Every police officer with a car? Have you lost your mind? Do you know how expensive it would be for every cop on the beat to drive around in an automobile? Next thing, people will want those automobiles to have radios and heaters!
Once upon a time, folks made that argument. Cars were new. Radios in cars were newer. Imagine the city council meetings a hundred years ago. What's wrong with the horses we already have?
There's an even newer idea for equipping cops these days, and it's got nothing to do with a Ford Model B:
Some police departments are giving body cameras--cams--to their patrol officers.
Jonesboro's police department is the latest to make the news by issuing body cameras to its people. Well, a few of its people. A small sliver of its people. The department has 153 uniformed officers. The grant it received from the feds to buy body cameras would buy . . . 10 of the doohickeys.
It's a start. Odds are the decision to give officers their own patrol cars started small, too.
The new chief in Jonesboro says he'll issue the cameras to cops on High Risk Patrols or special assignments. Let's hope that's only the case till he can get 143 more.
There are a few departments here and there--several of them in Arkansas--that already issue body cameras. But it seems to be a slow process. It doesn't have to be. An internet search shows some cams can cost more'n $2,000 a pop. Then again, there are others on the market that cost less than $150. That's less than a lot of Tasers cost.
Cops should be clamoring for these cameras. The gadgets would protect the good ones every bit as much as they did the public. Don't you know there are people living in Ferguson, Mo., these days who wish they'd bought more body cameras for their cops only a few weeks ago. So questions could be answered before all the confusion there--and the protests--began.
Communities that look ahead will learn the lesson Ferguson should have taught us all.
Editorial on 09/19/2014