When it comes to the question of whether to equip cops with body cameras as a way to prevent police interactions from becoming violent, writes Elizabeth Behrman in The Tampa Tribune, there's a range of opinion among local law enforcement.
While Tampa and Sarasota as well as Pasco counties are planning to incorporate them (Temple Terrace already does), Pinellas and Hillsborough sheriffs have said they're reluctant because of added costs and possible legal implications, among other things.
One potential hazard, noted Pinellas Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, is the fallout that could occur if an officer shuts off his or her camera before a heated interaction, and forgets to turn it back on; the officer could be accused of intentionally leaving the device off.
A team of scientists is performing a series of studies on the cameras' effectiveness for law enforcement agencies across the globe, trying to determine whether they have any impact on the number of police interactions that turn violent. A report on the initial city studied in 2012, Rialto, California, cautiously suggests the things are pretty good at preventing such incidents.
Researchers equipped officers with cameras on random shifts, and compared what took place over shifts that were filmed to those of control shifts that were not filmed, and counted instances of police use of force and complaints filed by members of the public against police.
Officers wearing the cameras were also required to disclose to anyone they interacted with that they were on film.
"We found that the likelihood of force being used in control conditions [was] roughly twice those in experimental conditions," researchers said in a summary of their results.
They also noted that complaints against officers went down by nearly 90 percent.
However, the team warned against jumping on the bandwagon, saying that the Rialto experiment is just one of several that will be conducted to determine body cameras' effectiveness.
In the wake of the death of unarmed African-American teenager Michael Brown and a grand jury's decision not to prosecute the officer who shot him, President Obama said he would make $75 million in federal money available for police body cameras. Weeks later, when a grand jury in New York failed to indict yet another cop, who was filmed putting a fatal chokehold on Eric Garner, another unarmed black male, some who were originally in favor of body cameras changed their minds.
But the difference between the Garner video and those collected by police in Rialto is that the former was taken by a bystander, whereas the officers in Rialto communicated that the interaction would be on film.
Similar studies to the one done in Rialto are being carried out in more than 30 cities in the U.S. and U.K. as well as Uruguay, and the researchers plan on announcing their full findings next summer.
