Police Body Cameras Case Study

Imagine one evening that a man comes home and finds out his significant other has been cheating. A wave of emotions come over as voices rise and neighbors call the police. Minutes later the police are on scene. With the adoption of police body cameras, the whole thing is caught on tape and kept as a federal record. Something personal and perhaps embarrassing is now out of that person hands and they have no control over what happens to the video. Police body cameras are thought to be the saving grace for police reputation and civil justice. Though the video data would no doubt be a valuable resource, there are many unexplored issues of exactly how the data will affect state budget, privacy, and police relations in communities.
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When a policeman arrives on scene it is a series of split second decisions. With the advantage of body cameras, we now can review those decisions in retrospection. It is easier to interpret a situation in many ways when you take out the physical aspects of being there. When viewing a situation instead of reading or hearing about it issues become evident. There have been studies that suggest that there are significant impacts on the perceived actions and use of force by police officers that use body cameras during incidents. Depending on how an incident is presented the viewer is likely to form different opinions on what happened. The studies show when video is the medium of delivery it influences perception and A higher observation of excessive use of force occurs (McCamman & Culhane, 2017). Confrontations between officers and civilians before body cameras has always been a case of different accounts presented before a judge. When a jury has ability to watch events unfold it may be easier to scrutinize an officer’s decisions or formulate bias against that officer. This makes any mistake an officer makes a liability and when those mistakes are under review it’s the policeman’s reputation and possible livelihood on the line. Actions that are watched though these new mediums will have direct impacts on people’s careers as police and a certain level of professional privacy should be
Some of the faults with body cameras are connected to the human aspect of them. The cameras are usually mounted to the chest or shoulder and can’t account for when an officer turns their head or sees something with peripheral vision. An officer could also forget to activate the camera during an incident (White & Couldren, 2017). How do you determine when the cameras would be on when an “always on” policy would be impossible? If a phone was left to record constantly it would either die or run out of memory before noon. In a perfect world where the cameras would always be on it will also be near impossible to hold a person’s eyesight to the same standard of a high definition camera. Cameras have the advantage when it comes to detecting more objects at lower light and image stabilization. At the same time the human eye can observe images at greater angles than a body camera. With the many differences in ability that humans and cameras have, how can we hold a person to the same standard as we see in video