It'll cut down on spurious lawsuits against them.
Nothing at all. If I were in law enforcement, I would be more than willing to wear one. But if the type of idiocy that is infecting Baltimore and other lefty cities is allowed to grow, police officers will be guilty until proven innocent. Bodycams will not be the be-all end-all to exonerate them.
There defense attorneys that don’t want the cops to wear them anymore, believe it or not.
Police body cameras are capturing so much footage it’s driving some defense attorneys to quit
ACLU Stand Against the Use of Body Cameras
The ACLU sent an 11-page letter in early September to federal officials, criticizing the adoption by the LAPD of body cameras for use by the city’s police officers and urged them that the program should be defunded. The ACLU letter indicated that the use of body cameras by the LAPD would make automatic recordings of events occurring to the public, thus violating a person’s right to privacy and the practice would undermine “the goals of transparency, accountability and creation of public trust that body-worn cameras should serve.”
A San Diego Body Cameras Example
San Diego and Rialito programs were early users of body cameras in Southern California. Working with a researcher from Cambridge University they discovered that the results of using body cameras resulted in an 88% decline in complaints against police officers and a 60% decline in police officers’ use of force.
In the San Diego Police Department, officers were wearing body cameras in at least two separate shootings earlier in the year. Because the public was not permitted access to the body camera footage, a heated controversy resulted. The stance of the SDPD is that once footage from body cameras become part of an investigation, they don’t have to release the footage to the public.
This raises the question about the public’s ability to view footage from body cameras under the freedom of information laws. Would releasing the footage really hamper any investigation by the police? Other relevant questions and concerns exist, such as whether police officers should use the video for both holding police officers accountable as well as for crime investigations? Should police officers be permitted to turn their body cameras off? Should video from body cameras be released in order to be used on TV and social media? What is the length of time footage from body cameras should be kept? And who should have access to the body camera footage?
Ask the police unions. They are the ones that fight the use of dash and body cams.