Pros And Cons Of Corrupting Police Body Cameras

Allegations against police officers over stepping their authority have surfaced over the years. Freddy Carlos Gray, a twenty five year old black man from Baltimore, was apart of these allegations. With his hands in the air and his head down, police would not take him to the hospital even though Gray was telling them that he was injured and could not breathe. Officials at the Baltimore Police Station say that this situation would have not ended in death if the officers would have follow procedure and took him the hospital. Critics describe the use of unnecessary force against civilians as unconstitutional, others say that officers are given too much power and that corrupt cops could easily give false information or sabotage evidence to clear

their names. Stanford Law School says that, ‘In 2010, almost ten out of every 1,000 American police officers were accused of some type of police misconduct. “In 2015, one thousand people were killed in officer-involved shootings”(), examples like these are why officers need to have body cameras.
Body cameras are not the solution to corrupt cops.

A person can argue that camera footage is just like any other piece of evidence; police officers can tamper with the camera and turn them off. Yes, one can argue that a camera is just as capable of being compromised as a piece of paper. If a cop were to tamper with the camera and the camera footage was randomly turned off during an arrest, then the judge could see that the camera was tampered with and a certain punishment could be charged to the officer. On camera, a judge can see the events that take place and interpret the evidence better; either way, body cameras are an easier solution to problem of corrupt

cops.
Relationships with police however, have been unsteady ever since the death of Michael Brown. Footage of a white officer beating a black man has come up from the woodwork down in Dallas Texas. “Video shows when Dallas police officers did catch up to Collins, he had already fallen off his motorcycle and was standing in the road. Officers ran toward him, knocked him down and began beating him with a baton and their fists”(). Due to incidents like these, police officer have been outcasted by society. Trust between officers and citizen is slowly fading away and some people are wondering about whether society can be able to have trust in the police again.
Trust is a two way street, both directions must have a balanced relationship in order to be successful. This trust is broken when person decides to lie to the authorities and proceed to add on events as they tell the story. Putting body cameras on police officers will eliminate untruthful facts between an officer and citizen. Now if an cop decides to lie to his or her commanding officer, he or she will be at fault due to the footage that has been taken. One might ask, who will be able to stop the officer from turning his or her camera off, if he or she wants to turn the camera off, they will go ahead and turn the camera off. Citizens are often concerned about protecting the community, but they often forget that police officers are regular people too. Police officers have families as well, body cameras also protect them too.
Theoretically an officer could be performing a domestic dispute call; the cop ask the lady about what happened in her house that lead to a domestic dispute, but the lady does not answer the officer. Asking again about what happen in the house, the officer is given no response. Now the officer asks the daughter about what happened that lead to the domestic dispute but this time the daughter answers the officer with an array of cuss words. While the officer is dealing with the daughters rant, the mother comes over and starts to yell at the officer. She starts to cuss into the officer’s face and begins to push him; the officer subdues the mother and takes her into the car for assaulting an officer. Later on, the mother tries to sue the officer for sexual assault, the officer and the mother go to court. The lady tells the court that the officer was grabbing her in a sexual way. For this situation, the officer could easily prove that he did not sexually assault the mother by using the tape that he has with his body camera. As one can see, this example can be taken into consideration because the mother had embellished her story so that she could not be charged with assault or so that she could get money from the officer.
You could argue that police officers could embellish their stories as well. Yes one can argue that a police officer could lie or block out important details of a story. Some could also argue that when the camera is accidently or intentionally turned off, both sides could lie to officials. Having a person monitor the cameras could solve this problem. No one can predict when a tough situation could happen and an officer could need help or the person monitoring could make sure that the standard procedures have been done. Stand offs, hostage situation, regular routine stop gone wrong, and barricades are all situations that could go south. Lucky for us, the government does not have to resort to monitoring situations; instead, they have received numerous experiments from various police forces that have conducted public trials.
Experiments have been conducted to test the durability and impact of behavior between police and citizens. Experimental designs have been a struggle for body cameras; testing where the camera should go and how well the camera will do are two of the concerns that are directed towards body cameras. Denver’s Police Department has conducted one of these experimental designs, but the department is not sure that the design is the main flaw with the body cameras, “ these are not always feasible, for practical or political reasons. In this experiment, we were unable to randomly allocate shifts, officers, cases, or vehicles”(). Flaws like these should be taken into consideration with every experiment towards body cameras, each state has numerous obstacles and various boundaries. Each state also has its own terrain: whether it is hilly as Colorado, spacious like Kansas, or if its full of obstacles and pedestrians like New York City, every state has its various difficulties. One of these difficulties includes how much money that was spent on the cameras.
Money is the only problem that most people do not think of when they are trying to come up with various solutions to different problems.

Right now the Kansas City Police Department (KCPD) is spending $6 million dollars on cameras for their officers according to the KCPD. David Zimmerman Chief of the KCPD says, “”We’re moving toward body cameras for the same reasons we did in-car cameras: to ensure accountability, to identify any issues that could require training and to provide indisputable accounts of incidents.””(). Unlike Zimmerman, chief Tony Farrar of the California’s Rialto Police Department is more worried about making sure the cameras are a good ideas, he is doing this by conducting

experiments.
These experiments that have been done by the Rialto Police Department are conducted to see the interaction of citizens with police wearing body cameras. Complaints towards officers and forced arrests dropped within four years because, “the technology is perhaps most effective at actually preventing escalation during police-public interactions”(Farrar). Even though this experiment showed positive results, people need to remember that this was only one experiment that was conducted on the use of body cameras towards the public. If the United States government were to require every police officer to wear a body camera they would need the results of more than one experiment involving the public.
States like Colorado, California, Missouri, and Illinoi have been conducting public experiments because of the events that have occurred in Ferguson, Missouri. According to Denver’s Body Worn Camera (BWC) experiment,153 square miles is the size of Denver, Colorado; 650,000 people live in Denver. 1,500 officers work in six districts, which is the fiftieth largest police department in the United States. 46.2% of people that live in Colorado are white and 10.1% are African American. African Americans 4.7 homicides per 100,000 people happen in Denver, which are the normal crime patterns for the city of Denver.