Don’t be naive. The rider will still face charges and will have to pay his hospital bills. The cop won’t be touched, certainly has done this before, and after raping a prostitute, will be back on the street making overtime in no time. All in a day’s work.

The gist of car monitoring is to monitor private citizens’ behavior for the sake of insurance company profitability, which seems less justifiable. The police monitoring benefit seems at most incidental, and at a high price (for the benefit of some readers: I don’t mean money). How often are most people pulled over by the police? For people who really are frequently harassed, it might be reasonable to choose to have such equipment. But if your idea is ubiquitous sensors because occasionally one may be able to capture bad police behavior, that sounds like another example of trashing the liberties one’s ostensibly fighting for.

I think a better model is the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, which has given video cameras to West Bank Palestinian families so that they can document how they’re treated by Israeli soldiers and settlers. Not only has it led to disciplinary actions against soldiers, but it puts into action the ideals of justice that were supposed to be part of Israel’s founding principles.