Letter from the UK (About Wearable Police)

Booze bracelets? 

Even Orwell did not foresee this dawn of the wearable policeman 

Brendan O'Neill
The Telegraph
July 31, 2014

Even with all their dystopian prescience, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell or Philip K Dick did not foresee a future state that would monitor its citizens' sweat for signs of deviant, boozy behaviour. I mean, what kind of swirling mind would it take to think up a system whereby citizens would walk around with sweat-reading gadgets attached to them so that anytime they sunk a pint of beer the authorities would be alerted and could take action?

How about the swirling minds of London's current rulers. Yep, not content with filming our every move on CCTV, and banning the consumption of alcohol on public transport and the smoking of cigarettes pretty much everywhere, London's behaviour-policers masquerading as politicians are now trialling "booze bracelets" to analyse the perspiration levels of certain offenders and let the powers-that-be know if their sweat shows signs of alcohol. Welcome to the era of the wearable policeman, of the ever-present copper on your cuff monitoring your every move.

Starting life in the US, booze bracelets are hi-tech electronic devices that are attached to the ankle or the wrist and can analyse air and perspiration emissions from the skin. Starting today, they are being trialled in four South London boroughs on offenders who have committed alcohol-fuelled crimes and have thus been banned from drinking.
Every 30 minutes the bracelet will monitor its wearer's emissions, and then once every 24 hours the bracelet will be connected to the internet so that its readings can be whizzed over to the authorities. If the faceless sweat-analysts on the other side of that internet connection see an alcohol level of more than 0.02 at any time over the previous 24 hours, then a policeman or probation officer will be dispatched to have a word with the wagon-dodging offender in question.

There's something really off about this techno-micromanagement of individuals' behaviour – yes, even of offenders' behaviour. For a start, it sets a potentially terrifying precedent. Why stop at wearable policemen that monitor alcohol levels? Lots of offenders are these days implored to go on anger management courses, having committed crimes while in a pique of rage, so why not introduce wearable devices capable of measuring anger levels through heart rate and blood pressure? Better still, fit such devices with a pacifying drug that could be injected into said angry ex-con whenever he loses the plot, and that way we can cut out the whole visit-from-the-probation-officer thing. Kids done for persistent graffiti crimes – why not get them to wear bracelets that can detect the presence of spraypaint near the skin? There's currently a discussion about criminalising women who drink during pregnancy and cause measurable harm to their foetuses. How about getting every woman who falls pregnant to wear a booze bracelet so that we can offset the possibility of drink-damaged babies being born?

And of course it never takes long for state-driven authoritarian measures to be adopted by sections of the citizenry, too. Will future parents force their teen offspring to wear booze bracelets, or nicotine necklaces, or marijuana measurers? The possibilities are, tragically, endless. In an era when politicians openly talk about pursuing "the politics of behaviour", and assume they have the right and the authority to tell us what we should eat, how often we should exercise, where we can smoke and how we should have sex (safely, never with strangers, and ideally not that often), there's no telling what wearable policemen will be invented next to monitor and perhaps even automatically correct deviant behaviour.

And the other problem with booze bracelets is that they further blur the line between being a convict and being a free man. Sure, some offenders must still be monitored upon release from jail – ideally for a short period of time – but we must also allow them to start living again, to be autonomous and to make decisions about their lives. Maybe a man just out of prison after serving a sentence for his part in a violent drunken brawl fancies a glass of wine over dinner – is that the end of the world? Should he be punished? Or should he only be punished if he goes on to commit another offence? I think it should be the latter. All of us deserve less behaviour-policing and behaviour-modification by the authorities, and even ex-cons shouldn't have to wear the state on their person, having it automatically measure their every move, foible and failing.