When Al Sharpton, Ann Coulter and the president of the United States agree on anything, my immediate, visceral reaction is extreme skepticism. In this case, the known facts support that skepticism.

It’s exceedingly unlikely that widespread use of police body cameras would reduce the incidence or severity of unjustified police violence. We’ve already seen the results of numerous technology “solutions” to that problem.

The introduction of mace and tasers to police weapons inventories encouraged a hair-trigger attitude toward encounters with “suspects” (“suspect” being law-enforcement-ese for “anyone who isn’t a cop”). Their supposed non-lethality made it safer to substitute violent action for peaceful talk.

The introduction of military weaponry and vehicles to policing hasn’t produced de-escalation either. Quite the opposite, in fact — now we get to watch small-town police departments stage frequent re-enactments of the Nazi occupation of Paris in towns across America.

And police car “dash cams?” That’s obviously the most direct comparison. But the dash cam always seems to malfunction, or the police department mysteriously loses its output, when a credible claim of abusive police behavior arises.

On the other hand, it’s absolutely certain that widespread use of police body cameras would increase the scope and efficacy of an increasingly authoritarian surveillance state.

The White House proposal calls for an initial rollout of 50,000 cameras. Does anyone doubt that the output of those cameras would be kept, copied, cross-referenced and analyzed against law enforcement databases (including but not limited to facial recognition databases) on a continuing basis?

Assuming a camera attaches to a particular officer with an eight hour shift (rather than being passed around at shift changes for 24-hour use), that’s 400,000 hours per day of random warrantless searches to be continuously mined for probable cause to investigate and arrest people. Even George Orwell didn’t go so far as to have 1984‘s Thought Police carry portable cameras everywhere they went!

Video technology is certainly part of the solution to police violence, but that solution should remain in the hands of regular people, not the state. More and more of us every day come into possession of the ability to record video on the spot, while instantly porting it to Internet storage so that it can’t be destroyed at the scene or tampered with after the fact. Cops need to be on cameras they don’t control.

But part of the solution is still just part of the solution. Even when cameras catch violent, abusive, criminal cops in action — as, for example, when business security cameras filmed Fullerton, California police officers Manuel Ramos and Jay Cicinelli beating homeless man Kelly Thomas to death in 2011 — it’s incredibly hard to get prosecutions and even harder to get convictions.

Ubiquitous video monitoring of state actors by regular people is a start. But the only real way to guarantee an end to police violence is to bring an end to state “law enforcement” — in fact, to the state itself.

The BBC article “Apps that protect you from police brutality” highlights three smart phone applications designed to hold government officials accountable, or at least put the fear of public scrutiny and rebuke in their hearts.

1. ACLU-NJ Police Tape
2. Stop and Frisk Watch
3. FlyRights

The full story can be found on Donnelly’s blog, Arm Your Mind for Liberty (“United States of America vs George Donnelly: How US Marshals Framed a Peaceful Photographer,” September 22, 2010). I would have said the blog entry is “George Donnelly’s account” of the story, but considering that the federal agents deleted Donnelly’s camera footage and issued contradictory statements, a neutral party would have to consider Donnelly’s account, which includes photographs and recovered audio recordings, as close to the full story as we’ll get.

Yes, federal agents did in fact try to destroy evidence while prosecuting an alleged crime. Why?

State power is an authoritarian concept — orders flow downward and obedience looks upward. The one-way flow of information is part of this exercise of power. The state wants to collect all it can on its subjects, but the powerful will only willingly provide subjects with information they consider harmless.

That is why the slogan of surveillance-state sycophants, “If you don’t have anything to hide, what do you have to worry about?” is meant to apply to the subject and not to the enforcers. State and subject are inherently unequal, and those who represent state power are considered to be above the rest of us. They get to look down on us all, and we only get to see what they are willing to show us.

George Donnelly eventually took a deal and pled guilty to a less serious bogus charge. His story shows how courts are on the side of the enforcers, partners in exercising unjust power. Justice will be found outside of government courts, in the court of public opinion and in the alternatives that are strengthened with each winning of broader support.

In a video about the event, Donnelly says, “Fellow prisoners reported that marshals were promoting me as ‘the next Timothy McVeigh.’” In the minds of federal enforcers, when they attempt to terrorize people into submission to the state, they are just doing their jobs. And any effective opposition they face is put in the same category as murderous terrorism.

But activists were not terrorized into submission. They contacted the authorities to show support for Donnelly, rallied at the Allentown courthouse, helped Donnelly as much as they could, and continued agitating for greater freedom. The feds can use all the labels they want, but they are trying to resist ideas that activists strengthen every day. Liberty is not something gratefully accepted from the government dole; every individual may claim the fullest liberty that does not infringe on the equal liberty of another.