Police Surveillance Paper

Police play an essential role in the society of maintaining law and order. They prevent crime as well as contribute in activities that bring public order such as helping in emergencies and regulating traffic among others. The police are an indispensable element in any society. However, the environment in which they operate with regards to controlling crime has changed over the years due to complexity of the criminal activities. As the persons that stand between social order and chaos, the police have faced difficulty pursuing the emerging demands with regards to crime prevention. The use of technology (surveillance) is increasingly taking center stage as a way of predicting crime that is bound to happen (Van Brakel and Paul 163). Surveillance solutions are much easier due to digitized ability to store, retrieve, sort, and classify information as witnessed by indiscriminate adoption of technology in all spheres of governance. The most prominent has been the use of surveillance technologies such as CCTV, biometrics, data mining, and body scanners among others. The counter-terrorism policies have permitted mass surveillance through large-scale collection of personal data in order to detect, track, trace, or perform risk assessment to prevent terrorism. Despite the good intentions of

However, there are ethical concerns regarding giving police greater power of surveillance. The paper has examined the perspective of the Kantian theory, utilitarian theory, social contract theory, and subjective relativism theory. As a duty-based ethics, Kantian theory insists on doing the right thing regardless of the consequences. For this reason, the right thing is to prevent crime from taking place in the society. By enhancing the powers of the police to perform their duty through surveillance, the citizens are assured of their security regardless of other consequences such as social control and infringement of