IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Summer 2014 - 71

policing offers justification for continued non-consensual imaging as
the circumstances dictate. The argument for extending the moral theory
of policing as a basis for justification beyond those directly committing crime is weaker. The officer, in
seeking to identify witnesses, can be
said to be seeking to realize the fundamental aim of policing by investigating an alleged crime - but where
the manner of doing this alienates
potential witnesses, even to the
extent that an actual witness denies
this fact and so withholds help the
investigation needs, then the fundamental aim of policing in this circumstance has been frustrated. And
if morally harmful police conduct
frustrates the fundamental aim of
policing then it seems not to be justified by the moral theory of policing.
Is there an alternative interest
being protected if the police officer continues to film having been
asked not to by the potential witness? Certainly the wider community (of which the potential witness
is a member) has a legitimate interest in the police being professional
and thorough in their work, and to
continue filming despite the citizen's
objection would be a means of holding the officer to account for their
thoroughness and professionalism
(in which case the BWV, although
worn by the officer, becomes a tool
for the member of the community to
whom the officer is speaking). The
wider interest of the community can
be set alongside the interests of individual victims in the moral theory of
policing but in this case the potential
witness, as a member of the community, could assert that in their one-onone encounter, the officer is directly
and personally accountable to the
potential witness (as a community
member) and in such circumstances
the potential witness (as a member
of the community) has no need of
technological assistance in holding
the officer to account for their professionalism during the encounter.
Indeed, accountability as a requirement on being granted discretionary

use of coercive powers grounds a
line of argument that a police officer should keep the BWV switched
on at all times even if both the officer and the person being spoken to
would prefer it to be switched off.
Supposing the roles were reversed: a citizen with BWV encounters a police officer not so equipped.
Is the officer entitled to ask the
citizen to stop filming? A police officer, when acting as such (particularly when in uniform) has a weaker
claim to privacy and autonomy in
these circumstances. The officer is
accountable to the community. If
the citizen keeps the BWV activated
while engaging with the officer, the
officer - precisely because he or she
is an officer - can have no sustainable objection to being recorded.
Police officers should not attempt
to remove, cover, or disguise otherwise visible forms of identification
such as a name badge or a shoulder
number in order to evade accountability mechanisms. In the event
that the citizen records behavior on
the part of the officer about which
the citizen wishes to complain, once
again the use to which the image
(and information contained therein)
will be put becomes relevant. Sending the image(s) to the officer's senior managers will result in a moral
harm to the officer if admonished
or punished for unprofessional or
criminal conduct but that harm is
justified by the weightier claim the
community has to an effective and
professional police service. But the
citizen will have no reasonable justification if instead the images are
posted on YouTube, the outcome of
which may be exposure of the officer's unsatisfactory conduct beyond
the community to which the officer
is accountable with associated unwarranted humiliation: an unjustifiable moral harm. Only if the citizen
could demonstrate that placing the
matter in the hands of senior managers would have been to initiate a
cover-up would the citizen perhaps
then be justified in exposing the images more widely.

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SuMMEr 2014

So much for BWV surveillance
as a mechanism of social control:
within the construction of surveillance as a way of seeing, BWVequipped individuals pass through
public spaces filming their lives;
perhaps sharing the images online
with a virtual community whose
members the image-taker may
not know or even know of. There
seems to be little authority or moral
justification for such individuals to
continue filming others who object
to being imaged - except where
this can be demonstrated to be in
the wider public interest.
In this construction of surveillance there is more than one way
of seeing. Individual contributors to
the blogosphere are but one range of
actors. The Australian National VET
E-learning Strategy envisages technology-assisted first-person documentation in the classroom.11 To the
generation who have known nothing
but a digital environment populated
with mobile media, using BWV
in schools and colleges may seem
uncontroversial. But the complexity
of camera surveillance ethics in the
public space points to the likelihood
of complex ethical considerations in
the educational space, particularly
given the technological ease with
which images can pass beyond the
control of the person being imaged.
As a footnote to the distinction between the two constructions of surveillance, there exists
an interesting possibility in which
agents acting within the construction of surveillance as social control
use surveillance as a way of seeing:
specifically if police officers who are
not officially equipped with BWV
in furtherance of their duties nevertheless equip themselves with BWV
and use the images privately within
social networking media and the
blogosphere. Intuitively this seems
to give rise to a number of objections
based on the abuse of police authority inherent in such a scenario.
11

See http://www.flexiblelearning.net.au/ (accessed
Aug. 28, 2012).

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Summer 2014
