> Cutting them down isn’t the worst idea but it would be nice if we could just elect people that wouldn’t allow this in the first place.

Is this really better though? First-party community maintenance is more direct, cheaper, and doesn't rely on fragile central authorities (granted, it _does_ rely on a difficult pattern of community discussion and collaboration to satisfy tribal consensus, etc).

I'm broadly OK with cameras being in public, but I have much more trust in direct action than I do in elected "officials".

On medium time-scales, it seems to me that a great solution will be to have community-maintained cameras kinda all over the commons, but such that the camera eye can be accessed publicly (ie, removing the information asymmetry which gives the undesirable actors (police, etc) greater view than the actual community participants).