For many communities today, distrust reigns between minorities and the local gendarmes.
We have been focused on outcries from Staten Island, N.Y., from Cincinnati, Ohio; from North Charleston, S.C.; and from Baltimore, Md., among other places, where there have been allegations of uniformed personnel overstepping their bounds.
In all these cases, videos – taken by civilian bystanders and by law enforcement – have been available to assist prosecutors in their investigations of the incidents leading to fatalities.
While those visual recordings have not always led to conclusive findings, they have at least put a face on the anxieties and anger felt by minorities about their issues of mistreatment in those communities.
Like many other states, New York City has initiated a pilot program in equipping designated police precincts in each borough with body cameras to be used with certain privacy restrictions.
And the N.J. Attorney General’s Office has followed suit, as noted by the July 29 issue of The Star Ledger, making available $4 million to outfit State Police and thousands of municipal police with the cameras and issuing rules on how and when they are to be deployed. Each body cam is priced at $500 and municipal police departments can apply for grants to acquire them.
As reported by The Ledger, the cameras must be activated when an officer is conducting “frisks, searches, brief detentions, assisting motorists, making arrests, transporting people under arrest and responding to calls.”
Officers are directed to notify people they are being recorded.
Not everybody is happy with the new program.
Video tapes recorded by the body cams will not be subject to OPRA requests under the rules set down by the AG and that is something that disturbs the ACLU.
And the N.J. State Troopers union has asserted that implementation of the new technology should have been a subject for negotiations. The union says the money allocated for the cameras could have been better spent hiring more troopers.
It will be interesting to see how many – if any – of the local police departments in The Observer’s coverage area end up with these new technological aides.
We’ve become accustomed to seeing police departments continuing to come up with new gadgets. For example, most departments have equipped patrol cars with onboard computers to assist officers in tracing stolen cars or writing e-tickets for motor vehicle infractions. Some communities have installed closed-circuit security cameras atop utility poles to help monitor criminal activity.
And now, those body cams. The device – worn on the officer’s uniform – appears to be light enough to the extent they won’t be a burden to the officer in the appropriate performance of his/her duty.
I say we should expand the use of body cams to include other professions. I call on the President to initiate a body cam program for the members of Congress.
Yes, why not body cams as a way of fortifying the integrity of the nation’s lawmakers? Under rules propounded by the U.S. Attorney General, all members of the House and Senate shall be compelled to turn on the devices when, for example, they are chatting up a contractor, campaign donor, foreign emissary, etc.
Once that system is in place, it can easily be expanded to cover all levels of government.
Only problem, of course, is getting Congress to appropriate the money for the cams. And, since they can’t agree on anything anyway, I suppose this idea is just an exercise in futility.
