"Let's See" Said The Blind Nation: LAPD Buys 7000 Body Cameras

Think of the stuff you do when nobody's looking.

The Revelation of body cameras is a whole new ballgame.

The End Time for police violence?

The Los Angeles Police Department is buying 7,000 body-worn cameras for its officers, Mayor Eric Garcetti announced Thursday. The decision is not directly related to the protests in Ferguson or New York City in the past several weeks, as the department has been testing the cameras for months. Nor does the purchase depend on President Obama's request for$75 million to help law enforcement pay for the equipment -- Los Angeles is relying on private donations

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All the same, those developments do mean that Los Angeles's program will be closely scrutinized by lawmakers, police chiefs and the press. Civil liberties advocates have concerns about the cameras. If the faces of the people they record are encoded in police databases, they argue, then the cameras will be an invasion of privacy. And they won't change the lawsthat are at the heart of recent decisions by grand juries not to indict police officers accused of killing unarmed black men.

Advocates for body cameras say they'll record nearly every encounter between police and citizens, helping to resolve disputes about what happens during altercations. But they are only a small part of what needs to be done to restore trust between officers and the people they protect.

For Los Angeles, body cameras follow years of hard work toward better policing. As NPR's Kirk Siegler reports, the beating of Rodney King in 1991 and the infamous Rampart scandal forced the department to deal with its racism and corruption. Court-ordered reforms helped the process along. Now, the department is supervised by an independent civilian commission. Its disciplinary protocols have been improved, and officers focus on community policing. The force, once largely white, is now 45 percent Hispanic and 13 percent black. All the while, as this chart from the Los Angeles Times shows, violent crime in the city has declined steadily, in line with the national trend.

That's not to say that Los Angeles police have solved all their problems. "I have a nice car, and I'm young and I'm black," one man told NPR in explaining why he is so frequently pulled over. That said, the department is evidence that police can improve relations with civilians without endangering public safety. And if law enforcement is fairer in general, then many of the objections to body cameras -- that cops will use the data improperly, for example -- may be less of a concern.