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Anyway, back to the body cameras: I concluded that any department or agency that issues cameras to all their officers or deputies
is going to have to deal with the consequences of the inevitable bad recording getting made public. Sooner or later, something
will get recorded that at the least is either embarrassing to the officer or the agency, or at the worst will show an officer violating
the hell out of somebody’s civil rights, which will make the department liable for monetary damages. For those reasons, a lot of
police departments wanted nothing to do with cameras on officers and avoided or resisted that advancement for as long as
possible.

My attitude, like most of my coworkers, was that the cameras were really helpful about 10 percent of the time, rather
inconvenient 89 percent of the time, and really, really unwanted about 1% of the time. A lot of citizens think cops wearing
cameras is a fabulous idea. But then readily admit no way in hell would they themselves want be in a job where everything
important they did was recorded.

The written policy for the use of cameras evolved (and grew in volume) over the years. Where it had been common practice to
turn off the cameras halfway through an event so the officers could discuss strategy with each other, we then had to keep them
recording non-stop so there wouldn’t be a suspicious or problematic break in the recording. This led to a new common phrase
among the officers, especially when a latecomer arrived on the scene: “Is your camera on or off?” which eventually got shortened
into the quickly understood “You on?” or “You off?” And even the firefighters who worked with us on the street learned to ask
“you on?” or “you off?” so they knew whether they could talk freely with us or not.
The cameras were great for DUI cases; that was undisputed. It’s one thing for an officer to try to explain to a jury how drunk
looking a suspect was; but when there is a video recording showing the drunk driver stumbling and fumbling and slurring their
words and acting like an ass..well that is pure gold. So the number of DUI cases we had that went to trial dropped to almost
zero. No defense attorney would ever, ever, want a jury to see their clients drunk like that. Before the cameras, it was not
uncommon for an officer to have to go to court and explain to a jury EXACTLY how the field sobriety tests were administered;
officers would have to reenact their part in court, with the jurors, judge, prosecutor and defense lawyers watching. And of course
the defense attorneys were looking for anything that deviated from anything written in the report, so they could try to catch the
officer in a discrepancy that might be suggestive of malice. Some officers would have to spend an hour or two on the stand,
answering questions. The video recordings changed all that and made prosecuting drunk drivers a lot easier.
The cameras made us restrain ourselves more. Obviously we had to swear less at bad guys, and be more judicious when
administering force to gain compliance. Which is another difference between cops in the old days – before I got into policing –
and what the profession evolved into. If I could generalize, which is generally dangerous and wanton to do but I’ll do it anyway,
I’ll suggest that cops back in the 20th century were generally less patient and a bit more aggressive. An uncooperative drunk
would be much more likely to get thumped on for failing to obey a simple command, for example. Or when a cop pulled over a
maybe drunk driver and found out it was an off duty firefighter or cop from another agency, that officer would be more inclined
to quietly take that driver out of their car and give them a ride home with no tickets or paperwork or reports. But now…it’s all
on camera and that gives officers much less discretion about how much or how little enforcement action (or force) is going to
be inflicted, for better or for worse.

Another aspect of recording police scenes was that for better or worse,
conversations were recorded verbatim. Now before the video cameras were
issued, I could kind of paraphrase what suspects said, in my police reports. Soon
after I got my camera though, I realized that I would have to get the order of
events perfect, so my reports matched the videos. Meaning, first the guy said
that, and THEN he said that other thing, and then it was after that other part
that he then said the other statement. Yes, I know you all think this is a great
and perfect system. but the reality is, it takes a LOT of time to go back and watch
and re-watch videos to transcribe them exactly. In that respect, the cameras
made a lot more work for us.

Also it’s a sure thing that each camera user will, at least once, forget to turn off their camera and record things afterward that
could be at best completely irrelevant and at worse quite embarrassing. Like talking on the phone to somebody else, or going to
the bathroom..

And like I said, for any law enforcement agency that starts using body cams, if you get enough cops recording enough things, at
some point somebody will absolutely record something on video that will be Not Good for the General Public to See.

And of course the officers could not delete their videos in part or in whole. No way. Literally impossible. I could keep rambling
on and on about uniform bodycams but I’ll spare you all and stop now.