this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
544 points (99.3% liked)

News

29274 readers
3316 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Pfeffy@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Anyone can record in public at any time anyway. There's no reason to not have police body cams even if they aren't as effective as they should be. The police will always have body cameras if they want them, and they don't want them. If the police don't want to wear them, that tells me that they probably should even if we need to work on getting public access to the footage.

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net -1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

With body cameras, law enforcement agencies could expand their surveillance capacity, mitigate police brutality lawsuits, create “highly controllable evidence” against the largely poor, largely Black citizens of whom police often seek to capture footage, and quell social unrest by creating “comprehensive digital archives” of attendees at protests for social change"

Did you read this part? It pretty much contradicts everything you said.

[–] Pfeffy@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Yes, I read it but I don't see any evidence to think that their stance is correct. Just because somebody writes something doesn't mean it is correct or even accurate. There's no citation for anything except one study demonstrating that the footage is not used to convict police officers very often, which is the real problem.

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/research-body-worn-cameras-and-law-enforcement

"Across these evaluations, researchers looked at a range of outcomes, including use of force, citizen complaints, arrests, and assaults on officers. Four of the body-worn camera programs evaluated were found to have no, limited, or even negative effects."

https://cebcp.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/BWCpaperLumetal.pdf

"Prosecutors, however, rarely bring cases against the police (Skolnick & Fyfe, 1993), and it remains to be seen whether this will change much as a result of BWCs. In their study of the use of BWCs in the courts, Merola et al. (2016) found that nearly all (93.0%) responding prosecutors’ offices in jurisdictions that use BWCs use them primarily to prosecute citizens. Not surprisingly, 80.0% of responding prosecutors in Merola et al.’s survey support BWC use by the police, and 63.0% feel cameras will assist prosecutors more than defense attorneys"

I know that probably no amount of research and evidence will change your mind but those are pretty easy to find so I just leave it here for other people to see.

[–] Pfeffy@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I can't tell if you are agreeing with me or not. I just said the real problem is that it's not used to prosecute police officers enough. Are you disagreeing with me citing one study that said four programs potentially had some negative outcome?

If body cameras are good for police, why do police not want to wear them?

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Ok, this part may not be easy to understand. There were looking at use of force, citizen complaints, arrests and assaults on officers. The theory is that thanks to the use of body cams there will be less cases of use of force, less citizen complaints and less assaults on officers. The study says that in some of the evaluated body cam programs they found that those statistics didn't change or that they got more cases of use of force, citizen complaints and so on. Basically, it's not clear if the cameras help reduce police violence at all.

The second part (which you ignored) says that the cameras are actually used mostly to prosecute citizens, not police. Basically, thanks to the cameras police can easily prove offenses and convict people. Just like the first article said, police us body cams to surveil and prosecute people. Prosecutors like cameras because they make their job easier. You can deduct from this that police also likes cameras. Your claim that "police does not want to wear cameras" is baseless. There's probably some opposition at first but once they et used to them it's just another tool used to oppress people.

[–] Pfeffy@lemmy.world 1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Once again, if body cameras help police, why don't they want them?

If you'd like to talk about the scope and findings of any relevant study, I would be happy to read it. But I'm not really interested in what seems like illogical paraphrasing by journalists.

You know the police have had cameras in their cars and all over the place for decades, right? If they want to wear a body camera, they will always wear a body camera. So I'm not really sure what the argument here is except that we shouldn't make them?

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 1 points 6 hours ago

There's nothing illogical about it. Police uses body cameras because they do want to use them. Can you think of any law that was passed against police? There were huge protests demanding police reform and nothing happened. The only thing that activists "won" were the body cams. That's because police and prosecutors find them useful. Sure, police was skeptical at first because the cameras were marketed as tool for accountability but as soon as they realized that they are actually tool for surveillance the adoption moved fast. That's the whole point the articles I've linked make and you find so hard to understand.

The DEA will stop using them because Trump's administration is incompetent and makes a lot of stupid decisions. Other agencies could stop using them but for now decided against it.