This was a voluntary program though. Blocking the police from asking for help is unnecessarily adversarial. You are right about police collecting video from Ring without user involvement, but this was transparent and voluntary.
It isn't like they were pulling videos without consent to send tickets for rolling stops. Although if they did, they could collect enough revenue to fix every road in the country. :lol
A good lawyer got the case dropped pretty quick, but not before she spent a weekend in jail, got fired as a teacher, and spent thousands on legal fees. The police had “video evidence” and therefore refused to drop the case even when the ex retracted the claims, and required months of fighting the legal system.
Beyond that awful freak incident, there’s tons of cases of police planting evidence, police ignoring real evidence, and police using an individual’s voluntary will to help them catch one crime to implicate an innocent person in a petty crime unexpectedly. There’d have to be a pretty big crime for me to voluntarily show the police any video of myself.
If we were to structure our lives around things that evil people misused good-intentioned processes for, then we would be continually paranoid and society would grind to a halt.
I am certainly in favor of limited police powers, but the conversation you are having is a different one from that.
And that police do bad things, and someone giving them more evidence of their own life is probably not in anyone’s best interest. Because no one can guarantee that the police won’t decide to use it against themselves.
Considering the point I was replying to was someone discussing using cameras to watch for crimes, I think we’ve pierced the topic around paranoia and structuring life around evil people - that’s the whole topic at hand with security cameras.