Should Police Be Required To Wear Body Cameras Essay

Throughout the past 10 years there has been many talks on whether the police should be required to wear body cameras. Throughout all the research and studies regarding these cameras, these have been many pros to body cams but there have also been cons and many challenges to implementing this system in police forces throughout the country. Many different police stations have done experiments with these cameras and have all shown very positive feedback. Regardless of the amount of work necessary to implement these cameras, it should be necessary for officers to wear these body cameras because they have the potential to save lives. To go along with that, police should be forced to wear these body cameras because they have the potential to save lives, give better representation than hearing a testimony, and make suspects less likely to run or attack an officer because everything they do is caught on camera. One of the biggest police shootings was the one that occurred in Ferguson, Missouri when Michael Brown was murdered by a police officer. Police reports stated that Brown was the aggressor even though all eyewitness reports say that was not the case. This led to an uprising in the police body cam movement because with these cam, police and other law officials would have a proper account of what actually happened. After this shooting, officers, Scott E. Culhane, John H. Boman, and Kimberly Schweitzer decided to take it into their own hands and create an experiment to test out the effects of police cameras. They compared real life police events when suspects knew police were wearing cameras to when the police had no cameras on. After completing the study it was found “complaints against officers dropped an astonishing 88% when body cameras were used. Furthermore, use of force incidents dropped 50%, reducing the risk of physical injury to both officers and the public” (“Public Perceptions Of The Justifiability Of Police Shootings: The Role Of Body Cameras In A Pre- And Post-Ferguson Experiment” 6). Similarly, in a different study of a different police department, “Allegations Vs. the police department went down by 35%” (Sousa 6). Both of these studies help to show how much safer officers and bystanders are when officers are wearing these body cameras. These are two of the many studies that have been completed that show just some of the benefits of these cameras. After seeing all these experiments and trials being done, something caught the Mayor of New York’s attention. He became very interested in the potential of police body cameras, “It 's going to improve the work of law enforcement. And God forbid, when something goes wrong, we 're going to have a clear understanding of what happened and whatever approaches we need to take as a result”(Griggs). This quote sums up a lot of what most citizens believe to be the main reason for these cameras. On top of lowering the probability of someone attacking an officer, if something were to happen, all of it would be caught on video. Some might ask what difference these cameras actually would have made in real life cases. Plenty of the surveys and case studies performed answer these questions. For example, after analyzing a case performed, the Government of New Jersey, reported that there were "a number of perceived benefits for using body-worn cameras, including better evidence documentation and increased accountability and transparency” (“Research on Body-Worn Cameras and Law Enforcement”). By saying this, they were explaining how because of the cameras, they would get a better understanding of what happened because with these cameras, there is no “he said, she said”, it is all facts. This would have helped in a scenario such as the Ferguson, Missouri case. With these cameras, the jury would have known exactly what happened and there would have been no questions asked. Overall, these cameras would make trials go by much easier because there would be another source for evidence and it would also be the most credible. Regardless of how …show more content…
Saving a life versus a police officer feeling uncomfortable having a camera on him do not even compare. Nothing compares to the possibility of the most precious thing on this planet,