Body cameras work both ways. It's my belief that law enforcement will resist body cameras on the whole, because how many of us would enjoy total transparency in our work lives?* Maybe it would be advantageous to only require permanent storage of footage containing police interactions with people external to the department. There are a number of clauses which will work themselves out via the legal system, hopefully not at the expense of too many deaths. Yeesh, kinda morbid, sorry.*Oh shit, I'm posting on Hubski again.
From what I've heard from cops most of them seem to consider it a good way to protect yourself. Some actually buy them out of pocket in places where they're not universally used because they won't have to worry. I'd imagine that a campaign to make them universal would go over well with police in general as long as it came with funding for it.
Couldn't we allow the police to use the body cameras much like they do with their dashboard cams? To my understanding, the video on the dash can save something like the last 40 minutes of video and also start to record what will happen from that point on. Why can't we have that feature on body cams and have severe punishments for police who fail to get a video record of an incident? Could anybody point out the downfalls to that for me?