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I am a 68 year old retired police officer and these body cameras will change the policing forever. I wait for the day that all officers will have the change to be judged fairly with events recorded.

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this is an example of the body cameras use applied to police using excessive force.

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Body camera footage from the killing of Nicolas Sanchez by Roy police

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Roy police have released body camera footage that shows officers shooting and killing Nicholas Sanchez.

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New York Times is just as lazy as Fox News.

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New York Times is just as lazy as Fox News.

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They used the same article as Fox and also failed to mention the amount of force used.

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Chief Peter Newsham of the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington said the results were surprising. "I thought it would have a difference on police and civilian behavior," he said. "Particularly for officers - and this is the exception - who might be more inclined to misbehave."

But Chief Newsham said the cameras had a number of benefits that could not be easily measured: more accurate investigations, better training and at least one case in which the footage exonerated an officer accused of shooting an unarmed suspect (who was indeed armed). Most important, he said, they bolstered the trust of the community.

"You have to be legitimate and trusted," he said. "You can't underestimate the value these cameras bring to that."

Behavior modification has never been the sole argument for body cameras. Their most important function may be to create an independent record of police shootings and other encounters with the public. But in some of those areas, too, videos have proved ambiguous: In the courtroom, for example, they have repeatedly failed to persuade juries.

Though body cameras are now in greater use, their purpose is often left undefined, raising thorny questions about surveillance, privacy and other issues. "Police departments have been rushing to body cameras without sufficiently deciding what the goal is," said Seth Stoughton, a former officer and a law professor at the University of South Carolina, who has studied the devices extensively. "When no one is sure what it is supposed to do, no one knows if it is working."

In the Washington study, which was conducted by David Yokum at the Lab @ DC, a team of scientists embedded in local government, and Anita Ravishankar of the Metropolitan Police Department, more than 1,000 police officers were randomly assigned cameras, and another 1,000 were not.

Each officer was tracked for seven months, with the researchers recording use-of-force incidents, civilian complaints, charging decisions by prosecutors, and other outcomes to see if the cameras changed behavior. On every metric, the effects were too small to be statistically significant.

"The results call into question whether police departments should even be adopting body-worn cameras, especially given their high cost," said Harlan Yu, from Upturn, a Washington nonprofit consulting company that studies how technology affects social issues. It was not directly involved in the research.

Mr. Yu said the cameras raised significant privacy issues, particularly in low-income, minority neighborhoods, and that vendors were beginning to experiment with incorporating facial recognition software. "As an evidentiary tool, they will likely get stronger over time," he said. "But the original purpose of cameras - transparency and accountability - could ultimately get swept under the rug."

Criminologists said there were several possible explanations for the cameras' apparent lack of impact. The Metropolitan Police Department has a reputation for being better-than-average in terms of both training and supervision, so whether officers wear cameras or not may have made little difference in their behavior.

The department has already had to confront excessive-force problems. After a Washington Post series in 1998 revealed that the city's officers had shot and killed more people per resident in the 1990s than any other police force in a large American city, the Department of Justice entered into a memorandum of agreement with the city to reform its policing.

"We went through a transformation with regard to use of force when Justice came in here," Chief Newsham said.

Under this theory, cities that have not had such reviews and calls for accountability may find that cameras have a greater effect.

Criminologists also suggested that the effect of the body cameras diminished over time, and that officers began to behave as they had before they started to wear the devices. Although if that were true the researchers would have found a greater gulf between those with and without cameras at the beginning of the study, which they did not. Or, the effects of the cameras may have spilled over to officers who did not wear them, just because they knew their colleagues did.

"This area of police practice is under-researched, so we really don't know a lot," said David A. Harris, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law who studies police accountability. "In this police department, cameras had a certain effect, but you cannot extend that to other police departments."

Until now, the most commonly cited study on police body cameras had suggested that they did indeed have a calming effect. That experiment took place in 2012, in Rialto, Calif., where officers were randomly assigned cameras based on their shifts. Over a period of one year, shifts that included cameras yielded half as many use-of-force incidents (including the use of a police baton, Taser or gun) as shifts without cameras did. The number of complaints filed by civilians against officers also declined - by 90 percent compared with the previous year.

The Rialto study had a big impact in policing. Axon (formerly known as Taser International) has sold more than 300,000 police cameras worldwide and cites the Rialto study on its website. A federal judge also cited the study in 2013 when she ordered the New York City Police Department to conduct a yearlong pilot program using body cameras. (The department has outfitted 927 officers with cameras and will compare their performance with officers without; results are due out this spring.)

But the Rialto experiment included just 54 officers, compared with over 2,000 in Washington.

In another new study that will be published in the November issue of the journal Policing, researchers led by Michael White of Arizona State University interviewed 249 people who had recent encounters with officers wearing cameras. Those who were aware of the cameras perceived the encounters as more "just" than those who were not.

Monica Hopkins-Maxwell, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia, said cameras were "not a panacea" and that only more emphasis on initiatives like community policing, data collection and better training would help build good will.

"I don't think body cameras in any way, shape or form by themselves increase trust," she said. "The way you increase trust is through relationships and how communities are treated by police officers."

Professor Harris, of the University of Pittsburgh, said that the impact of body cameras will remain a disappointment to many people given the hype surrounding them once video footage of police behavior - good and bad - went viral on the internet.

"We were sold on the idea that these cameras were going to bring a brand-new accountability to policing, and that isn't entirely what has happened," he said.

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police brutality  misconduct and shootings

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Body Cameras Have Little Effect on Police Behavior, Study Says

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Chief Peter Newsham of the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington said the results were surprising. "I thought it would have a difference on police and civilian behavior," he said. "Particularly for officers - and this is the exception - who might be more inclined to misbehave."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Chief Peter Newsham of the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington said the results were surprising. "I thought it would have a difference on police and civilian behavior," he said. "Particularly for officers - and this is the exception - who might be more inclined to misbehave."

But Chief Newsham said the cameras had a number of benefits that could not be easily measured: more accurate investigations, better training and at least one case in which the footage exonerated an officer accused of shooting an unarmed suspect (who was indeed armed). Most important, he said, they bolstered the trust of the community.

"You have to be legitimate and trusted," he said. "You can't underestimate the value these cameras bring to that."

Behavior modification has never been the sole argument for body cameras. Their most important function may be to create an independent record of police shootings and other encounters with the public. But in some of those areas, too, videos have proved ambiguous: In the courtroom, for example, they have repeatedly failed to persuade juries.

Though body cameras are now in greater use, their purpose is often left undefined, raising thorny questions about surveillance, privacy and other issues. "Police departments have been rushing to body cameras without sufficiently deciding what the goal is," said Seth Stoughton, a former officer and a law professor at the University of South Carolina, who has studied the devices extensively. "When no one is sure what it is supposed to do, no one knows if it is working."

In the Washington study, which was conducted by David Yokum at the Lab @ DC, a team of scientists embedded in local government, and Anita Ravishankar of the Metropolitan Police Department, more than 1,000 police officers were randomly assigned cameras, and another 1,000 were not.

Each officer was tracked for seven months, with the researchers recording use-of-force incidents, civilian complaints, charging decisions by prosecutors, and other outcomes to see if the cameras changed behavior. On every metric, the effects were too small to be statistically significant.

"The results call into question whether police departments should even be adopting body-worn cameras, especially given their high cost," said Harlan Yu, from Upturn, a Washington nonprofit consulting company that studies how technology affects social issues. It was not directly involved in the research.

Mr. Yu said the cameras raised significant privacy issues, particularly in low-income, minority neighborhoods, and that vendors were beginning to experiment with incorporating facial recognition software. "As an evidentiary tool, they will likely get stronger over time," he said. "But the original purpose of cameras - transparency and accountability - could ultimately get swept under the rug."

Criminologists said there were several possible explanations for the cameras' apparent lack of impact. The Metropolitan Police Department has a reputation for being better-than-average in terms of both training and supervision, so whether officers wear cameras or not may have made little difference in their behavior.

The department has already had to confront excessive-force problems. After a Washington Post series in 1998 revealed that the city's officers had shot and killed more people per resident in the 1990s than any other police force in a large American city, the Department of Justice entered into a memorandum of agreement with the city to reform its policing.

"We went through a transformation with regard to use of force when Justice came in here," Chief Newsham said.

Under this theory, cities that have not had such reviews and calls for accountability may find that cameras have a greater effect.

Criminologists also suggested that the effect of the body cameras diminished over time, and that officers began to behave as they had before they started to wear the devices. Although if that were true the researchers would have found a greater gulf between those with and without cameras at the beginning of the study, which they did not. Or, the effects of the cameras may have spilled over to officers who did not wear them, just because they knew their colleagues did.

"This area of police practice is under-researched, so we really don't know a lot," said David A. Harris, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law who studies police accountability. "In this police department, cameras had a certain effect, but you cannot extend that to other police departments."

Until now, the most commonly cited study on police body cameras had suggested that they did indeed have a calming effect. That experiment took place in 2012, in Rialto, Calif., where officers were randomly assigned cameras based on their shifts. Over a period of one year, shifts that included cameras yielded half as many use-of-force incidents (including the use of a police baton, Taser or gun) as shifts without cameras did. The number of complaints filed by civilians against officers also declined - by 90 percent compared with the previous year.

The Rialto study had a big impact in policing. Axon (formerly known as Taser International) has sold more than 300,000 police cameras worldwide and cites the Rialto study on its website. A federal judge also cited the study in 2013 when she ordered the New York City Police Department to conduct a yearlong pilot program using body cameras. (The department has outfitted 927 officers with cameras and will compare their performance with officers without; results are due out this spring.)

But the Rialto experiment included just 54 officers, compared with over 2,000 in Washington.

In another new study that will be published in the November issue of the journal Policing, researchers led by Michael White of Arizona State University interviewed 249 people who had recent encounters with officers wearing cameras. Those who were aware of the cameras perceived the encounters as more "just" than those who were not.

Monica Hopkins-Maxwell, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia, said cameras were "not a panacea" and that only more emphasis on initiatives like community policing, data collection and better training would help build good will.

"I don't think body cameras in any way, shape or form by themselves increase trust," she said. "The way you increase trust is through relationships and how communities are treated by police officers."

Professor Harris, of the University of Pittsburgh, said that the impact of body cameras will remain a disappointment to many people given the hype surrounding them once video footage of police behavior - good and bad - went viral on the internet.

"We were sold on the idea that these cameras were going to bring a brand-new accountability to policing, and that isn't entirely what has happened," he said.

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police brutality  misconduct and shootings

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Body Cameras Have Little Effect on Police Behavior, Study Says

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Chief Peter Newsham of the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington said the results were surprising. "I thought it would have a difference on police and civilian behavior," he said. "Particularly for officers - and this is the exception - who might be more inclined to misbehave."

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Not once did Fox News mention the amount of force used, body cams don't stop police from using force it stops them from abusing the force they have to not mention the amount of force used does not show all facts.

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Prompted in part by high-profile complaints about police use of force, the U.S. government in recent years has allocated tens of millions of taxpayer dollars for body cameras for state and local police departments - and those states and municipalities have invested millions of their own dollars as well.

But a study released Friday reveals that body cameras have little to no effect on police behavior. Officers wearing the devices act similarly to those who don't, the study concludes.

And there is no significant difference in citizen complaints about camera-wearing officers versus those without cameras, the study says.

"Evidence of their effectiveness is limited," researchers David Yokum, Anita Ravishankar and Alexander Coppock conclude about the cameras in their report, titled, "Evaluating the Effects of Police Body-Worn Cameras."

The study tracked more than 2,000 Washington, D.C., police officers - half with cameras, half without - for 18 months. The research team then tallied their use-of-force situations, civilian complaints against them, etc., and examined whether cameras affected the results.

But every measure showed the differences to be insignificant.

"The results call into question whether police departments should even be adopting body-worn cameras, especially given their high cost," Harlan Yu, a consultant with Upturn, a Washington nonprofit that examines technology's effect on society, told the New York Times. Yu's group was not involved in the study, the Times says.

"The results call into question whether police departments should even be adopting body-worn cameras, especially given their high cost."
- Harlan Yu, consultant with Upturn, a nonprofit that examines technology's effect on society

Police departments investing in body cameras "should not expect dramatic reductions in the use-of-force complaints, or other large-scale shifts in police behavior solely from the deployment of this technology," study director Yokum, of The Lab @DC, told the Washington Post.

"So if you are a police department thinking that this technology on its own is going to be something to cause big shifts on those two dynamics, this would be a cause to recalibrate your expectations," Yokum said.

Washington, D.C., police Chief Peter Newsham told the Times he was surprised by the results because he was expecting the use of cameras to at least have an impact on those officers "who might be more inclined to misbehave."

If the cameras have any value at all, the chief told the Post, it's likely to be in helping clarify details of controversial cases - such as whether a suspect is armed or not when officers arrive at a crime scene.

Sgt. Matthew Mahl, chairman of the D.C. police labor union, told the Post that he too expected the study's conclusions to be different.

"I honestly thought that complaints would have come down," Mahl told the newspaper. "We're spending all this money to realize that everything is the same. Maybe that's a good thing, that we've been doing things right from the beginning."

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Prompted in part by high-profile complaints about police use of force, the U.S. government in recent years has allocated tens of millions of taxpayer dollars for body cameras for state and local police departments - and those states and municipalities have invested millions of their own dollars as well.

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Hillary Clinton will be a guest in our event.

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Attend december 31st 2017 Blue lives matter. Get our police body cams, protect everyone.   Get together and discuss with us! Our district in this city of ours needs to have a discussion, when do we focus on getting body cams for our police? We need people who are willing to debate and support u...

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By Brianna Keilar and Dan Merica, CNNUpdated 2:49 PM ET, Wed April 29, 2015

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By Brianna Keilar and Dan Merica, CNNUpdated 2:49 PM ET, Wed April 29, 2015

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citation for the article

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Hillary Clinton would be a good candidate.

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Hillary Clinton would be a good candidate.

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Hillary Clinton supports this movement.

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Even Hillary Clinton wanted America to address the issue and have police wear body cams.

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"As a citizen, a human being, my heart breaks for these young men and their families," Clinton said, listing a number of incidents in the last year that have found black men killed at the hands of law enforcement. "We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America."

She continued: "We have allowed our criminal justice system to get out of balance and these recent tragedies should galvanize us to come together as a nation to find out balance against."

Clinton's comments -- which came at the David N. Dinkins Leadership and Public Policy Forum at Columbia University - are the first time the presidential candidate reacted publicly and in person ( she reacted on Twitter on Monday) to the death of Freddie Gray and the Baltimore riots that rocked the city earlier this week.

Clinton followed up her comments with some of her first policy proposals since launching her campaign two weeks ago, reforms she said that need to be felt "on our streets, in our courthouses, in our jails and prisons, in communities too long neglected."

Clinton linked the need for reforms to income inequality issue, too, an issue her campaign has said she will champion on the trail. "We also have to be honest about gaps that exists across out country, the inequality that stalks our streets," she said, arguing that good policing will only do so much if issues like unemployment and poverty are not also addressed.

The presidential candidate called for federal funds being spent to "bolster best practices" not "to buy weapons of war that have no place on our streets." Her suggestion come after many on the left and right have questioned the militarization of law enforcement during protests in Ferguson, Missouri last year.

Clinton's stance on criminal justice has changed with the times. As first lady, she lobbied for her husband's 1994 crime bill, parts of which are now viewed as counterproductive to reducing crime.

The former secretary of state also called for ending policies of mass incarcerations, arguing that a "missing husbands, missing fathers, missing brothers" level "profound consequences" on families.

"Keeping them behind bars does little to reduce crimes but it does a lot to tear apart families and communities," Clinton said of low-level offenders. "We need to start understanding how important it is to care for every single child as though that child was our own. "

She added: "It is time to change our approach. It is time to end the era of mass incarceration. We need a true national debate about how to reduce our prison population while keeping our communities safe."

Clinton touted judicial reform as a bipartisan issue, name-checking Republicans like Sen. Mike Lee and Sen. Rand Paul, a 2016 presidential candidate.

"We should make sure that every police department in the country has body cameras to record interaction between offices on patrol and suspects, that will improve transparency and accountability it will help protect good people on both sides of the lens," Clinton said, calling for body cameras to be the "norm everywhere."

Among Clinton's other prescriptions: probation reform, bolstering treatment for mental health and drug addiction and looking at alternative sentences for lesser offenses, specifically those committed by young people.

"And please, please, lets us put mental health back on the top of our national agenda," Clinton said. "Our prisons and our jails are now our mental health institutions."

At a Manhattan fundraiser on Tuesday, Clinton said the events in Baltimore were "heartbearking. ... The tragic death of another young African-American man. The injuries to police officers. The burning of peoples' homes and small businesses. We have to restore order and security. But then we have to take a hard look as to what we need to do to reform our system."

An evolution on criminal justice

The measure significantly built up police forces across the country, funded prisons to increase capacity and put in place tougher sentences, including for some young offenders.

In 2007 in Iowa, during Clinton's first run for president, she acknowledged an "unacceptable increase in incarceration across the board," and has since joined the bipartisan ranks of those who support changes to mandatory minimum prison terms for certain crimes, an effort heralded by President Barack Obama in his second term.

And, more recently, Clinton has questioned decriminalizing certain drugs, a policy prescription that many advocates have said would alleviate prison crowding in the United States.

Just Monday, in a foreword to a compilation of criminal justice reform prescriptions published by the Brennan Center for Justice, President Bill Clinton admitted the effects of the law, which he championed as he was shifting to the right in the face of a Republican-led congress and at a time that being tough on crime was popular.

"Our nation has too many people in prison and for too long - we have overshot the mark," Clinton writes, but also defended much of the effort. "So many of these laws worked well, especially those that put more police on the streets."

Clinton's policy proposals on Wednesday mirror her passage in the book.

The book, "Solutions: America's Leaders Speak Out on Criminal Justice," includes a chapter by Clinton. Proving what a crowded political space the issue is, it's sandwiched in between New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's proposals, the former a potential Republican presidential candidate and the other already in the race.

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hillary clinton calls for mandatory police body cameras - cnnpolitics

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Hillary Clinton calls for mandatory police body cameras - CNNPolitics

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"As a citizen, a human being, my heart breaks for these young men and their families," Clinton said, listing a number of incidents in the last year that have found black men killed at the hands of law enforcement. "We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America."

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Police officers in the United States of America need to have body Cameras

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The police officers across our entire nation of ours must have cameras to help them out when they need it and help out the community when they need it. For the officers that are discriminated by communities because of lies body cameras can help tell the truth, help the police who had to make a hard decision and are now ridiculed by the people. for the people who do wrong with the power they are given, those officers that do wrong to the people they swore to protect, they will be tried for their crimes and the camera will help the people have justice.