Nov 29, 2014 3 min read

There’s a community in the heart of America that’s been rocked by a police shooting.

Ferguson, Mo.? Yes. But also Woodville, Ohio, a rustic, Norman Rockwell-style village in the middle of the flat farmland that surrounds Toledo. Residents of the community, which contains about 2,000 people, are divided over the shooting earlier this month of a loose Labrador retriever by a police officer. The officer said he feared for his safety as the canine was charging toward him, and he shot the dog in the right foreleg in order to halt its progress.

The dog is recovering and the officer was cleared of any wrongdoing, but the town is torn. The duties of officers in Woodville traditionally consisted of nabbing speeders, blocking roads for funeral processions and, maybe, coaxing a cat out of a tree, but some residents are now insisting the police be subject to greater surveillance and scrutiny.

It’s not clear whether a typical dashboard camera would have provided any greater clarity in this case, and the officer’s vehicle did not have one.

However, a body camera probably would have, as it also would have in Ferguson, Mo. A crossroads like Woodville is not likely to hop on the body-camera bandwagon anytime soon, but other, larger cities like New York and Washington, D.C. have, and more should follow suit.

The cameras fit on an officer’s glasses, lapel or shoulder and create a digital record of an incident. Though having a visual record of any occurrence doesn’t remove any and all ambiguities – the manner in which the Zapruder film of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination 51 years ago continues to be sliced, diced and minutely analyzed after all these decades makes that clear – it provides more compelling and persuasive evidence than the often unreliable testimony of witnesses.

Studies showed body cameras benefit both officers and the public – when they are in use, accusations of excessive force tend to go down, as do the number of the number of complaints against officers. It shows both police and the public are minding their p’s and q’s when the cameras are present, one police chief recently told the Sun Sentinel newspaper in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., “That shows both sides are probably on their best behavior … I think it’s good for the cops and the public, for accountability.”

According to a Justice Department report released in September, only about 25 percent of law-enforcement agencies in America are using body cameras and they don’t come cheap – the cost of each device is typically somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,000 – and the data-storage costs are even higher.

According to USA Today, when the New Orleans Police Department decided to invest in 350 body cameras, the final price tag came to $1.2 million, with the bulk of cost dedicated to digital storage.

But it stands to reason those costs will decrease with time, and the investment will be worth it when tallied against the costs incurred in communities like Ferguson, Mo., and all the other places where a police officer’s actions go under the microscope.