The Problem of Technology Merging With Public Safety

João Victor · Jan 31, 2023

In the last few years we are seeing something new up coming in the safety field. The technology has been merging with the way police and others safety institutions act in the daily basis, body cameras and government hacking - that allows the exploration of electronic products used for targeted and covert surveillance and is understood as one of the ways used to break encryption, with the narrative of fighting terrorism and crime. Although, according to official documents and international studies, these spy tools are being used for illegitimate reasons, such as repressing different opinions of specific government policies, monitoring and repression to... guess who? the poor and black ones - are some new trends in the field of public security in Brazil and around the world.

With the advance of a significant technological contribution, social control, massive surveillance, as well as the privacy of people, are being managed from the restructuring of institutional dynamics in the field of security. Some lay people could like the idea of the technology merging with the security filed, but the true is that is another way of social oppression against the working class and black people, turning it as social control from the state and private companies.

The police is the owner of the body camera footage, they don't release the footage to a regular civilian. Body cameras can be useful for big operations, but in the daily basis, the footage in their hands is another way of repression to the civilian population. About the facial recognition it is used within a system whose end mechanism is the mass incarceration of the black population through the false identification of suspects.

In this sense, the creation and use of technologies by public security institutions, mainly by the Brazilian police, with a focus on the Military Police, raises a series of problems, there are nuances and necessary notes to be made. This is evident with the implementation of body cameras in police uniforms, since we are dealing with new forms of policing, the production of images and data of civilians, images and data of the police themselves, in addition to the relationship of how to deal with privacy . It is necessary for us to speak, fight and be very careful with the new ways of policing, so that they don't further harm a minority.