Over the past several months police officers and police stations have been getting criticized for treating other races differently.
People have been so outraged they have started movements and protests such as Black Lives Matter. When these acts happen, it’s serious business.
We need to keep our community safe and one way we can solve this problem is police body cameras. These cameras are worn by police when they work in their community. This monitors them and makes sure of appropriate behavior when encountering the public.
Body cameras are a safe and helpful tool for police officers to add to their uniform.
“We can record a situation, a scenario in training, and then go back and look at it and show the student, the recruit, the officer what they did good, what they did bad, and [what they can] improve on.” said a Tampa Bay Police Department spokesperson.
Police stations can record situations between police officers and civilians to enforce good, acceptable behavior. With this ability police stations can see the way officers treat others and see what they did wrong or what they did right.
This is important because we need our community to be safe and know that they’re safe.
This can also be used as a helpful tool when it comes to training police in academies, it will give them a better understanding of what to do and how to act when they enter the field.
According to reporter Sandra Enos, President Obama and other leaders have supported the use of body cameras to track officer encounters with civilians, and a 2014 poll found that 79 percent of Republicans and 94 percent of Democrats favor the use of body cameras.
This tells us that body cameras are supported by the smartest and most professional people of our government. This means that many people in our country agree with the idea of body cams and the effect they will have in communities.
“I also think it’s a great opportunity for us to show the transparency of the organization. And I also believe that it’s going to show the level of professionalism of our officers out there in our community,” Ted Gillespie reminds us that as a community and as a nation we need to know how professional our officers are. We need to know if we can trust and are safe around our protectors. And if not we’re in trouble. These body cameras will enforce good behavior and professionalism from the officers when in contact with the public.
I asked middle schoolers what they think. In a recent survey of classmates, 92.9 percent of students do not think police departments should be defunded.
Over the past several months police officers have not been perfect, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get rid of them. Getting rid of the police will send the crime rate to the sky. Police officers bring balance within communities. We must monitor them when they are on the job.
Some people argue that police body cameras are an invasion of privacy. But this doesn’t matter. The benefits outweigh the concerns. People do and can film whatever they want when they’re in public so there’s no argument for invading privacy in public.
As important as it is that our community is safe getting rid of police officers would make it worse. Therefore body cameras are the solution to police brutality. Body cameras are safe and helpful; they watch over police officers when they’re on the job to make sure nothing out of hand happens. They also are approved by most of the U.S government and past presidents, meaning they must be something good to have such a high approval rate. Lastly they show how professional the police officers in our modern day society really are.