This atlas has spent nine ledgers recording how precisely Canadian police can resolve a member of the public — by plate, by face, by device, by record. One hundred capability states. Not one of them describes the reciprocal act: a member of the public making a record of the police. The word film does not appear anywhere in this atlas. The only bystander in it is a person a Montreal video-analysis system might place under investigation.
10 sourced records8 capability states100 rows pointing the other way
Every capability here resolves a person. Only one of the two people is in the register.
Across nine jurisdiction ledgers this atlas carries 100 capability states: automatic plate recognition, facial matching against mugshot data, body video uploading automatically into evidence management, records systems integrated with provincial and federal counterparts. Every row measures how finely the state can resolve a member of the public. The counter-capability — whether a person can make a durable record of an officer, and what happens to that record — has never had a row, so it has never had an answer.
THE CAPABILITY, AS REGISTEREDResolution
Person appears→Plate, face, device→Record, retained
One hundred capability states across nine ledgers. Toronto alone carries twenty. The register is detailed enough to distinguish a seven-day read retention from a 365-day hit retention, and an ALPR on a police vehicle from a Genetec reader on a parking-enforcement one.
No Canadian statute creates or protects the act of recording an officer. Legal commentary is consistent that no law forbids it — which means the capability rests on the absence of a prohibition, not the presence of a protection. An absence cannot be breached, so nothing attaches when it is defeated.
Name tag removed→Public record blinded→Police CCTV finds them
At the 2010 G20 roughly 90 Toronto officers worked without name tags. The Service identified them by reviewing 22,000 hours of its own closed-circuit video. The police record was intact and searchable; the public's had been degraded at source. The discipline discussed was one day's pay.
Not a timeline of purchases. A timeline of what Canada has committed to, enacted and regulated on the deliberate defeat of human sight — and where each of those instruments points.
Capability register
The row that was missing, and its mirror
The same evidence states the city ledgers use, applied to both sides of the lens.