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Notes -
RE: Body Cams
A couple articles does not a vibe-shift make. At the height of BLM Dems were more likely to support body cams than Reps (92 to 84%), but support was about as close to unanimous as any topic gets. I couldn't find any data newer than 2015 but it would take a massive vibe shift to put a dent in 92% support. Given the Dems are pushing for cameras, that seems unlikely.
Also, your ProPublica link isn't against body cameras. It's accusing the police of acting improperly with the footage they have.
The only legitimate argument one can make against body cameras, IMO, is that judges become way too reliant on them. I have seen this shift over the past few years where many judges seem to have a crippling addiction to body/dash cameras. In practice, this makes cases that should take minutes, often take hours.
By way of example, I'd offer a pretty standard DUI. Misdemeanor, guy is clearly drunk, refuses the breath test at the station.
Pre Body Cam a simplified version of the trial goes like this: 1) Did you respond to an accident? Yes. For a man who had hit a pole with his car. 2) I got to
and there was a guy in a slumped over in the drivers seat with his car smashed into a pole. 3) What happened next? I woke him up and tried to administer field sobriety tests but he kept falling down and couldnt do them. So I arrested him. 4) Then at the station? He refused the breath test.Post body cam: The same thing, but we watch 2 hours of field sobriety tests attempting to be be performed, and 30 minutes of dragging a drunk guy to the breath test station and refusing.
One of the main effects of body cameras is for defense to use discriminatory policing angle. Lawyers can sift through months of bodycam footage of any given policeman and prove that he let some other offender on the same charge thus proving racial profiling etc.
I think this is one of the more insidious aspects that bodycams have. In a sense they turn policemen into modern robocops, they know that they are constantly surveilled and that the smallest mistake can be used against them. So their policing may turn into a procedural nightmare - you are not talking to a police officer, you are talking to a Moloch that now controls policeman's actions. You rob policemen of their agency, they will no longer rely on their intuition, experience or hunches. They will be less likely to utilize their judgment when it comes to leniency or more strict policing if needed.
I think it completely changes the meaning of many laws, which were designed on assumption that some things will be fuzzy and that they will rely on personal judgement. It is similar effect to may other laws. Your anti-jaywalking or littering or loud noise laws may be fine if they require some action on part of offended party and randomness of police officers being around. The same laws will look differently in some future city full of cameras and drones with capacity to be personally assigned to every citizen on the streets.
I have seen this attempted fewer than a handful of times, and never seen it work. Even in my very blue jurisdiction, judges are not going to fall for a compilation video of an officer arresting black men and call the cop a racist on the record. The only people who try it are very new defense attorneys (often public defenders) that are pie in the sky idealists that haven't had a chance to understand they are torpedoing their reputation and credibility by trying it.
Thats not to say there aren't bad cops, a few years ago a state trooper was outed as faking hundreds of DUIs. He was discovered by, not some enterprising young defense attorney, but instead by internal investigations who were investigating him for his suspicious amounts of overtime.
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It should be noted that bodycam footage, like court hearings, are generally not uploaded to social media by the police themselves. They are public records which many jurisdictions make publicly available on a government website, and then YouTubers grab the video and make content out of it.
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