The DEA is now abandoning body cameras
43 comments
·May 6, 2025JohnMakin
tmpz22
Their counter argument will be "the privacy of the people we interact with" i.e. a SWAT team storming a house when a young child is in the bathroom.
dghlsakjg
Having the recording, viewing the recording internally, and releasing the recording to the public are all separate things.
These are solved problems. Hundreds of agencies use body cams now, and this has been dealt with.
bee_rider
I basically agree with you, but also am not sure how to square this with my belief that we are really gathering way too much information as a society (it always leaks).
stuaxo
Can't see them traumatising children.
theoreticalmal
Other than the “sorry, we raided the wrong house” situations (which absolutely should out the whole swat team in jail) a judge has to sign a warrant to raid the house, for good reason. The responsibility for the kids being traumatized lies with their parents, committing crimes in the house.
null
sjsdaiuasgdia
This administration is allergic to accountability, so this tracks.
ty6853
Body cams can be removed at light speed but somehow the process of rescheduling marijuana moves at the speed of molasses.
SlightlyLeftPad
So while we’re talking about government overspending, this money was already spent. What is going to happen with these cameras that are now going to be unused?
rolph
now they can be carried at option rather than at mandate, thus self serving functions for cams now on the table.
SlightlyLeftPad
Cool, so since government accountability is now optional, I suspect we’ll get a few camps. At the very least, these two: honest officers who relish constant supervision and scrutiny, dishonest officers who relish violence and brutality above all else.
qingcharles
Aren't a lot of these bodycams provided for free, and in exchange you have to use their cloud to store all the footage until the end of time?
(give the razor, sell the blades...)
vjulian
I genuinely don’t understand why people, even intelligent people, take the US political and governance structure seriously.
delichon
It incarcerates around 1.9 million people and has another 3.6 million on probation or parole. It seizes and consumes more than a third of all production. It demands compliance with about 120 million words of federal rules. It's the greatest military power on earth. It's unserious to not to take that kind of power over our lives seriously.
mullingitover
> For another it consumes more than a third of all production
This is often a positive.
In times of financial panic, which free markets always come around to, the government is a spender of last resort that helps to kickstart production and demand when the free market is in absolute shambles, stashing gold in holes in its backyard.
Furthermore, when it's functioning well, it gives the fattest of the industrialists a haircut and returns that money to the populace where the revenue can actually deliver value instead of sitting in a vault somewhere.
yellowapple
Probably because the removal of thousands of dollars from my paychecks over the course of every year is a serious matter, as are many of the functions which those involuntarily-paid dollars support.
cosmicgadget
It's voluntary as you choose to remain in the country.
eth0up
I thoroughly sympathize with even more callously cynical views, but what all good people should remember, daily if able, are the unsung work horses that have ploughed through endless, self healing bureaucratic rot mires and festering heaps of wriggling legalese to preserve the creaking vestiges of liberty and dignity that we take for granted. If not for those who take such initiative and toils, we'd be in an alternate reality. A terrible one.
Maintaining a semblance of justice and fairness is an overtime job. The ravenous hovering ghouls of corruption make alpha vultures seem blind and sessile.
mountainriver
The DEA has been caught doing some incredibly sketchy things in the past. Considering most drugs should be legalized or at least decriminalized, they provide little benefit and are now allowed even more freedom to exert their unnecessary power.
I didn’t know Biden had issued an executive order on this. That’s exactly what we needed.
These can only be a positive to help police absolve themselves from wrongdoing - until such point wrongdoing is so pervasive that it becomes a net negative for them. then the cameras are a liability.
to quote a line ive often been delivered by police -
“if you didnt do anything wrong, what do you have to hide?”