Law enforcement officers have been hit by this requirement and I think it’s time for medical doctors (especially during surgery) to wear them.
How about auto mechanics? Is it time? Many disputes over car repair bills and faulty repairs / and or property damage or injuries resulting from poor workmanship could be resolved if mechanics wore a body camera. Perhaps fewer “mistakes” would be made if shops were required to hang onto recordings for a period of time.
Quick oil change shop botches an oil change and refuses to own up? Let’s watch the recording!
Is this a joke thread? Most of the time the body camera would be showing the fender while mechanic was working and rest of the time it would show what it recorded after the mechanic threw the thing at the dumpster because it got in his way.
…and interestingly, body camera footage doesn’t tend to change a police officer’s behavior:
I hope people don’t get the wrong message from this study, that this makes the cameras useless. I think the footage should be used to exonerate police officers when their use of force is appropriate.
And how many cameras are going to get broken when mechanics are in tight spots. Say the transmission that catches it and knocks it to the floor while the transmission is being removed.
This will also mean an additional expense which will have to be added onto a customer’s bill. I can see a customer now when a ten dollar camera surcharge is added. Many already complain about a 2% shop supplies charge.
While its nice in a dispute to have a camera to try and settle it, I for one think we have too dang many cameras watching everything we do now. Everyone has a camera recording everything.
I’m not surprised that the study shows no reduction on police shootings with cameras because otherwise you would have to believe that these shootings weren’t justified in the first place. Point a gun at the police and you are likely to get shot. If only we could get the criminals to wear body cams, that might help.
A local mechanic shop has installed cameras in the bays to quickly resolve customer’s complaints. For him it’s mostly customers trying to scam the shop.
+1 to that comment!
Despite a recent poster who made unsubstantiated allegations against her mechanic, and who also is apparently of the belief that most mechanics are crooks, I think it is much more likely that customers will attempt to scam the shop, rather than the other way around. Yes, there are some larcenous mechanics, but I think that they are far outnumbered by the customers who are trying to get something for nothing.
Hopefully without getting too far away from body cams for mechanics, while you’re correct in that assessment, what you’re missing is that it’s not necessary for certain people to point a gun at a cop, or even to have a gun, in order to get shot.
You might find googling “New Orleans police ham sandwich” instructive.
… and then there the people who were shot and killed because they were holding a cellphone.
I guess that the moral of the story is to never hold anything in your hand when dealing with law enforcement personnel.
Knowing how many shops have tries to sell me repairs my car didn’t need, I’m not biased towards the shop personnel or the customers. If I was a mechanic or a shop owner, I might have a biased perspective.
You have to remember that the police are at a heightened level anticipating anything that might happen in a traffic stop. It only takes a few seconds for everything to go bad and they have to be ready for it. Mistakes made sometimes sure, but keep your hands empty and where they can be seen.
Like I said I think there was only one time at the dealer where they told me I had a bad oil leak that was pure BS. Never had a problem there before and it might have been the young kid involved that needed the points or something. Given the severity of the repair a second opinion by me and a third opinion by another shop prevented any needless expense. I probably should have talked to the owner but I didn’t even know the kid’s name.
I do long for the days when you could hang around the shop while they worked on your car and see everything that was going on.
Cops need body cameras. They constantly find themselves in dangerous situations where they may have to use force, sometimes deadly force, and the cameras support their decision far, far more than they show them to have overreacted.
Cops also use the video for training purposes, to train other cops in how to handle the unexpected as well as how NOT to handle it.
And, I believe that it generally prevents cops from abusing their authority.
I personally find this statement offensive. While cops are human and occasionally one out of the millions of cops on the beat across the nation at any moment overreacts or goes rogue, in general cops do the best job they can under extremely difficult circumstances. Shadow, I hope that should you ever need a cop to get SERIOUS to protect you, they’re not afraid to do so because of their body cameras.
Cops’ body cameras more often than not become valuable evident to get violent criminals out of our neighborhoods. Even when the cops know full well that some liberal judge will probably just throw the criminals back out among us.
Mechanics don’t need body cameras. They don’t have to go up against the violent bad guys, gang members, or drug-crazed addicts.
I was inside the cab of a truck today, with my head and one hand literally under the dash and my legs on the ground. No other way to do what needed to be done. A very uncomfortable position to be in. I could barely breathe, that’s how tight it was
I had so little room, the body cam would have made the job impossible
I would have thrown that thing against the wall
And then, after it landed on the ground, I would have worked over the remnants with the heaviest deadblow hammer I’ve got
And after that, I would have taken those remnants to our 100-ton press . . .
Hee hee. Like I said, I have a sweat shirt that says “what happens in the garage stays in the garage”. Although I’d like to peek at what they are doing, I’ll afford the mechanics a little privacy while they work, and don’t ever turn the sound on anyway.
The problem is that police training drills two main concepts into officers’ heads: 1) above all you must go home at night, and 2) everyone is a potential cop killer.
In short, they’re telling these guys that the streets are full of monsters, and then handing them guns and sending them on their way. It’s guaranteed a disaster will happen.
It doesn’t help that training scenarios often reinforce racial stereotypes, such as the shoot/don’t shoot simulator from Remington which features an angry wife-beater-wearing muscular black man chasing a petite blonde white woman with a baseball bat. Great imagery there, isn’t it.
Castile was pulled over because he was black, and then he got shot because cops are trained to assume everyone’s out to kill them. Precedent has been set that all a cop has to do to get away with shooting you at a traffic stop is to claim he was afraid of you.
So yeah, @bing, I actually agree with you - police are at a heightened level, because they’ve been trained to be afraid of anything that moves. The problem is that such training leads to far too many bad shoots.
