Today, the Obama administration announced $263 million in funding for 50,000 body cameras, in response to the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. -- just as I predicted it would yesterday.
Currently, the Ferguson police department does not outfit body cameras that constantly record the first-person perspective of each policeman, and it therefore could not verify police officer Darren Wilson's testimony that shooting Brown, an unarmed youth, was a desperate act of self defense.
Until today, it was unclear whether the Obama administration was going to take any action on Ferguson, but given the administration's policy toward data in government, this particular approach is not surprising. In addition to creating a senior-level position to make federal departments more transparent, Obama also trailblazed government transparency when he allowed citizens to track the spending of a multibillion-dollar economic stimulus package online.
Nor is this the first time a Democrat with strong ties to Silicon Valley has announced sweeping transparency as a solution to these issues. Last year, a Democratic mayor heavily funded by Mark Zuckerberg and Google mandated that the data from police stops be placed online and open to public scrutiny. At the time, now Senator Cory Booker was Mayor of Newark, and he was responding to stop-and-frisk policies, the hot-button race issue that permitted police to stop and search suspicious-looking bystanders.
Silicon Valley-supported Democrats tend adopt the technology industry's approach to transparency as a solution to problems. The more information, the better.
This approach has tradeoffs: Both Booker and Obama have resisted policies that blame or constrain police departments. For instance, Booker could have simply opposed the practice of stop-and-frisk altogether, as New York Mayor Bill De Blasio did when he took over for Michael Bloomberg.
Likewise, some have called on President Obama to appoint a special prosecutor to more aggressively investigate the police department's handling of the Michael Brown case.
But blaming police is fundamentally different than a transparency approach. Requiring body cameras allows communities and police to work collaboratively toward better solutions. When they know others are watching, police are more likely to check their own behavior, and complaints are reduced. No strong-handed authority figure is needed to protect one group from another.
This is why I predict that Obama will also call for greater community outreach programs and racial bias awareness training. Education and face-to-face interaction are lower-tech strategies to the transparency approach. The solution to problems is simply more information. Technology plays a role, but it's not the only strategy.
It should be no surprise then that the tech hotbeds of San Francisco, San Jose, and Austin, Texas have been experimenting with police body cameras for years. These communities prefer education as a solution to troubled race relations.
As a technology writer, I'm often asked how Internet companies would tackle issues that are not strictly tech issues, like net neutrality or broadband access. My answer is to look to politicians who have the support of tech billionaires.
In this case, requiring police to record everything they do -- a kind of mandated pervasive transparency -- seems to be perfectly in line with how Silicon Valley wants to change the world.