by Robert M. Traxler

Let’s talk about police body cameras. Our friends who do not care for the police (mostly folks on the far-left side of the argument but not exclusively), tell us the police are jack-booted thugs. They will maintain that the police are Fascists who are racist, sexists, homophobic and generally tools of the capitalist pigs or an unjust government.

The anti-law enforcement people maintained that body cameras would prove that law enforcement sits around eating doughnuts and thinking of ways to oppress the proletariat, especially minorities. The road to hell for the anti-most everything American crowd is that the cameras show the police doing vastly more good deeds than evil. Disdain blinds and distorts perception, as does stereotyping people by the group.

My undergraduate degree is in criminal justice, a subject I taught at the collegiate level; I spent most of my time in the U.S. Army with the Criminal Investigation Command (CID) in the United States and overseas. I will freely admit to a love for our criminal justice system and the good folks who make it work.

The anti-police crowd told us in the 1970s to 1990s that all we needed to do to fix the problem of an unjust police force was to have more minority police officers. Law enforcement recruited minorities; problem solved? Hardly, the anti-folks just say the minority police officers are blue, not black or brown, women or gay. This irrational stance must be taken to continue an incorrect stereotype.  

Back to the police body cameras championed by the anti-law enforcement people. New applications, mostly funded by Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA, allow for the police body camera to have instant facial recognition, fingerprint recognition and vehicle recognition capabilities. This can unlock new applications for public safety uses.

In the case of a wanted felon, the image can be sent from the officer’s body-worn camera system; the computer “learns” what the person or their vehicle looks like and deploys the image to the devices of other officers. Identification of wanted felons using facial recognition software can be made instantly even if they are somewhat disguised; not what the anti-law enforcement crowd had in mind when demanding body cameras.

Body cameras are being used every day to exonerate unjustly charged law enforcement officers, a use surely not contemplated by the anti-cop crowd. The body camera footage that proves a police officer did something unlawful are all over the media, but the vastly larger number, the ones that exonerate the police, are not news, so they are infrequently shown.

The disdain for law enforcement is not helped by President Donald Trump’s well-known affection for the police. The far left and right who are disdainful of the President will transfer that anger to those good folks in the criminal justice system.

Quite frankly I was puzzled that the anti-cop folks mostly on the left called for the vastly expanded use of technology that makes their activities that are unlawful more difficult. The far left and right tend to advocate violence to a greater degree than 95% of our nation’s citizens.

In a pure law enforcement view, a body camera is great; however, it is a system that reduces our civil liberties and expands government’s ability to track the innocent as well as the guilty. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and this is a great example; those who hate the police have empowered the police with a new technology, a very powerful one, one they never intended.

Beware of what you wish for, you may get it. Thinking a concept through is always the best course of action.