“Good cops have nothing to fear from everything being on video.”
I respectfully disagree, in part. While I do support cops wearing bodycams and do agree they do more good than harm, the fact is that in the current environment perfectly lawful encounters between law enforcement and the public being caught on camera are being criminalized. Even when we are right we are being destroyed.
This is why I (and many others) am retiring. May God help those in the communities we serve as the mayhem increases as we necessarily retreat.
I think that’s a totally separate issue. If the bodycam is accurately documenting each encounter, then it’s doing exactly what I think it should be doing. If people are looking at basic reality and creating their own faulty narrative, or they have unrealistic expectations of how police should be handling various situations, then there’s other problems going on.
For now, I’ll settle for everyone having direct video and audio evidence documenting the basic facts of what took place. That should put every reasonable person on the side of good cops. It’s certainly turned around a lot of people when video and audio emerged after the fact that added context to the situation (like this story). Ultimately, I just want the basic facts to not be in dispute. If there are so many unreasonable people in a specific area that police can’t actually function, then the people living there will have to deal with the consequences of the ridiculous policies they create (including loss of good cops). See also: the paradise of CHOP.