Police Officers Should Wear Body Cameras Essay

“Police officers cannot be expected to encode and retain every one of the countless details that make up a use-of-force incident.” This quote from the Los Angeles Times article ‘The Right Body Camera Policy’ explains one of the many needs for police officers to be equipped with body cameras. Not only does it promote non-lethal methods, it helps police officers in the process. Police units should be required to wear body cameras in order to hold officers accountable of misconduct, as well as defend police from false accusations. To begin, police officers should wear body cameras in order to hold themselves accountable for misconduct. The majority of police officers are great people, trying to always do the best for their communities and the

This couldn’t be any less true. The call for body cameras never mentions making recordings public record, which USA Today article ‘Cameras on Cops a Privacy Question’ suggests. A figure is cited that storage of footage in a city using Baltimore as an example, could cost $2.6 million a year. As technology improves, storage solutions will only become cheaper. This figure also assumes that all body camera footage would be permanently stored, which the question of body cameras never mentions or suggests. After a certain amount of time, chances are body camera footage would be deleted in order to make room for newer occurrences. Back to the point of privacy, there is nothing mentioned of making body camera footage public accessible. What this means is that all citizens who end up in video still have their full privacy. If another incident occurs such as a police shooting, the footage would be carefully released by police departments, hiding identities of anyone who was not involved. So not only does the integrity of the police force outweigh the need of hiding someone’s face, it simply isn’t true that people in the background would have their identities released in the first