I am. I have mixed feelings on body cams, mostly from my experience with car cameras. While I certainly do think they are good for the officer and greater society, Washington state's public disclosure laws will make it nearly impossible for most agencies to do. Right now, without any cause or even expense in some areas, joe blow can walk into a police department and request everything ever documented ever. While there can be a court injunction to limit the scope requested, with a little bit of a reason as to why they want everything ever, joe blow will get their request fulfilled. With video recordings it's especially tough to redact faces, names and certain dialogue because it's all completely manual. So to request large swaths of video can cripple a department for years. So there's very few agencies willing to collect those records only to have them be used to essentially cost the department huge chunks of their already thin budget. Bottom line is that the law needs to be changed to be more reasonable first for it to be viable.

Second: I used to have a wicked in car camera. It was top of the line and recorded some great video. The support staff was knowledgeable and prompt for any problems or questions. But even despite all of this, the system was down about 50% of the time for seemingly no reason at all. Some days the hard drive failed, some days windows would crash, sometimes their software would corrupt. It was always something. When 8/10 car cameras were down daily, it just became inexcusable. Yet despite all my best efforts to keep mine running, if it crashed and something wasn't on video, if someone requested it and it wasn't there, I'd get a talking to about my not recording the incident... Even after I would explain that the system was broken- it always came down to the officers fault which was extremely frustrating. Eventually the costs of constantly repairing these broken systems became too much, so they scrapped most of them.

And finally a good example: I once watched a guy blow right past a school bus that was unloading children. It was all caught on camera and was an easy choice to write him a ticket because he flat out didn't care. He comes in to fight the ticket and demands the video. After about $300 in time and materials to get this guy his video the judge grants the guy a deferral. The city was then in the hole for all of the time and effort for something that the video should have made a no brainier. So the video was worse than useless.

As far as body cameras go, I want one. I think it would be a great tool to have if implemented correctly. My only real beef with it is that if I am asked to record video when on a call, I want to record the entire call. In Washington state police shouldn't (unless exigency is present) record video in someone's house. It's a violation of their rights and privacy supposedly but I think the courts are still testing the limits. About 20% of my calls are spent in someone's house. If you are being told that no one trusts you unless there's video proof of what you did, why would you create a known exception that would allow the most obvious chance for sue happy opportunists to make something up? For as many domestic calls I go to, I wouldn't have the camera on all that often because it usually takes place in someone's home. That seems ridiculous to me.

I also can't wait for cameras to become the norm and to have all of our local and national celebrities, CEO's and politicians recorded at their worst. So if you basically are ever arrested for anything, you get plastered all over YouTube after a public disclosure request for everyone to enjoy. I don't think many people understand how uncomfortable they will be when they realize how vulnerable their entire life is when the police show up once body cameras are normal. But hey, more cameras seemed like a good idea when it wasn't them being recorded.

While I mostly covered the negatives, I feel that most of the positives for body cameras are covered elsewhere. I truly enjoy this experiment that is law enforcement and think that the further integration of technology is exciting. I look forward to someday have a body cam, but hope that most of the issues are resolved by then.

I hope this helps in any way.. Sorry for the long tangents!