Argumentative Essay On Police Body Cameras

Background

The concept of police body cameras became a hot topic around Fall of 2013 in New York City when a judge found that the NYPD’s stop and frisk tactics violated the constitutional rights of New Yorkers. A solution that the judge found was to experiment with officers wearing body cameras, which ignited fervent debate on the usage of technology in such instances. The debate is based on the common expectation in American society for political authorities to respect the privacy of citizens in terms of monitoring and surveillance. Although this is an important and respectable standard, the unique purpose of police on-body cameras refutes this claim. The goal of police-body cameras is to improve the quality of life of American citizens by

According to research conducted by The Guardian, Black Americans are more than twice as likely to be unarmed when killed during encounters with police as white people. Furthermore, An analysis of public records, local news reports and Guardian reporting found that 32% of black people killed by police in 2015 were unarmed, as were 25% of Hispanic and Latino people, compared with 15% of white people killed. (Swaine, 2015) One of these encounters is the account of a New York City resident, Eric Garner. In July 2014, the 43-year-old father was arrested, put in a chokehold, and died under the custody of the New York City Police Department. His death sparked an ongoing national dispute about policing actions in minority communities and racial discrimination in the criminal justice system. (Goodman, 2015) To prevent situations like this from occurring in the future, some body cameras, and other steps can be administered in the NYPD

In America, we are accustomed to seeing police officers with guns, but in other countries, such an act would be considered a provocation and a violation of law. In European countries such as Britain, Ireland, Norway, Iceland and New Zealand, officers on duty are unarmed. Guðmundur Oddsson, an assistant professor of sociology at Northern Michigan University, told The Washington Post "The practice is rooted in tradition and the belief that arming the police with guns engenders more gun violence than it prevents" (Noack, 2015). By following the model of these European countries and only allowing a few officers in special circumstances to carry firearms, the risk of overall gun violence is lessened (Engel, 2014). In addition to the problem of gun violence is the increasing trend of some local police forces to rely on military-style gear and tactics, even in situations that fail to pose a major threat to officers’ safety. “Theory underlying the weapons effect or similar kinds of phenomena would suggest that the more you fill the environment with stimuli that are associated with violence, the more likely violence is to occur,” explained University of Missouri social psychologist, Bruce Bartholow, who has studied the “weapons effect”. When