Say cheese, you’re a criminal!
Published April 25th, 2006 in GeneralSurprisingly enough there wasn’t much of a fuss made last week when the Irish Minister for Justice, Michael MacDowell said that he wants our police force to carry cameras to take photographs of suspects (subscription required), especially in light of other discussions centering around peoples images been taken and used without their permission online. (Here, here, here, here, here and here.)
This move has the potential to be a PR nightmare in that it could spawn a lot of unforeseen issues (or least issues that no-one had the foresight to realise would be an inevitable spin-off).
I’m a big fan of The Shield, a TV police series. In the last series, police officers would take photos of known gang members in order to catalogue members. Officers would photograph them despite not having committed any crime and keep all the images up on a wall in the department.
Our police force will inevitably take photos of people in order to enforce anti-social laws. However, if someone happens to be standing on the wrong street corner with the wrong groups of friends, will they be labeled a delinquent for life? More importantly, a reformed individual should not have to have a tag hanging over them. I understand the reasoning behind this move, but the lack of a Garda Ombudsman and its openness to potential abuse leaves me more wary than open-minded.
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2 Responses to “Say cheese, you’re a criminal!”
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Although some gardia are testing video cameras used by UK police, there is no IT infrastructure to support the storage and meaningful archiving of multimedia data gathered from Gardai. Wouldn’t you expect that they get e-mail accounts first?
I think the real issue isn’t the taking of photographs for a specific use.
It is what controls are put on the access and control of those photographs to ensure that
(a) they are only used for the purpose they were taken and
(b) they are erased after they have served that purpose.
As regards Bernie’s point, my guess is that the plan, if there is one yet, will be something as basic as MMSing them back to the station computer and then saving them in a folder by the date they were taken.
I don’t think that this plan would meet needs (a) or (b) above.