As many of you may know some police officers wear body cameras. Many agencies are now requiring their officers to strap on an additional item when the get ready for work every morning. You would think that police officers would be grateful to have this new addition, however, that is not always the case. There are many pros and cons to the body cameras and the pros of the body cameras seem to outweigh the cons right? Well that is not necessarily true. While the list maybe longer for the pros the cons equal them out by the weight that they carry.

Let us talk about the pros for a second. Some of these pros include: the safety of the officer, the safety of the recorded, the ability to have video evidence in court, and so on. The safety of the officer recording is very important as well as the safety of the person being recorded. Now I understand that the camera itself is not doing anything to protect these two parties, that would be a crazy advancement in technology and, honestly, I would be a little scared. They do, however, protect the officer in the sense of being wrongfully accused, in court, of police brutality. On the other hand, these cameras will be a deterrence, I think, of police brutality and save the people being recorded from these types of outbreaks. The camera will pose as a deterrence and the officer would be less likely to act irrationally because of that camera. When a case gets to the court system, the video that was recorded can be used to either help put a person in jail or help keep them out of jail. Body cameras do not seem so bad right?

Wrong. Some of the cons that I have personally heard from police officers whom I have done ride-alongs with are: you cannot talk to a person how you normally would, increase of trust issues between the community and the police, etc. How a police officer communicates with people can greatly differentiate on whom they are talking to. A police officer who encounters a black gentleman may have a different dialogue than he/she does with a white person. So what does this have to do with body cameras you ask? This means that an officer could get into trouble for not being "professional" when it came to talking with a certain person. How an officer communicates with a person is very important because that dialogue can be the difference between the making or breaking of a potential bond. This brings us to the trust issues. A community who has a local officer preforming community policing may be more hesitant to run up and talk to an officer because he/she feels like their every move is being watched. Not very many people like to be recorded. Hooray for body cameras.

All in all, like everything, there are pros and cons to the body cameras and it depends on who you ask if you wanted to know if they are good or bad. I personally believe that the pros outweigh the cons. My father is in law enforcement and I have many friends in law enforcement as well. I feel a lot better knowing that they have video evidence to help them if the time, God forbid, ever occurs. When I finally graduate I know I will not oppose to the wearing of the body camera.