Smile! You’re On A Body Camera
Salt Lake City Police are now wearing miniature body cameras to record their interactions with the public. Several major metropolitan Police Departments, including Salt Lake City, have adopted this method of recording interactions between officers and citizens.
“We have a policy in place now where our officers wear body cameras,” says Salt City Police Chief, Chris Burbank. “All of our first responders now have those available, and they are to turn them on when they are interacting with the public.”
According to Burbank, the police force started looking at body cameras approximately three and a half years ago, and he believes that this is “the future of policing.”
The small cameras can be attached to a shirt collar, a cap, or even a pair of sunglasses; all of the videos are automatically uploaded to a central server. According to Burbank, this isn’t about trying to catch officers doing something wrong, but rather to create a record of the officer’s interactions with the public.
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[/one_fourth][three_fourth_last]Burbank adds “and then to be used in court, what better way to conduct an interview than to be able to say ‘here’s the first hand emotion that took place when I was talking to this person?’ As opposed to a very flat document on a piece of paper.”
One significant feature of the camera is its “pre-event video buffer,” which continuously records and holds the most recent 30 seconds of video when the camera is off. Meaning that the initial activity that prompts the officer to turn on the camera should be captured automatically.
On Thursday, January 8th, a police body camera captured a widely reported incident between a Salt Lake City Police Officer and a citizen, James Dudley Barker, wherein the body camera captured the initial interaction but was then damaged in the altercation, and the subsequent shooting was therefore not captured on camera.
But not everyone is convinced:
There is controversy and debate surrounding the issue of police body cameras. In the wake of violence between officers and citizens in Ferguson, New York, Dr. Steve Mann, founder of the MIT Wearable computing Lab, and Brian Wassom, an Attorney an officer for AugmentedReality.org, published an article in Forbes magazine, which asserted that body cameras for police officers are only half the solution to the problem of violence between police and citizens. “Placing cameras in the hands of cops alone creates an imbalance of information,” Wassom says, “and hence an imbalance of power – power that can too easily be misapplied or abused.”
The other major area of concern is cost. The Salt Lake city Police Department says that the cost for each individual unit is $3,368. At this point, $295 units have been purchased, for a total cost of $1 million.
