Police Body Cameras Pros And Cons Essay

Police brutality is a huge problem in America today, and few steps are being taken to prevent this injustice. One way of eliminating some of this from society is having police officers wear manually activated cameras on their bodies to record any interactions with civilians. Recently, multiple cases revolving around police brutality including two extremely controversial cases from 2014 where two black men (Eric Garner and Michael Brown) were killed by white officers who later were not charged. The news and multiple social media websites took notice of these cases and it became a widespread public issue. A way to solve this problem is to have law enforcement wear these cameras so that the video recordings can be used to resolve many disputes revolving around necessary force. Body cameras
These devices allow a firsthand look into an incident and give immediate evidence to a case. Heather Ann Myers wrote about a yearlong investigational study of body cameras for law enforcement and said, “The findings suggest more than a 50 percent reduction in the total number of incidents involving use of force.” In this investigation conducted by Chief Tony Farrar, it is clear that body cameras not only traduced the number of occasions where force was used, but also made these situations more clear, in giving video and audio for every situation. In the article “Police Body Cameras: What are the Pros and Cons?” Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum said, “There are certainly benefits . . . in documenting encounters with the public. It provides the context of what happened.” Wexler noticed the benefit of having these cameras and their video at their disposal as well. These cameras help add to the police officers accountability by reinforcing their stories, or in some cases, denying them completely and help eliminate forceful officers from the