distributed responsibility
Monday, August 27th, 2007I’ve been pondering the idea of distributed law enforcement. It does, of course, hold all the wonderful potential of the witch hunt (bad), but could create a safer, more conscientious society.
I thought of this while driving, but it could potentially be applied to anything.
Imagine everyone had the ability to “tag” a scofflaw by, say, pointing and clicking with their cell phone at an embedded chip (in the license plate, or on the person, or whatever). The
cell phone communicates the ID of both the “criminal” and the accuser to some central data bank, presumably run by law enforcement.
Now, *obviously* this has potential for abuse, so the database isn’t stupid. Two protections I can think of are as follows:
1) The system tracks how many “tags” an individual gets. Presumably genuinely bad (misbehaving) will get plenty of tags, so you could put a minimum threshold number before the system bumps up the offender to the notice of a law enforcement official.
2) The system tracks how many “tags” each individual *gives* as well. Tag weights are normalized by your frequency of tagging, so any ultra-conservative old ladies won’t be putting half the population in prison.
The system will also note, of course, the location and time of tag origin. This could give law enforcement a running update of when and where most crimes are happening, hence when and where they need to be.