Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? This isn’t a perfect society, by a long shot, so those who have authority must be held accountable for exercising that authority responsibly. And the best way to do that is to give everyone — especially their superiors and the courts — the ability to see their behavior first-hand.
If they don’t like it (and they almost never do), tough titty. Abuse of power is rampant in police work of all sorts. If this sort of thing ever becomes common, maybe those who are drawn to police work simply to gain power over others will look elsewhere for jobs. That can only be a good thing for law-abiding citizens.
In some localities, its illegal to record cops on video tape, and you can and will be arrested for it. “Only a terrorist would want to record the police.” ;-(
In all but one state, as I understand it, those laws are subject to limitations: you can’t record the police surreptitiously, for instance. When a policeman is operating in public, and you’re making it clear that you’re recording (by, say, holding a video camera and pointing it at something), the law says that you’re perfectly within your rights.
Of course, rights or not, you can expect most police to confiscate and destroy the tape or possibly the entire device if they’ve done something wrong and you might have recorded it. But that’s what the article I linked to above was all about: ways to instantly upload the video to the Internet, and alert people to watch it in real time, so that the policeman can’t destroy the evidence of his misdeed, or bully you into doing so before it gets seen.
Many mobile phones can upload the video instantly to the internet…. 🙂
That’s what the article was all about. 🙂