CanadaPolitics

I used to think that body cams for police was plainly a great idea. Now I think that there are a lot of potential problems requiring stringent regulations and enforcement along with meaningful and perhaps severe penalties for misuse.

For example:

• Footage must be encrypted during storage and transmission in ways that make it available to only to those with authorization. No giving away or selling footage or access to footage for commercial purposes. Access logs must be maintained well beyond the retention period of the footage itself and deletion logs must be maintained in something approximating perpetuity (100 years is probably enough.)
• Footage must never be used for any purpose except direct investigation of incidents known to or suspected by the officers in question at the time of recording. In other words, no going through existing footage to support the investigation of incidents that came to light after the recording was made. (No "time travel"!)
• Footage must be retained for some minimum period, but beyond a certain baseline cannot be used for any purpose except investigation and prosecution of the police themselves (and maybe during training?).
• Field use of all forms of biometric recognition is absolutely prohibited. Investigatory use of biometric recognition must be strictly controlled and can be used only to aid investigation and never as evidence by the prosecution.
• Gaps in recordings, regardless of cause, invalidate the use of associated footage for use by the prosecution, except in the case where the officers themselves become the subject of investigation.

That might go too far and might have critical gaps, but seems like a good place to start.