This strikes me as remarkably similar to the "crown jewels" problem of API availability.
Simply stated, it's that it's the hardest sell in the world to expect a company to expend money and resources to act against its own interests, and applied to governmental organizations like the police, no appointed official is going to stomach spending money making themselves look bad.
More broadly stated, you can't solve accountability problems by asking people to step up and be more accountable. The only way is to impose rules from above.
And even that won't work if there's actual bad faith involved. Police depts issuing rules on body camera usage will find that the cameras just don't work when they'd make individual officers look bad.
I'm sure CPD had the best of intentions when it created its API. But as soon as a journo ran an article using it to make them look bad, regardless of how right it was, means their access was going to get revoked. Nobody forced them to put out an API, and it just became a political liability. Of course it's going to go away.
> More broadly stated, you can't solve accountability problems by asking people to step up and be more accountable. The only way is to impose rules from above.
> But as soon as a journo ran an article using it to make them look bad, regardless of how right it was, means their access was going to get revoked.
No. This is specific (but not exclusive) to their culture.
If NASA has this toxic culture, we would lose more than 50% of all rocket payloads and astronauts. Programmers who have this mentality are defensive about their code (as if any criticism of their code is an attack on their ego) never grow and quickly turn the culture around them very negative.
Simply stated, it's that it's the hardest sell in the world to expect a company to expend money and resources to act against its own interests, and applied to governmental organizations like the police, no appointed official is going to stomach spending money making themselves look bad.
More broadly stated, you can't solve accountability problems by asking people to step up and be more accountable. The only way is to impose rules from above.
And even that won't work if there's actual bad faith involved. Police depts issuing rules on body camera usage will find that the cameras just don't work when they'd make individual officers look bad.
I'm sure CPD had the best of intentions when it created its API. But as soon as a journo ran an article using it to make them look bad, regardless of how right it was, means their access was going to get revoked. Nobody forced them to put out an API, and it just became a political liability. Of course it's going to go away.