A video camera on every corner

At nearly every turn, in public at least, there's a very good chance you're being recorded. Cameras are virtually everywhere: on street corners, in parking lots, inside stores and outside buildings, even in the hands of millions of everyday Americans who use cell phones and smart phones to capture video and images wherever they go.

It's little wonder, then, that police are also recording. They've put cameras at intersections and on cruisers' dashboards to capture traffic scofflaws, in public parks and around attractions to deter crime. And now, as The Pilot's Veronica Gonzalez reported, they're putting them on themselves.

Ninety Chesapeake police officers have been assigned cameras, which record every interaction with the public through a pager-size device clipped to an officer's shirt. For the past three years, the cameras have recorded evidence and defended city police from false allegations of misconduct.

"People with cell phones that record, they only see part of the story," one officer told Gonzalez. "These cameras give you the whole story."

The cameras are supposed to be activated every time an officer speaks with someone. If that's the case, the cameras should, indeed, present a clear account of an encounter.

As much as that may trigger fears of Big Brother, there's little difference between the police officer doing the recording and anyone else.

The fact remains there is no presumption of privacy on a public street.

But officers who use video cameras to record everyday affairs in public - and even those who don't - must be willing to have themselves recorded by others as well.

So far, that hasn't been a problem in Chesapeake, where a police spokeswoman wisely noted the public's "right to record the officer."

Unfortunately, that hasn't been the case elsewhere, including in New York and Maryland, where people have been arrested simply for recording officers performing their duties in plain view on public streets.

In many of those cases, charges eventually have been dropped or overturned. And rightfully so. But in far too many, authorities have pushed forward the charges, won convictions and unjustly imprisoned people simply exercising their rights.

Officers don't have any less of a right to the same tools as everyone else. But they also don't have any more right to privacy on a public street than anyone else.

Cameras are everywhere in our public lives today: on street poles, on dashboards, on cops, in our hands. That may be creepy, and it may take some getting used to. But it also won't change.