 what role does technology gonna play in all this, particularly surveillance technology, where you're kind of taking the human element out of it somewhat, having a more purely rational approach to crime. I mean, that does seem like the- You want Eric Adams Robocop? I don't know that I want Robocop, but I will say these highly law and ordered societies that we were referencing before, rely heavily on automated surveillance to implement that order. And on one hand, that is terrifying to me. Like I don't like the idea of ubiquitous government surveillance, obviously. On the other hand, automating some aspects of policing, I can certainly see the appeal if a lot of the problematic incidents that we see, these hope high-profile incidents seem to, like they could have been avoided if maybe it was just automated camera or something issuing the ticket. Like, how does automation and surveillance work into your vision of a better police society? It has, I mean, I'm worried too a little bit. In some ways, I think it's sort of inevitable. I hate to say Foucault was right, but he may be on this kind of concept of surveillance. Police can't and shouldn't be locked into the technology of today or yesterday. So as the technology advances, they're gonna be tools police are gonna use. Again, these are choices. I mean, it would be nice to get out ahead of this. What do we want police drones to do? 10 years ago, the concept was unfathomable and to many people dystopian, but it's inevitable. And, you know, they serve a purpose. So we have to be transparent about this. We have to have discussions about it, but society changes. Law enforcement is gonna change along with that. But that's a bit different than and a bit more complicated than the idea of, you know, cameras and automated enforcement. Again, I don't like zero tolerance. I'm really not for automated enforcement, but the move behind that is usually, oh, cause cops are racist, so cameras won't be. And yet, if you put cameras where traffic crashes happen and pedestrians die, I'm still gonna have a racially disparate impact. And then what do you do about people that with vague tags and so on, at some point, you do need cops making traffic stops. Right. I mean, I think it would, you know, even if there is a disparate outcome, it becomes a lot harder to argue that it's a disparate, that it's like, you know, purposely racist or discriminatory against someone. And we were talking with Coleman Hughes about this a little bit last week, Loire, if you put, that they did that in Chicago and there was that disparate outcome, but the upside was also that these communities where there were a lot of traffic fatalities, the traffic fatalities went down, disproportionately helping that community. So there's the double-edged sword to it. And then also there's, you know, the thing that I always try to keep in mind with, when we're talking about police surveillance is this idea that, you know, David Brin, the writer, talked about a lot of surveillance where not only are they surveilling us from above, but it's gonna require more surveillance by us of the authorities from below. And so that's where the transparency comes in that we should have access to, it should be much easier to requisition any footage that is caught by police and to be able to surveil what they're doing. Like the road has to go both ways if we're headed down. That happens. It's messy, though. I mean, I'm for the dangerous future. I'm for that, but you know, do you wanna have access when cops go and investigate a sexual child abuse case? You know, people are having the worst day of their lives and cops are going into their home. I don't, you know, it shouldn't be, I want transparency, but at some point there's a matter of privacy as well. And it's hard to, you know, these are tough rules and regulations and decisions to make about this stuff. But the other, I think perhaps an overarching point about surveillance, it is by its nature reactive. You know, the video in a bodega can identify who the killer is in part because that person is almost assuredly already in the system and, you know, facial recognition comes into play in that gang databases can come in and play that. And of course people are, you know, some people are fighting all these things because they don't want policing. But they're, they're reactive in nature. And ultimately police can be proactive and prevent crime and that requires men and women using brains and using their intelligence. And, you know, again, that tough part of good leadership is making sure it doesn't go overboard. There's a constant problem in policing of the statistical tail wagging the dog. You have to think, why are you doing this? What's the goal? And the goal never should be, well, I made an arrest. I mean, what's actually after the fact that might be the goal. But as a, in terms of proactive policing, I have to figure out what are we trying to accomplish and how do we accomplish that? But that's never gonna be done solely with cameras and surveillance at some point. It does involve, you know, physically arresting somebody. We can't, we can't get away from that. And I would argue we don't, we shouldn't, we don't want to. But the surveillance and technology part and I think it's sort of, we need that discussion but we shouldn't let it distract from the core of actual good legal, moral constitutional policing. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our show, Just Asking Questions. You can watch another clip here or the full episode here and please subscribe to Reason's YouTube channel and the Just Asking Questions podcast feed for notifications when we post new episodes every Thursday.