A WALK around the many stands in one of the halls of McCormick Place, a gigantic convention centre in Chicago, during the annual conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), showed how the debate on policing has changed in America. The Peerless Handcuff Company was still hawking its wares, as was Peacekeeper, which sells batons and lets prospective customers bash “Numb John XT”, a dummy, to try them out. But the buzz, helped by a cohort of forceful public-relations executives, was around vendors of body cameras, data collection and information-sharing technologies with snazzy names such as Vievu, BodyWorn or SceneDoc.
Cops in America have had a tough year. Videos of perceived or real police brutality have gone viral at regular intervals, causing loud public outcry and leading to demands that all police officers should wear body cameras. These troubles are not going away. Violent crime is on the rise in nearly all big cities, and the level of trust between police and the public, and minority communities in particular, is at an all-time low. In Milwaukee, a genteel midwestern...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/20deWtF
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