The level of resistance the cops will put up to maintain their current status is obvious, with the armed robbery, assault, intimidation, disregard for the law, and general "violent gang"-like behavior. I expect strongly that at least some amount of actual shooting-war will be required to correct this situation.
What I'm suggesting that a necessary step in the basic concept of having a police force. The nature of the job by necessity requires us to grant some extra powers and exceptions in law to the people we hire to enforce it. Unfortunately, history shows that not only can we not trust that those powers will not be abused, we also cannot trust that the usual check against abuses of power will be implemented (or even attempted at all). Various types of regulatory capture, institutional corruption, and far too many people choosing to look the other way have demonstrated very clearly a list of methods that do not work.
The key problem in all of that tends to center around someone being able to abuse their powers freely while retaining a very high level of trust. Tying police powers to the camera separates these issues, and might be the start of a much-larger plan to fix this mess we're in. I don't expect that the people currently benefiting from the situation will like it. In fact, as they are (by definition) violent criminals, I expect the people committing the worst abuses will fight back. Hard.
I suggest we start solving that problem now, regardless of the difficulty. Power accumulates, so this will only be harder in the future. I don't have a miracle solution for how to enact these ideas - that is going to be hard regardless..
