Did Body Cameras Backfire?
Body cameras were supposed to fix a broken system. What happened?
In 2014, when Police Officer Darren Wilson fatally shot an unarmed black teenager named on a street in Ferguson, Missouri, police brutality rocketed to the center of the national discourse on race. Law enforcement needed more accountability, activists argued, and body cameras became the state’s preferred corrective. The Obama administration’s Department of Justice offered more than in grants for new cameras in 2015, the year after Brown’s death, and another in 2016. Then-candidate Hillary Clinton called for body cameras . In 2018, a New York judge mandated that all NYPD officers wear them, tactics. The future of policing, it seemed, had arrived.
