“body cameras should be on all the time without control of the wearers” Forget bathroom breaks. What about an officer texting a spouse? Talking to a confidential informant? Talking to a victim of a horrible crime who is terribly traumatized and doesn’t want their face plastered across the internet? Not to mention that body cams overwrite the footage they have every 30 min. because they just don’t have much storage. Suggesting that such footage be saved forever or uploaded to the cloud instantly is so financially and technically laughable it is not even a serious proposal.
What reforms do police need?
Before you even talk about it, if you are not committed to making their job easier in any way you can, and tackling crime by negating the causes of it, don’t even talk about changing policing or the police in general. If you want to make certain parts of policing more stringent, you need to make some parts of their job easier too.
I think there are a lot of things police departments can do better. However, I want to point out that a lot of our community (and the whole country) falls into 2 camps.
Camp 1- police officers are the bravest, best people ever. Litteral malachim who can do no wrong (I might say they theoretically can do wrong, but good luck finding a case that happened outside of an hour before shabbos where I thought the cops were wrong)
Camp 2- I got a ticket once, or a cop was mean to me, and therefore I am to the far left of BLM, and I hold all cops are Nazis.
We need to realize that police are just people who do a job that while scary, is not actually that dangerous relative to most jobs people hold (farming, roofing, and trucking are all kill more people every year). There are a lot of things (using qualified immunity, using civil asset forfeiture, de-escalation tactics, general community relations) that the police need to do a MUCH better job of. That being said, most police officers are wonderful people, not racist or anti-Semitic, and do a job which is lemaisa dangerous and scary, for little pay and horrific side effects. They keep us safe, and for that, they deserve hakoras hatov. But they are not perfectly good or perfectly bad.