They are both emergency responses and require tremendous amount of material and human resources to get there very fast.
Police have the fastest cars with the brightest lights that let them go wherever they want the fastest (Bonus if they have a motorcycle, but those they keep to give speeding tickets for some reason). It also means they are the first ones there and might need to do CPR from time to time or help that guy about to jump down the bridge.
>Why has our society conflated those?
We are imperfect humans in an imperfect world. We can't assign every single task to a different human being. We, as a society, accept that.
>The fact that we're talking seriously about affording public policing a sphere of secrecy is just a symptom of that problem.
There is a big difference between secrecy of the police and privacy of the policed.
Go watch Live PD and come tell me seriously they should stop censoring the names, date of birth, addresses, plate numbers, SSN, wardrobe malfunctions of the victims, witnesses and children that appear in the show.
They take the time to protect the privacy of the bystanders, but it costs money and an incredible amount of resource to do so just for a couple of teams for a couple of hours a week and they don't even do a perfect job.
I get it. Most of us are programmers, so we think we can setup a pretty solid set of rules for when something applies. Maybe some of us can. And when that perfect ruleset is found, it will be awesome. However, it is a lot more fluid and discretion is not necessarily a bad thing.
It's not that black and white but it's not that complex of an issue either.
Act - https://www.aclu.org/other/model-act-regulating-use-wearable..., White Paper - https://www.aclu.org/other/police-body-mounted-cameras-right...
Honestly, privacy is nearly dead anyway. I'm not happy about it but there are databases with enough information on us to steal anyone's identity. With that level of information already existing... it seems kind of silly that what we're most worried about with police cameras basically comes down to embarrassment.
It's also weird how hacker news has forgotten that Google Street View has tons of pictures of naked people with automatically blurred faces. Same for Google Maps/Earth.
As another poster said, this is solvable. Just will require more than a few rules.
That's the problem. The fact that we're talking seriously about affording public policing a sphere of secrecy is just a symptom of that problem.