Transparency is a must when you're in charge of protecting a citizenry from crimes happening every day. One of the equipment that has been helping police be transparent is the body camera that seeks to build trust on how officers respond to crime by recording and storing actual footages.
According to Christian Science Monitor, many police officers have recently been reprimanded for unrecorded interactions that preceded shootings and caused human lives. It has also become a gateway for some officers to get away with use-of-force incidents and escape civilian complaints.
Body cameras turned off may also lead to wide public distrust of police authority, analysts say. The honesty of law enforcers could easily be questioned by the public as the former can manipulate body cameras to conceal the truth for personal interests. This is why strict penalties must be established to compel officers to turn their body cameras on all the time (via Christian Science Monitor).
According to another Christian Science Monitor article, a Washington, D.C., consulting group study of fifty police departments concluded that that policies for the use of body cameras should be established and that the recorded footages must be available for civilians to access. This lessens the risk of abuse on the part of policemen handling the body cameras and allows the public to hold officers accountable of misconduct, if any.
However, as per Quora, body cameras can't always be turned on by the police. If the camera is on for the entire eight to ten hour shift of one policeman, a huge amount of storage would be filled up with footage, relevant or not. Another reason is for the confidentiality of some conversations and the privacy of some civiilians that must be protected.
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