Totally disagree with @beschizza, and agree with those who say that automated (or especially discretionary, by police stations with no oversight) release of interactions with the (presumed innocent) public turns a tool of police-monitoring into a tool of intimidation of the populace.
More body cameras — which are pointed at the public, not the officers — simply become more surveillance cameras, with the power to invade privacy, or chill free speech by identifying those at a protest, or to intimidate a dissenting bystander with the implicit threat of making an “altercation” a part of that person’s future Googleable history.
From an commentary here:
Even assuming that the primary role of police body cameras is, in the words of the A.C.L.U., to allow “public monitoring of the government instead of the other way around,” their deployment is fraught with contradictions.
First of all, citizens should know when their actions are being recorded, potentially for use against them. But police can easily transform the act of notification into one of intimidation, using the power of the badge and camera combined to chill legitimate dissent or exercise of a citizen’s right to refuse interrogation and search.
The chilling effect of surveillance makes a camera on the bodies of the police more dangerous than a camera in the hand of a citizen.
The database of videos cannot be secret if the program is meant to provide oversight, but transparency at meaningful levels could risk embarrassment of innocent citizens filmed in police encounters.
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Body camera videos should not be released automatically, and certainly not at the discretion of police departments, but should be released when the public make legitimate requests for them, or inquiries into events. They should also be randomly screened by independent ethics oversight boards.
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The public should always have the right to film the police.
