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Why body cameras and not gun cameras for police?

1 points by t3hSpork ↗ HN
Everyone talks about body cameras and all the problems associated with those like having to allow police to turn them off so that individual's privacy is maintained, etc.

If we instead mandated that police guns had cameras, we wouldn't have that problem. anytime a gun is withdrawn from it's holster it would start recording.

4 comments

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jeffmould
The problem with that is that often times claims of brutality occur without a gun ever being pulled. Plus by the time a gun is pulled the situation has already escalated. There is no context to what happened prior to the gun being pulled.
GFK_of_xmaspast
We can't even get cops to not break or disable or mask body cameras now, why do you thing gun cams would be any different?
douche
I don't think this would really work out all that well, just at a practical level. Firearms really want to be just as simple and reliable as they can be, which is the downside of most so-called smart gun designs. If it gets to the point that you have to pull the trigger, you don't want any doubt about whether you'll effectively have lead going down range.

The camera, storage, and power source would also need to be rugged enough to stand up to the stress and impact of repeated firings, and you'd have to keep that power source juiced up. I imagine you'd see a lot of dead batteries in gun-cams.

dragonwriter
> If we instead mandated that police guns had cameras, we wouldn't have that problem.

Police use of force isn't restricted to firearms, and even when it does, the contentious issues related to context and justification often include events that occur before the gun is drawn.