I like this. I wonder if we should include a severe penalty for the early deletion of data?
I'd be a bit concerned if there was an honest mistake, but the idea is worth discussion.
OK, now onto an explanation of my bill.
There's been a lot of concern (or I would hope at least) about police brutality. In most court cases, in the absence of other evidence, an officer of the law generally has more credibility than the accused in the eyes of the jury.
For obvious reasons, this is not a desirable state of affairs. So what I'm proposing is that we equip our law enforcement officers with wearable cameras to help give juries a more objective perspective when dealing with allegations of police brutality.
For those of you concerned, this won't necessarily hamper law enforcement. For instance, the city of Rialto, California, implemented these and found that complaints of police brutality fell
88 percent. In addition,
police spend $2 billion a year due to allegations of police brutality. So, in some respects this could actually enhance honest law enforcement and restore some credibility to police officers.
I'm not sure that $2 billion will be enough to completely cover our law enforcement, but it should be a good start. I read that the TASER company has lowered prices of AXON Flex cameras to just
$499 a piece. For those of you who are fiscally conservative and are concerned that $2 billion is "beaucoup bucks too many", we had a pretty big surplus in the last budget, so I think we can accommodate it.
Moving on, about Section 2, Clause 2; as a libertarian, I'm generally opposed to heavy-handed sentencing such as this. However, I think that abuse of power by those entrusted to protect the people is one of the gravest public safety concerns [/sage] so I think that we can make an exception here, but I'm willing to budge if that particular measure won't pass muster.
Lastly, why AXON Flex? No reason in particular, it just seems like the most effective product out there. There's a pretty comprehensive review of this particular product
here.
