Body cameras represent a HUGE invasion of privacy of the people the officers encounter and of the officers themselves, who after all are going to visit the restroom and chat with their loved ones while wearing the camera. It is important to protect the public and to protect cops from false accusations that cops wear body cameras - it is, so far, the best proposed way to provide oversight on these people empowered to use lethal force where we live. But if we want to make that work, we need to protect the reasonable privacy of the cops and of the people they meet, while also preserving and making available when necessary the body-camera footage.
So, some simple ideas:
- The cameras should be on. Always. No switches, no covers.
- The footage must be preserved for a reasonable amount of time as a default, to be automatically extended if someone files a claim that they are interested in coverage of a particular area/officer/time period.
- To protect privacy, the footage should only be available at dedicated viewing stations and on request, not idly and over the internet. It should not normally be shared.
- It must somehow be made fairly straightforward to view the material upon submitting a reasonable request, with the presumption that requests are to be granted. On the other hand: it may help that viewing must be done in person, but this doesn’t abrogate the invasion of privacy involved. This is a tricky one! I can imagine a need to allow prior review and requests for omission/censorship/obscuring by representatives of the cops and of people caught on film, and all this is difficult to handle.
- There must be some provision to allow recordings deemed to be in the public interest to escape from the contained viewing environment and be more widely shared.
