But today, the implementation of body cameras hasn’t resulted in the noticeable positive shift we would have expected. In a statement announcing the rolling out of this program, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said that body cameras held “tremendous promise for enhancing transparency, promoting accountability, and advancing public safety.” If the Obama administration’s embrace of body cameras seemed like a top-down, overly optimistic policy move, it wasn’t. In 2015, under Republican governor Nikki Haley, South Carolina became the first state to require the use of body cameras. As Levinson-Waldman says, “some of these problems aren’t the fault of the officer but are just the way body cameras function. Body cameras have shown that, as they stand, they alone are not enough to fix policing issues.

Source: Huffington Post November 28, 2017 21:45 UTC