Police Body Cameras Advantages

There have been a plethora of discussions on whether or not body worn cameras on law enforcement officers are beneficial to the police and public. There are several convincing points on both sides of the argument; overall, police body cameras will be detrimental to police and the public. Body cameras only record a certain point of view, have a lack of quality audio, and are expensive to sustain. Primarily, police worn body cameras will be disadvantageous to police and the public because the only capture a certain point of view. Cameras can only see a specific point of view and have less peripheral vision than a human being. These body cameras will be worn on the officer’s chest. Biologically speaking, this is not where an officer’s line of vision starts. Therefore, whatever the camera is viewing may not exactly be what the officer is seeing. The officer can turn his head and watch a scene play out before him; and by the time the camera is facing the scene it could have already played out. Consequently, the camera will only be capturing the officer’s reaction to the to the situation that was previously played out before him. Moreover, police worn body cameras will be prejudicial to police and the public because the cameras lack quality audio. The microphones built into any kind of camera are horrendous when it comes to capturing
The cameras, themselves, are not too expensive. According to Wolfcom, a company that makes police body cameras, each camera is $249.99 plus shipping and tax per camera. Relatively, it doesn’t sound that appalling, but these cameras only hold roughly eighteen hours of video footage. The cost from these cameras is going to come from the data storage. According to Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, the cameras would cost an additional $2.6 million a year for storage and extra staff needed to manage the video