It would seem an obvious and easy decision: equip every police officer with a police body cam. A small video clipped, usually, to the epaulet on a shoulder. The cams would provide evidence in the event of a tragic and questionable police practice. The police body cams would also provide evidence that, in most cases, police acted properly.
The media leads us to believe it’s a simple decision. As with most things in life, the choice to use police body cams has another, under-reported side.
Why would anyone be opposed to them or, at least, point out the difficulties? There are five.
- The cost of equipping an entire police force, such as Chicago or New York for instance, is immense. People say, “So what? We pay taxes and isn’t every dollar worth perhaps saving a life or getting justice?” Sure, but a dollar spent on the equipment, the software behind them, repairs, people to set up the programs for recording and down-loading, and all the bureaucrats who would come along means the department is unable to hire the two or twenty extra officers needed on the streets. Take you choice.
- Both police and prosecutors warn about this difficulty with police body cams. People forget that a city employs dozens or maybe thousands of police. Each one gets to wear a police body cam. Each camera records for hours. Can you imagine the amount of data that is created? Maybe there is some software that exists that can scan all that data quickly and accurately, but it still requires time and money. At some point, a human must review the data that is in question. How many people would that take away from other law enforcement duties?
- Most police departments have a citizen’s complaint team. In Minneapolis, it is composed of several people including a cop, civilian, and a lawyer for the department. They take complaints and review them for further action. If police body cams’ data were available to the public (some states restrict access to the data by the public) the complaint team would be swamped with data retrieval requests for every imaginable police offense. It would come to a halt and the public would suffer as a result.
- You may think these ideas are, ultimately, just about money. Yes and no. Of course, all these steps would take money to pay for the technology and the people to run it. But that use of resources takes it away from other areas of law enforcement—both people and alternative technology. I’m not sure the cost of the police body cams is worth it.
- For one, final, reason—the majority of police stops by far are non-events. People cooperate with police, the police are professional and respectful, nothing happens, and the incident ends. That’s probably 80%-90%+ of stops. Do we really need hours and hours of data about each one of those?
