TexasCHLforum.com

Personally, I strongly support the use of body cameras by officers. I remember trying to rig my own dash camera when most police departments did not ahve them. I believe it will exonerate me much more often than incriminate me.

As a general rule, police officers are split on the use of body cameras. Some like them and some don't. Police unions are generally against them but that is more politics than anything else. Many of the cops who do not like body cameras are not against them because they think they will be used in a case of a shooting to charge the officer, but more because they think the administration will use them to look for complaints and suspend them over little violations of rules, such as spending more than 30 minutes at their dinner (GPS units on patrol cars have been used for this exact purpose). I believe it is much more of a reflection of the disconnect and politics between the officers and their administrations than the criminal acts of cops.

Along those lines, cops feel this way because they know very well what the odds of being in a shooting or a newsworthy situation are. They are few and far between. Consider the fact that there are about one million law enforcement officers on duty in the US. Divide by three to get the shifts covered, and then another time by half to get the days off, vacation, training etc. covered. That means there are about 166,666 officers ON DUTY at any given time. Even if we assume that only one-fourth of them are actually patrolmen, it means that there are 40,000 police officers out there interacting with the public at any given minute. Now look again at how often the abusive cases occur. It really is a very small minority of the officers. It makes the news because it is that rare (man bites dog or dog bites man type of thing).

And that is what leads to the budget problems and choices. The costs of body cameras are almost all in the storage and handling, not in the actual cameras. If you are the chief and have a set budget, or even if you are preparing your new budget, do you want to argue for something that pays so little return on investment? Compare that to how often the breaching tools are used (way too often IMO but that is a separate argument). Which one should the chief buy?

BTW, for any who are not aware, most of the body cameras are digital, as are most dash cameras now. They are constant loop type systems, with the video going to memory and being overwritten later as needed. When the camera is activated (manually or by the auto system) it goes back and captures some segment of the video, usually 30 seconds or one minute before activation. I don't know how they can set up an auto activate system for the body cams, but I have seen some advertised that are always on and the department can erase anything not necessary later. But storage of an 8 hour shift per officer eats up money fast, as does the review of what to save longer.