Persuasive Essay On Police Body Cameras

Since their inception, police body cameras have been a controversial topic as many do not agree on their effectiveness and legality. To the trained eye, body cameras clearly have no negatives other than the sheer cost of their implementation. Some people, nonetheless, do believe that it is an encroachment of privacy for police to record private and/or public interactions even though it is purely legal. While that may be seen as a negative, it is wholly subjective and must be completely ignored when considering the factual analysis of police body camera use that is necessary to verify their validity. When only taking fact into account, there is no way to deny the nearly infinite benefits of body cameras.

Starting it all off, nearly

Policeone.com reports that there is a “spillover effect” in departments where only some officers wear cameras as “citizen complaints declined both when cameras were in use and when they weren’t” and that it “may reflect a conscious effort by officers without cameras during a given shift to competitively improve their behavior to favorably match that of fellow officers who had the ‘advantage’ of wearing a body cam.” Logically, if the spillover effect is true, it would not be necessary for every officer in the department to have a body camera for a clear benefit to be visible. Those who believe that even minor use of body worn cameras (BWCs) as such is an unconstitutional violation of rights have been proven wrong time and time again through many levels of case law like People v. Lucero, 190 Cal. App. 3d 1065 where the case effectively explains that “a person has no expectation of privacy when they are engaged in an interaction with police.” (Ramirez, pg. 5) While some may also make the argument that “user licenses, storage

Maciag says that “a new report reveals there 's little consensus about how to use [body cameras].” This is very concerning for those that advocate for the adoption of body cameras, as lack of understanding, legislation, policy, guidelines, and training may kill off the dreams of having a technology enhanced criminal justice system. Problems prevalent as such can be resolved with proper education of police and police departments in technological data management. Concurrently, legislators must enact laws to restrict the acceptable use of body cameras in order to keep the public eye in favor of their law enforcement use. The prevalence of aforementioned problems is even more obvious when you consider that almost 38% of police departments with body cameras are unable to determine how much footage is being recorded daily by their officers. (Maciag) Many feel that this can be solved through proper funding and research into effective footage management, and they are certainly right. Proper funding for initial training and implementation of the cameras is provided for most departments, however, many departments never receive funding to properly store the footage, or even learn how to. Being such a major barrier to the effectiveness of BWCs, it is something that needs to be fixed lest the adoption of said cameras may diminish. Some police departments, such as the Seattle PD, have looked into uploading