I love my body cam; I’ll never work without it. The downside to body cams, however, is that they have exposed the general public to violence that police must encounter. The general public did not sign up for those encounters, nor are they prepared to process those encounters.

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Transparency, properly defined, is important. However, transparency is not simply releasing to the public police video of an incident that happened five minutes ago, and naming officers involved in said incident. The public does not have the right to know these things while

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the investigation is ongoing. Watching the killing of any human being is traumatic for most people. The untrained eye misses many key elements, and sometimes even invents elements that are not actually present. This is why trained professionals need to investigate these

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events, without the interference of public opinion based on a five-minute video. The problem today isn’t a lack of transparency by police departments, it’s defining “transparency” as “the public gets to know everything we know, when we know it”. That’s just foolish, and

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until police chiefs across the country begin standing up and refusing to release video, names, and intimate details of critical incidents until the investigation and prosecution are complete, we’ll never actually achieve anything resembling proper justice.