As to the body cams you get what you pay for, and it comes with the normal ups and downs and hiccups.
A local department got the cheapest cameras they could find. They had enough battery power/memory to run for about 4 hours. The department had 12 hour shifts. It had confusing interface involving a single button and to understand what the camera was telling you you had to interpret a series of flashing lights (meaning if you were working on night shift you always had a light blinking on your chest, which is not ideal). The administration was good enough to mandate in policy that cameras needed to be on during any and all contact with the public, but not mandate what to do in the event your camera runs out of battery or memory. Further complicating matters the single, small button that was used to turn the camera on, off, start recording and stop recording was difficult to manipulate with speed and under stress, and to make sure it was recording you had to take your eyes off whatever it was you were recording (traffic stop, domestic call ect..) and interpret the series of flashing lights. The problem with that is almost all the incidents you really want recorded happen so quickly most of the time the poor bastards couldn't turn the camera on, or at least devote the attention it would take to make sure the flailing, mid run button push they executed had the desired result. The end result was a drop in productivity.
1: If you do things the right way you don't mind a camera
2: yeah it looks bad if your camera ain't on but that doesn't necessarily mean you did anything wrong.
3: On a personal note, it is super weird watching yourself post incident
592 Replies
134812 Views