Sadly, stories about police discrimination and the Tasering of 10-year old girls are frighteningly commonplace these days. Officers in San Jose, CA have a particularly bad reputation, which is one reason why they are being outfitted with head-mounted cameras.

The kit includes a camera, a control piece and a computer that hangs from the belt. Every time an officer interacts with a civilian, they are required to activate the AXON camera. Afterward, the officer can switch the camera to a “buffer” mode that records limited video, or turn it off completely. At the end of a shift, the video will be downloaded to a central server.

A leading critic of the department welcomed the cameras as a tool to provide useful evidence, but dismissed their significance as a solution to rocky police-community relations.

“The AXON project is unfortunately a positive thing right now because the level of distrust is so high,” said Raj Jayadev, director of the community organization Silicon Valley De-Bug. “But it doesn’t address the more fundamental problem: What stereotypes police may carry when they see people of color on the street and make assumptions about character.

Since an officer can simply turn off the device at anytime, I don’t think AXON will put an end to police abuse. However, keeping a record of these interactions can do nothing but help the evidence gathering process. Trials financed by Taser are currently underway, but reports estimate that a full-fledged deployment in the San Jose area would cost upwards of $4 million in taxpayer money.

I’m not OK with the price tag (there shouldn’t be one) but it may help restrain some officers and thats something I can support. Likely it will be impossible to quantify the benefits of this program though.

Related posts:

1. Taser Axon: a Taser product I can support
2. Survey finds London CCTV cameras do little to help solve crime
3. Cameras for the win: drug suspect turns tables on NYPD

John McCain’s model for ginning up the economy isn’t Keynesian or Milton Friedmanite. It’s EBay Inc.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee regularly asserts that 1.3 million people worldwide “make a living off EBay.” He holds up the figure as evidence the world’s largest Internet auctioneer is a model for job and economic growth.

McCain, seeking to address voter anxiety about the economy, uses EBay to signal that he is “fundamentally optimistic about the capacity of the U.S. economy to innovate, for that innovation to give new opportunities for jobs,” said Doug Holtz-Eakin, the candidate’s senior economic adviser. “We shouldn’t be obsessed with looking backwards all the time, and saying, `Gee, where did those jobs go?”’

This affection for EBay as an engine for job creation, however, confounds economists such as Betsey Stevenson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia.

“In terms of jobs, there’s no net increase in GDP that comes from trading stuff that’s already made,” said Stevenson, author of a study on the Internet and employment levels. “New people selling stuff out of their closet on EBay isn’t growing the economy.”

“It’s an example of good old-fashioned U.S. ingenuity, but selling used products is a limited business model,” said Ethan Harris, the chief economist at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in New York. San Jose, California-based EBay transformed what was an “incredibly inefficient market for junk and turned it into a very efficient market for junk.”

McCain may not accept such criticism. He has shown increasing disdain for any economist who questions his policy prescriptions. Earlier this month, he lashed out at critics of his proposal for a summer gas-tax holiday.

“You know the economists?” McCain said June 12 at Federal Hall, near the New York Stock Exchange. “They’re the same ones that didn’t predict this housing crisis we’re in. They’re the same ones that didn’t predict the dot-com meltdown. They’re the same ones that didn’t predict the inflation that’s staring us in the face today.”

You know the economists? The ones that claimed we aren’t in a recession.

Oh wait!!! You aren’t an economist.

You just surround yourself with them. The ones who are fully versed in kindergarten level economic theory. Not to insult kindergartners.

Not that you aren’t well read. (skip to 2min 30 seconds in)

John, you do realize that there were economists who predicted the housing crisis and the dot-com meltdown and the inflation “that’s staring us in the face today.” They come from the Austrian school of economics and you had one of them on stage with you. Ron Paul is his name and if you’d like to start looking into this school of thought I’m sure he’d be more then happy to help you out.

Related posts:

1. John McCain calls for creation of commission to study Wall Street crisis
2. Politicians prepare bailout while economists tell them to wait and voters tell them not to do anything, guess who wins
3. McCain looking for Paul’s backing