It’s coming and maybe faster than you think. There is nothing you can do to stop it. Depending on your point of view, on-officer or body-worn video (BWV) that integrates into daily operations and the courts may be a great or a not-so-great next big step for law enforcement.

Video recordings of law enforcement actions have been a peripheral but key influence for nearly a half century in one form or another. Video images of police tactics during civil rights protests in the 1960s certainly had profound social and legal impacts. George Holliday’s 1991 video capturing the Rodney King beating started a chain of events that reverberate even today. Cops, which first aired in 1989, is one of the longest running television shows in America, featuring officers in more than 140 different cities in the United States and in Hong Kong, London, and the former Soviet Union. The newest phenomenon in this regard is the proliferation of video-capable cellphones and the jumpy, mostly low-resolution images being captured by those who possess them. These video images are often uploaded to the web within minutes of capturing the events they depict. Most officers on the street today have been at incidents where more than one cell phone is recording their every movement and word. These are all examples of video cameras pointed toward police activity by the press, by ordinary citizens, and by reality television producers.