Police-Body Camera

Body-camera technology become a method of choice as debates on improving police-
community interactions intensified. In their course of duty, the officers face varied degrees of
danger; nevertheless, while the officers are supposed to serve the public, there are situations
when their conduct becomes questionable. Police body cameras is ideal in documenting all
the encounters. However, the applications, interpretation, and conclusion of data collected
through these body-cameras raise ethical and legal concerns. At one end, people agree that
the upgrade will provide data that is valuable in a court of law, assessing police performance
and improving general service provision standards. On the other hand, data obtained from
police body cameras appear to be biased to police point of view, affects personal privacy and
ethically questionable.
Application of body-mounted cameras is at the infancy stage, with no clear count of
its employment; however, numerous agencies are adopting its use. What started as way of
monitoring the officers’ conduct and increasing public trust has triggered debates on quality
and legal perspective of the information. Current concerns is on privacy of the information
when released to the public. While in use, these cameras can capture private details of
people’s lives, for instance, the inside someone’s apartment. Such information are under the
protection of right to privacy and thus does not belong to the public arena. Besides the
privacy issues, these body cameras can also capture disturbing images involving the police,
for instance, scenes of shooting, police interaction with mentally ill individuals and people
exercising their civil rights such as demonstration. Such videos might reach the public as
required by law when there are questions regarding officers’ conduct, individual rights and
security appears to be ignored. On the other hand, when policy restrict the release of the
footages for public scrutiny, it hides scenes of officers harassing people and the main role of
this camera appears compromised. There is a dilemma regarding the release of information

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captured by body cameras to the public, currently, their application either compromises
personal privacy when made accessible to the public or fails to satisfy their main objective.
Some police departments permits the officers to switch their cameras on or off
depending on the situation at hand. However, increasing the officers’ control over the
information captured by this camera brings the technology under their command, applications
of data collected in legal proceedings becomes questionable, as the information is partisan.
While it solves the privacy problem, the officers are free to capture scenes that excludes their
misconduct. Most departments fits officers with camera that requires manual activation when
the officers leave the patrol car to collect information, officers also have absolute control over
the time these footages stays in the camera when there is no direct feed to a central location.
The amount of control granted to officers over the camera reduces these body cameras to
personal items activated to favour the police perspective. The absence of backup information
also permits police to delete footages that might be critical to an investigation; in addition,
public distrust on police officers continues to grow, as the department are free to manipulate
scenes of harassment or misconduct against individuals. As it is impractical to have the
cameras running throughout, it is at the officer’s discretion to activate these devices manually
when interacting with the public, which might not be the case. The public only knows that the
camera was not running when there are no footages to validate complaints against the
officers; the evidence might be deleted or not recorded at all making the body cameras
ineffective.
The quality of information collect from police body camera also raises questions
when it comes to interpretation. As noted by Seth, a law professor at the University of South
Carolina, the position of a camera determine the perspective of data collected. He adds that
mounting the camera on officers’ body creates distorted footages as the officer moves,
instability issues with body camera brings about blurred images and does not clarify what

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actually happened (Williams, et al. 2016) . In simulation tests, Seth found that mounting the
camera on officer’s chest or head tends to exaggerate the footages when compared to videos
of the same situation as recorded by a bystander (Williams, et al. 2016) .
While the use of body-mounted cameras by police officers raises some questions, they
have been handy in handling of legal proceedings regarding an officers’ conduct. Some
police departments have solved the privacy problem by instating policies that govern the
release of these videos to the public, modifications such as blurring of victim faces and totally
concealing information from public access during investigation are in application. The
credibility of information collected has been improved by installation of automated activation
systems in police body camera, common triggers include sound and motion of certain
intensity, additionally, the information collected is transmitted directly to central storage thus
limiting data manipulation or mishandling by officers. By limiting these biases, police body
camera is an effective method in fostering public-police relations.

Works Cited

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Williams, T., J. Thomas, S. Jacoby, and D and Cave. 2016. Police Body Cameras: What do
you see? April 1. Accessed June 4, 2016.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/01/us/police-bodycam-
video.html?smid=fb-share&_r=1.