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Budget Slam for Body Cam-Changho Kim
Police departments across the country have been accused of corruption and injustice, so the United States Federal Government is deciding to force local police officers to attach body cameras when on active duty.
There are thousands of police officers spread across the entire country and the fact that the government would have to fund all these police officers with body cameras is financially unethical. Policeone.com states that each body camera costs roughly $267 and there are around 900,000 sworn police officers. That totals $240,300,000. With this price, we would have to start paying ten percent more of our income for the next fifteen years.
Additionally, the recent events that have led to the accusation of the police department are falsely observed. The shootings at ferguson and the beatings at Baltimore have led to deaths of two African American men, it is true that the local police conducted these acts however it is the United States Justice System that is responsible for the punishment of the police officers. Injusticeexposed.com targetted the U.S. Justice System as the second most corrupt department and that they affect both the police and the citizens. Logically, isn’t it easier and better to reform the Justice System instead of spending millions of dollars?
There are still many reasons as to why body cameras are not needed, crime rate has been gradually falling since the 1990s. In a 1990 to 2010 fact study we found that crime rate in the state of California has been falling sharply. In 1990 we started with 350,000 crimes recorded per year and then in 2010 the crimes recorded were just above 150,000. (Kristen) This means that the Crime Rate has been gradually decreasing. Just like what Mohammad Mosaddegh, former Iranian President, said “If it is not broken, don’t change it.” (Worldleaderindex) This means the millions of dollars used to buy the video cameras would go to waste.
Along with the downfall of crime in the status quo, obtaining body cameras would result in an obstruction of privacy. Picture an officer searching a lady’s purse for any dangerous weapons, as he takes out each item to observe it, the body camera records everything the woman has. This is not only a violation of personal privileges but also a violation of the fourth amendment. The U.S. Constitution was made on the basis of a new free nation, and the fourth amendment affirms that “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.” (Jefferson) These body cameras violate the The U.S. constitution, the very foundation of America.
The final reason, why buying body cameras is ineffective is because they are useless and obsolete. There are cameras everywhere, literally everywhere. When an average person walks out into the street he is spotted by at least five different cameras in five different places. Additionally, there are already cameras attached to the police cars. Santa Clara City Hall posted on their interview with the mayor that all the street lights have been attached with new security cameras. (Herbert) Buying body cameras would be just as useful as buying two left shoes.
Police Body Cameras pose new problems
By Choha Kim, Irene Park
With advocates like the Brown family, the police in Rialto, Daytona Beach, and Sanford have already been equipped with body cameras. And during the equipment of body cameras, it triggered several complications, such as the cost, privacy, and inability to record everything.
"There's a lot of unanswered questions when it comes to body cameras," said Johnathan Bragg, spokesman for the Greenville City Police Department, in an interview with the Greenville newspaper.
Nearly 40 percent of departments without body cameras mentioned cost as the primary barrier to using them, in a survey of 40 police departments by the Police Executive Research Forum.
“The cameras themselves aren’t overly expensive, but the years and years of data storage you’re going to deal with--that can definitely be cost-prohibitive,” Lindsay Miller, senior research associate at the Police Executive Research Forum, stated in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
According to Press Enterprise, the storage expenses — running into the millions of dollars in some cities — often go overlooked in the debates over using cameras as a way to hold officers accountable and to improve community relations.Yet those costs can have a significant effect on city and county budgets, and in some cases may force police chiefs to choose between paying officers on the street or paying yearly video storage fees.
President Obama announced a new initiative to “strengthen community policing.” Part of it includes funding for local police agencies to purchase body cameras. This policy also caused problems with costs.
Besides the cost problem, despite the fact that it can be one way for regular citizens to monitor them, American Civil Liberties Union(ACLU) has claimed that “the body cameras could pose a potential threat to privacy.” But equally important are the privacy interests and fair trial rights of individuals who are recorded.
According to LA Times, such video “sometimes captures people at the worst moments of their lives,” American Civil Liberties Union senior policy analyst Jay Stanley said. “You don’t want to see videos of uploaded to the Internet for titillation and gawking,” he said.
In addition to titillation and gawking moments, according to LA Times, “We want people to feel free to talk to a police officer as a trusted confidant, and if we sit here and have a camera mounted on a lapel- are you really going to want to talk about a problem with a marriage or with a child or a sexual assault if I have a camera pointed at you," Stanley said.
For that reason, experts and privacy advocates have encouraged departments to adopt policies that include allowing victims and reluctant witnesses to be filmed only with their consent, according to LA Times.
Not only did it cause problems related to privacy and cost, but also it posed another problem.This body camera doesn’t always work because the video cannot contain every single events that happened.
As stated by Seattle Times, "before rushing to embrace body cameras as an answer to police accountability concerns, let’s carefully consider whether the value of cameras for the public is being oversold — and whether cameras bring a host of new problems that have no easy solutions."
The police camera is getting far from the primary purpose; only to reveal how police officers took care of events without prejudice, discrimination, and racism.
“Instead of the cameras being there to protect the officers, they get disciplined for petty stuff constantly- for violating the uniform code, or rolling through a stop sign for an urgent call, or for not turning the camera on. That’s one of the hottest issues for my guys. They’re tired of nitpicking, and that’s what the cameras have been used to” said Jeff Roorda, a Missouri state Rep and business manager for the St. Louis Police Officers’ Assn, in an interview with Los Angeles Times.
In spite of the advocates' claims in which police body cameras are strongly necessary for justice, with the problem of the privacy, cost, and inability to record everything, there should be another replacement.
Body Cameras: The Start to an End of Police Brutality- Johnny and Joshua
In recent news in the US, the police officers are being told to wear body cameras to alleviate the rising amount of claims of police brutality. The awareness of the cases of police brutality was triggered by the increasing amount of citizens who have openly expressed their own personal experiences of corrupt police brutality.
Police brutality can concern a large magnitude of actions, such as assaulting innocent citizens, making unprofessional and obscene remarks (due to racism), and making false statements as excuses to justify their actions. The capturing of these scenes of police brutality can only be attributed to the rise of improved technology, which allowed more people to access devices that could record scenes in an instantaneous manner. The increase in public awareness of the issue of unreported police brutality through videos of the instances across social media sites (such as Facebook and YouTube) had brought greater concern as to why the problem was left unnoticed by the police force for such a long time. Now, with the issue of police brutality being unreported and undocumented by the police force becoming an increasingly large predicament, more and more citizens have taken it as their own duty to spread awareness of these instances.
The Shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri is an example of how the application of body cameras may have prevented the sudden death of Michael Brown. While reports of Michael Brown’s case have proven that he was indeed guilty of stealing cigarettes before the encounter with officer Darren Wilson, they had provided no actual reasoning for the sudden and drastic action of the officer in shooting the suspect. The encounter between the two before the series of events that led to the death of Brown had been left undocumented and used as an instance where police body cameras may further allow the justice system to work properly. The trial of Darren Wilson had concluded with the officer being cleared from any rights violation charges. This is an essential factor for supporting the use of body cameras as the jury had no visual and auditory evidence that could prove that the officer was fully justified in his actions against Michael Brown.
The Ferguson shooting is only one of many instances of cases where a police body camera could have provided substantial solid evidence that can be considered incontrovertible and neutral in a procession of trials. As the Ferguson shooting is being used as a documented premise of extreme police action, the social relationship between officers and the citizens have become skewed. However, a solution has been proposed by citizens in response to the issue and with the accountability of technological advances in video capturing: the use of body cameras.
An article written by Reuben Fischer-Baum also points out that "the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Bureau of Justice Statistics - independently of the FBI - also estimate the number of police homicides per year at around 400." However, recent reports of documented cases of police assault (from sites such as www.killedbypolice.net/) estimate that over 1000 people were actually killed or injured in 2014 alone. It is important to clarify that these numbers are simply estimates. No one actually knows the exact yearly amount of casualties from police homicide cases. This is a major issue: how can no government group identify how many cases of police homicide are made every year? It’s no wonder why the topic of body cameras has been gaining massive publicity in recent news. How could the public rest in peace when they have to live in fear of assault from the police officers who are responsible for protecting them from injustice? The first step to solving this issue would be through the implementation of body cameras.
Body cameras would make recording every case of police homicide easier while simultaneously providing evidence of the activities of every police officer while on duty. A body camera would also provide an accurate record of where police are and what they are doing on the job. The camera would additionally provide an audible record of an interaction between a citizen and the officer while on duty. The cameras would also provide a method of protecting suspects of any false accusations, misconduct, or abuse against officers. These cameras would also coincidentally increase the accountability and cooperation that citizens may have in complying with officers due to the eradication of the fear of undocumented police misconduct. The application of these cameras would ultimately start a series of events to further re-establish the trusting relationship between the citizens and officers.
While the use of body cameras may seem mostly positive, there is also a skeptical group of opposition towards the use of body cameras. The application of body cameras would an extremely large financial cost towards the police funding. The potential costs involved in the use of the body cameras, the ongoing maintenance of the equipment, and the costs associated with storing and maintaining the video footage collected from the cameras is an extremely high cost that may cause financial setbacks for the police force. However, it is arguable that the cost of a human life should outweigh the costs necessary for the use and maintenance of the cameras themselves.
It is also important to note that the cameras themselves may not be the ultimate and perfect solution to resolving issues of undocumented police brutality. The cameras do not have fully developed policies, as of yet, to guarantee the proper and ideal use of the body cameras. However it is a start to a permanent solution; a step is all that’s necessary to start a series of changes towards a better future.
Police violence evokes a call for body cameras-Lauren and Andrew
The rise in police violence from 2014 to 2015 has caused a ruckus in America, which in turn, caused international protest and controversy. In the debate on how to minimize police brutality, police body cameras have become the go to solution to prevent any potentially detrimental incidents that can affect those who are violently abused by the police.
“I can’t breathe.”
The statement above was from a very disputable event on July 17, 2014, when an African American man, Eric Garner, was arrested for supposedly selling untaxed cigarettes in Staten Island. As he was being arrested, a cellphone video captured the New York City police officer, Daniel Pantaleo, putting Garner into a chokehold. According to NBC New York, this tactic is prohibited in the New York Police Department’s policy. In the video, one can clearly hear him shout, “I can’t breathe” 11 times. Despite his protests, Pantaleo continued to place Garner in chokehold, which led him to go into cardiac arrest. Due to the cellphone video, this led to a controversial debate as to whether or not to enforce stricter policies in the police departments.
The police body cameras, or also called “cop cams,” are pager-sized cameras that are clipped onto an officer’s uniform or worn as a headset. This camera records the audio and video of the officer’s interactions on a day-to-day basis. This can enforce a strict balance to make sure that the police officers are not abusing their power. Cameras are potentially strong checks of power for the police officers because film cannot be altered.
According to the Police Foundation, Executive Fellow, Chief Tony Farrar, completed a yearlong study which focused on evaluating the effects of the police wearing body cameras. In this experiment, the officers in the Rialto Police Department were each distributed cameras. Farrar concluded that “the findings suggest more than a 50% reduction in the total number of incidents of use-of-force compared to control-conditions…”
Police violence has become a big issue due to the various events where bystanders caught police unnecessarily abusing African American "criminals" on film. The incident in Staten Island was only reported because a cellphone video was able to capture this violent encounter. However, one can infer that there are numerous confrontations that go unnoticed. Due to this inference, it should promote better awareness to strictly enforce police body cameras to make sure that all crimes are reported, to reduce risks of false accusations, and to reinforce the policies of law enforcement.
Another controversial incident that occurred on August 2014, was the incident in Ferguson, Missouri where an unarmed African American teenager, Michael Brown, was shot and killed by a white policeman, Darren Wilson. Despite much protest, the grand jury declared Wilson as innocent. Similarly, this incident was also filmed by a bystander, which promoted awareness of the police violence that occurred especially in impoverished neighborhoods. In both incidents, the verdicts came out to be innocent for the white policemen. This brought about the discussion of technology concerning cameras due to the intense protests and riots that arose due to the verdicts.
Having police body cameras can reinforce trust in the police officers. According to www.idebate.org, cameras can reduce complaints, as shown by the Rialto study, which stated that wearing cameras reduced complaints by 88%. This shows a mutual relationship as the police officers can act and behave in a proper manner, and the public will not make as many complaints as they do now.
Although critics can state that cameras are violating the officers’ rights to privacy, this should be an exception because the cameras are primarily being used to benefit the justification and control of law enforcement as the government is allowing the public to be monitored. Therefore, police body cameras should be used to reinforce a stronger bond between the police department and the general public.