Body Cameras

Police Body Cameras And its Neccesity

By Efe Iyigel

In recent years protest against police brutality has been amplified through activist groups such as Black Lives Matter and movements to demilitarize the police force. Incidents and aggressions such as the death of George Floyd or the common experience of cops planting fake evidence inside minorities they pull over to frame them for arrest. Because these incidents often require to be recorded for the case against the officer to have ground people advocate for the requirement for all officers to wear a body camera at all times while acting in an official capacity. There is a necessity for a body camera requirement for police officers so that they may be held accountable for their actions.

When a cop wears their body camera it helps improve their accountability. Too often during reports of police brutality is the cop said to have no evidence of the account. This may be due to the editing of footage, deletion, or even the refusal to wear and equip the camera. When police officers know that any possible misconduct is being recorded they are less likely to engage in aggressive behavior towards civilians. Gene Grabiner is a professor who studies issues related to social justice and social class, in his paper “Who Polices the Police” he describes how a police department in Rialto has found a 50% decrease in incidents that involved use-of-force after body cameras were implemented (2016).

A common counterclaim to the argument that police officers should be required to wear cameras is that it can be an invasion of privacy or cause distress to the officer. As people, most of us have some sympathy for the officers and their qualms but many agree that the cameras are needed so that the police have reason to follow the laws they enforce upon others and prevent misconduct. As said by Jay Stanley of ACLU body cameras may be one of the strongest forms of accountability available to police officers due to it showing an unadulterated view of their actions (2013).

The editing of camera footage also needs to be regulated to prevent on-the-fly changes that may swing the decision in court proceedings. In the past, many officers have removed important parts of arrest footage after an arrest and before it must be submitted to the court. There needs to be a balance between constant surveillance and restricting the ability to remove case-sensitive information. Officers should be punished for the deletion of necessary footage and have been before in Oakland (Stanley, 2013). A compromise or remedy can involve the cameras automatically turning on before encounters so that police officers' actions between altercations aren’t always being recorded.

Other than concerns of privacy people normally react well to knowing an officer is wearing a camera while working. Dave McClure, Nancy La Vigne, Mathew Lynch, and Laura Golian with Urban Institute found that members of the community in which where police officers are active were more satisfied with knowing they were wearing the camera while on duty (date?). They were satisfied knowing that the police officers in their community were being held accountable for their actions and knowing that they cannot ignore their duty to uphold justice. This satisfaction outweighs the stigma around the concept of cops and the people around them being surveilled constantly (Stanley, 2013).

There is no doubt that the inclusion of a rule that required police officers would increase police accountability and decrease the amount of aggressive confrontation with civilians. This decrease in aggressive confrontations will also help prevent needless cases of police brutality and even deaths at the hand of police.

Police brutality has been running rampant in the world for centuries. Many people, especially people of color, have been terribly murdered by the people who are supposed to protect them. With that came the idea of body cameras on police officers, first proposed by former President Barack Obama in 2014. He had good intentions behind the push of the body cameras, hoping they would reduce the police brutality in the United States. However, in the same year, after he paid millions of dollars in body cameras, a total of 994 people were shot and killed for the entirety of that year (Police Shooting Database 2015-2021, 2022). Six years later in 2021, a total of 1,134 people were shot and killed due to police brutality (Mapping Police Violence, 2022). These body cameras haven’t done much to change anything. They have a possibility of affecting crime victims, they aren’t as beneficial as they were promised to be, and a longer training time would be more useful.

A police body camera has typically one function. That function is to record the events of a crime in order to find the criminal or show evidence of police brutality. However, it’s been said by the Civilian Complaint Review Board, or the CCRB, in 2020, that they didn’t get recordings of many crimes from police stations, even though they asked for them (Matsakis, 2020). Police stations having the ability to choose whether or not to bring in their body cameras as evidence is unfair. It defeats the purpose of having them, especially since alternate uses of footage have been deemed much more effective. During the traumatic event that was the murder of George Floyd, there was body camera footage. However, it was videos from passing citizens and security cameras that were used to get George Floyd justice (Matsakis, 2020). With that, body cameras just seem unnecessary since most police stations aren’t even using nor turning in the footage in the first place.

When it comes to crime, it’s a sigh of relief when a victim gets the justice they deserve. Body cameras are an instant way to do that. However, victims and witnesses have explained their fear of going against police officers’ wishes in order to not be seen in the footage (Taylor, 2016). They can have many valid reasons as to why they don’t want to be shown in the footage, like the fear of being found by other criminals or being attacked by people for telling the police about the crime. When it comes to crime, not many situations are black or white. There’s a huge gray area most of the time as things aren’t that simple.

Now, with all of these problems, why use body cameras in the first place? Well, a benefit to them is that more police officers are being held accountable for their actions, especially in terms of murdering people. A Texas police officer was fired and charged for murder in 2017 after killing a fifteen-year-old boy (Wiley, 2017). He was able to be fired due to the footage being recorded on his body camera. Now, I’m glad that the child was able to get the justice he deserved, but I would like to propose something. Instead of body cameras, maybe have police officers train for longer periods of time than they are now. An average span of time for an American police officer’s training is about less than six months that only touches on the basics. That is less than the amount of training of a cosmetologist, which is about four to five years (Not Enough Training, ND). Their training should be a lot longer and shouldn’t cover just the basic training. They should cover everything, including how to handle a potential criminal in a compromising situation.

Overall, police body cameras have some benefits but haven’t proven to be as effective as they promised to be. They could be eventually, but there are plenty of things that needs to be fixed.