Excessive Force

Body Cameras on Police officers

In todays modern society, technology is all around us. This gives people a sense of connection pretty much anywhere and at any given time. With the rising issues on police brutality we see people recording police more than ever before. This is not illegal and on the contrary is a citizens way of protecting themselves, from the police? Since when did the police become a threat to a private citizen? Has police brutality always been around us but we just caught on to this trend by the means of technology and social media. In my opinion, police brutality has always been among us but has been overlooked in the past as it wasn’t an issue that was brought up by the media. 

It is obvious that the citizens of the United States do not condone this kind of bad practice. And it is understandable that African Americans feel targeted by police, as consequence we have the Baltimore riots. Statistics back up the issue of racial profiling by police officers. I firmly believe violence is almost always not resolved with more violence, and if so one of the two parties will end up badly harmed which will more likely encourage some form of retaliation. Are there any real solutions? Body cameras have been largely implemented by the U.S. Department of Justice. While it is very costly to get every single policeman to have a camera attached to their uniform, it is good for a start that 50,000 policeman where equipped with this new technology. After this fact the U.S. department of justice revealed statistics on a study. The conclusion is body cameras often discourage officers to use brutality which fell by 60%, for the officers wearing a camera. 

Body cameras combined with citizens protecting themselves by recording is a feasible solution. But morality is the most important part of this situation. The police should have much more stricter penalties for officers recurring to lethal weapons firsthand. But civilians should not be scared of the police but rather respect an authority that was put in place to protect us. Which has long been forgotten.

You can run but you can't hide

Privacy is now a trending issue that is directly tied to our communication technology resources. Nowadays such thing as privacy does not exist. And this is mainly because the most popular social media services, web search engines, cellphones, and computers overall are constantly being monitored by the U.S. Government. Such actions In my opinion are not always so inconvenient, only in such matters of security of course.

 Ever since 2013 when Edward Snowden former NSA Employee revealed how “personal” information is constantly monitored by the National Security Agency there is no doubt people would start to speak up about the issue. This government agency is literally spying on the people living in this country and no doubt even people in other countries. I do believe that privacy is a right we should all have, but at what cost? The NSA states that tracking and monitoring data is lawful, and that they do not collect everyone’s data but some of it comes “incidentally" or not on purpose but because there’s bulk of information being collected it just so happens to end up in their hands.

 Is this immoral? maybe. Is this necessary? maybe. Who knows what would be different if the NSA would not do this sort of practice. Perhaps everything would be the same. But perhaps there has been a variety of events that have been prevented from this controversial privacy violating practice.