Police Officer Protection: From Body Armor to Body Cameras

The job of a police officer is not for everyone, as it is a demanding on and off duty. There is a lot of training you must endure in order to have the skill set to sacrifice your life every time you put on your uniform. There are only small group of people that have what it takes to be a police officer. But even after all your training, regardless the amount of years of experience you may have, making a split second decision when your life and potentially the life of others is on the line, is never an easy task.

Cell phones have imposed huge problems for the police making their job of serving the public even harder than it already is. Police officers have enough to worry about, but to have a citizen recording them for the hopes their video will sweep the internet is an unneeded pressure and in most cases, interferes with them trying to doing their job.

Police departments have now switched the camera, where field officers are now equipped with body cameras,  one that is able to protect both officers and citizens. This technology, for obvious reasons, is far better than the typical dash camera as the video was often compromised due to lack of mobility and picking up voices if sirens were on.

How Body Cameras Help Police officers:

​​How Body Cameras Help Citizens:

- Video evidence will ensure the officers actions are always acceptable
- Provides transparency
- Decreases the amount of use-force encounter

IT’S ALL IN THE STATS

Although some people would say that there is not enough evidence that definitively shows  the effectiveness of body cameras, there was a study done by Justin Ready and Jacob Young of Arizona State University.  They analyzed 3,698 field reports of 100 police officers, where half of the officers were assigned body camera as the other half were not. They gathered this data for a year dating from Nov. 1, 2012 to Oct. 1, 2013 and these were the results:

- Officers who did not wear body cameras conducted more “stop-and-frisks” and made more arrests than officers who wore the video cameras
- Officers who did not wear cameras performed 9.8% more stop-and-frisks and made 6.9% more arrests
- Officers assigned to wear cameras issued 23.1% more citations for ordinance violations than those who did not wear cameras.

People often forget is how hard it is to make the decisions police officers have to make. Check this video and watch normal people encounter situations police officers deal with on daily basis.

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www.policemag.com