Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Body Cam?

STXHunter has a thread about a pepper spraying incident.

It would appear there was no camera or it hasn't been released.

That got me to thinking,
When these came out, cops were very reluctant.
Understandably. The immediate reaction is of someone
trying to bust you.

But times have changed, sentiments to law enforcement has
changed.

So, for LEO types, old and new. Camera?
Experience wearing one?
Like it/hate it? Why?
And, if you don't mind, how many years on the job.

Not all departments have funds for them.

You know... De-Fund the Police and all...

Sure.
There are small departments, poor departments.

Is your answer that you dint have them?

Still be interested in your thoughts as to good or bad?
How often they protect an officer vs catch him vs the images are
unclear/decieving.

Goes both ways, I reckon.

We’ve been wearing them for about three years now. Body worn cams have saved more cops than harmed. I have zero issues with them on the street when in contact with the public. They suck in that if it isn’t on camera it didn’t happen and sometimes lack context.

They do have the propensity to cause internal trouble as well. The model we use record non stop and the admin can randomly review any camera they want. If you get caught disparaging a thin skinned administrator, you will get jammed up. Thankfully i can retire anytime i want.

The body cams are there to save the City from lawsuits. They have had the side affect of recording good evidence. Many Public Defenders now decry the body cams and attack the City's case on petty administrative procedures in order to discredit the body cam footage.

However, while the body cams are often free the data storage is immensely expensive. Think like printers are cheap but the ink prices will kill you over time. I beleve Seattle turned theirs in over that cost issue.

I'm looking at it from the outside in as I'm not a cop. I can certainly imagine times when they'd be a headache. That said, I can't imagine not wearing one in the interest of self preservation.

My hats off to all the good guys doing their job.

Of course Seattle would do that.

JM,
That was my personal thoughts on reading Rogers post.

It's definitely a he said/ he said case. A bit of video might clear it up.

My department has been using them for about 2 years. I wear one every day. The only issue I have with them is administrative. It’s a bit of a pain to have to go back and classify every event recorded. It needs an event or case number and an explanation. Ours record automatically when your lights come on and in a few other situations. Like when you take the safety off on your Taser. Your camera is activated whenever anyone else takes the safety of theirs too. Following roll call whenever people are testing their gear ( lights and Tasers) your camera just start recording again. You have to back into to the system and document that inadvertent recording. There are a lot of them.

As a supervisor, I’m required to ensure that all of those recordings are classified. In addition, I have to do a monthly audit of my squads BWC recordings. This takes time and is an additional burden we didn’t have 2 years ago. Sometimes the cameras aren’t activated because the officer didn’t turn the camera on. It happens and is almost always an honest mistake. I’ve done it myself. You turn it off when you intended to turn it on. The problem is, the lack of footage is often assumed to be some kind of intentional act. Don’t make a habit of it.

The bottom line is, that the camera doesn’t lie! It has saved many more officers from false accusations than it has implicated. People swear they never said or did something, here it is…that’s you, right? On the other hand, some people won’t talk to us at all because they know there will be a record of the conversation and they want to remain anonymous. The doesn’t help a criminal investigation. It’s not perfect solution for everything. There is good and bad with the cameras but they re here to stay. One other point, Virginia law requires saving most of those recordings for 99 years. The data storage cost is astronomical and a huge taxpayer expense.

Fairly good summation here, though 'we' are only about a year in. The costs, storage in particular, and the admin time (I've delegate that to my Det. Sgt.) are things that most folks don't consider. My Sarge spends a solid 12-16 hours a week dealing with footage which, obviously, is taken away from investigations
Our Axons only will on!y 'capture ' the 45 seconds prior to activation (no audio), so that helps. As Mac says, admin can use them inappropriately, but that's not something I worry about..........despite the Chief being kinda an azzhole

Made me laugh George. Hope you’re well buddy

At first they were viewed with great suspicion. (20 years on the job). The concern, and it was validated, was that vindictive and overbearing Nazi like administrators would use videos as a way to micro manage and nit pick virtually everything an officer did. Literally from the way a person walked up to a vehicle on a vehicle stop, to interactions with people. They would also use the videos as an excuse to get even with officers that they did not like.

If they had a problem with officer Joe and the fact that he called out the Captain on some BS during a meeting (like forced diversity and other PC crap), then just say that Joe is not stopping enough stop sign violators, or approaching vehicles in a manner that looks incorrect, or had a driver's license in his dominant hand instead of keeping it free during a stop. Basically they would scour videos to find anything and if they could not find something, they would essentially create a problem that really wasn't there.

True story example (of Nazi admin/departments) from many years back when we actually used VHS tapes. When I was with State I was extremely successful at narcotics interdiction. Unfortunately the same region had a guy who tried to do narcotics interdiction but apparently was not following state policies, got jammed up and they fired him.

I was seizing literally millions of dollars worth of meth. The governor at the time had a directive stating that he wanted us to aggressively go after meth and I was doing so. In fact I had received some accolades from the governors office for the work I was doing. The regional admin however would have preferred if we just wrote a bunch of chickenshit tickets to people and nothing else. (He had a 1970s highway patrol mentality. He actually told me one time that if he had it his way that all uniformed officers would wear right hand flap holsters no matter if they were right or left handed, along with the old cross chest straps, mag pouches and every other thing would all be worn the exact same way. Nothing would accommodate the officer, as uniformity and "The Look" is more important).

I was never a ticket writer so that didn't help. They decided that since I had seized literally millions of dollars of drugs that I must be dirty and violating the policy and/or the law. The local admin started their own unofficial internal on me.

They pulled 2.5 YEARS worth of tapes on me. The two regional administrators watched 2.5 years worth of tapes and could not find a single law broken, right violated or agency policy violated. They were actually pissed. They wanted to hammer me and use the hammering of me as an example to stop the other guys from doing interdiction. I remember clearly calling out the regional administrator on this, which was unheard of, but I was pissed.

Instead of commending me for doing things by the book and being very successful, they were furious they could not destroy someone's career. I remember a few coworkers who were shocked when they found out that I would dare speak to the two administrators for the chickenshit crap that they had just pulled on me. They had a rep for destroying at least one career a year as an example to keep everyone else in line. Fug them, I was pissed.

Back to the topic in general.



On the bright side. Video cameras were/are excellent tools for saving officers butts when it comes to peoples allegations. The drunk woman who says "He fondled my tits when he arrested me", and all of the "he called me a fugtard", I had $2,000 in my wallet when your officer took it, . Or when your officer wrote me that ticket for doing 110 on the interstate he said I was a dipshit fatfuq and I want to complain my way out of this ticket.

People being liars and complaining trying to slimeball their way out of trouble was so common that when a supervisor would say " Hey Mack, some lady says you did ABC when you stopped her for doing 30 over". My typical response was "Sure that's exactly what happened". I would go get the tape and tell the supervisor to put the tape in my box when he is done. It was so common it wasn't worth my time to even reply to their stupidity 95+% of the time.


It was actually fun to say " Oh hey why don't you come down to the station, and you can write down your formal complaint about all the things the officer did to you when you were in the back seat of his cruiser." Oh by the way. Remember that little red blinking light that you were staring at when your drunk azz was sitting in the back and the officer was supposedly feeling up your oompaloompa ugly tits and groping you everywhere and allegedly sexually assaulting you... Well that is actually an internal car camera.

By the way, did we mention that falsely accusing someone of something like sexual assault, or stealing money, or whatever is actually a crime. Yeah, come on down to the station..


The bottom line is that the tapes save good officers from the dirtbags in public. They unfortunately give departments who habitually throw officers under the bus a great tool for doing such things. It is far easier for politically correct departments run by politicians and their appointees to throw good officers to the wind (and destroy their lives) and hire new idealistic replacements than it is to actually stick up for guys who have been doing the job for many years.


The bottom line is that if I was working on the street today I would record every single encounter with the public and with an administrator, as neither can be trusted. So glad I haven't worn a uniform in years and am totally done with that nonsense. You could not pay me enough to put up with that crap.

Thank guys. That's the stuff I was curious about.
Unfortunately, the desk jockey, admin/HR pricks are there, always will be.
Executing their petty grudges on the producers, when they themselves
produce nothing but paperwork.