ESSEX police officers wearing body cameras are less likely to have to deploy Taser, Essex Police Federation Chairman Steve Taylor has told BBC Essex.<\/p>\n
Speaking on the Dave Monk radio show, Steve agreed with a recent West Yorkshire Police report which revealed that people \u2018modify their behaviour\u2019 when they realise they are being recorded.<\/p>\n
Body cameras help Essex officers in several ways Steve said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Federation is a great fan of body cameras,\u201d he told the show.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd they help our members in a number of ways. We\u2019ve seen a change in a behaviour of those we are dealing with when they know they are being filmed and when they know that any footage could be used in future prosecutions.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt means we might not have to use as much force to detain a suspect as we may have had to otherwise and anecdotally I would say that the use of Taser has definitely gone down due to their deployment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Other body cam benefits include reassuring the public that stop and search powers are being used correctly and that any force being used to detain suspects is at the appropriate level.<\/p>\n
The Essex force currently has 700 body worn cameras in use, 400 more can\u2019t be deployed because of what Steve calls \u2018back office functional\u2019 issues.<\/p>\n
\u201cTaser and body cameras for every officer is what we want to see,\u201d Steve added.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are more which could be deployed but the force servers aren\u2019t able to accommodate the extra tech currently.<\/p>\n
\u201cTechnology moves so fast and the process of how we spend public money for policing can\u2019t always keep up.<\/p>\n
“These pieces of kit aren\u2019t cheap, but upgrading could mean footage could be accessed by wider groups, the CPS, defence teams and the public, for instance.<\/p>\n
\u201cCost is, of course, always an issue in the public sector and particularly in policing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ESSEX police officers wearing body cameras are less likely to have to deploy Taser, Essex Police Federation Chairman Steve Taylor has told BBC Essex. Speaking on the Dave Monk radio\u2026 read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":116,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4197"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4197"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4204,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4197\/revisions\/4204"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}