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Body Worn Cameras: Necessity For Police Departments To Capture Real-Time Evidence

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Manish Agarwal, Director, SecureyeSecureye provides complete security and surveillance solutions like biometric attendance system, CCTV cameras, Entrance Security gates and Video Door Phones.

In today's technological era of advanced equipment, we are quite adaptive in using latest products to ensure safety and security of us as well as society. In past few years it's quite evident to see the usage of internet has increases manifold. And in that course, these days anyone can easily upload video footage on various platforms and start a live streaming of any incident.

Now when it comes to security and safety, Security officers or Po-lice Officers comes into mind. Many state governments have ruled to make compulsory for Police Officers and Security personnel to wear body worn camera. This will enable them to record any incident occurring at the scene of crime or even during normal conversation after any security alert. This will help to enhance the transparency as well as alertness that how any crime or security alerts is handled.

However, the practice of adoring Body Worn Cameras is at its initial phase, but slowly it is becoming standard equipment in the Police Department and a part of dress for Police officers across the nation.

Overview of Body Worn Cameras
Body worn cameras are small device that can be clipped with collar or pockets. The batteries last for more than 6 to 8 hours with continuous high quality recordings. It can also record videos in bad lighting conditions like dark places or at nights.

Benefits of Body Worn Cameras
There are several benefits of Body Worn Cameras; here are few of them as follows:

Better Transparency: Body worn cameras may result in better transparency and accountability and thus it improves the law enforcement legitimacy. Video captured during the
conversation with the community at crime scene or real-time video capturing can help to solve the case and also it would develop a confidence amongst civilians and police officials.

Improved Accountability: Police body cameras can provide actual videos and audios of the event which can independently verify what happened in that situation. Recording interactions with residents is likely to minimize the complaints related to the behavior of Police Officers. Both officers and citizens may tend to be more restrained, knowing that the camera is capturing their words and actions.

Corroborating Evidence: Use of body cameras while on the duty can provide hard evidence of decisions made by officers in high-intensity situations. The footage is extremely valuable in knowing exactly what happened.

A well-implemented system will help companies reduce the costs of maintaining their facilities, improve the flow of information across departments

Help against False Accusations: Video recorded by body worn cameras can help protect citizens as well as police officers against any false accusations of misconduct or misbehave. It is quite certain that both will support each other to abide the law.

Features of Body Worn Cameras
Audio & Video Quality - The system should be capable enough to capture conversation as well as video at any circumstances. Wide angle video capture is a must for body cameras.

Battery Backup - The body worn camera must have at least 6 to 8 hours of back up so that videos can be captured for long duration without any glitches.

Real Time Video - The Physical Camera must have capability to transfer the real time videos on cloud storage for transparency.

Compression/Encoding - The most modern models of Body worn cameras uses H.265 and MPEG-4 encoding or compression. H.265 is the new standard with better compression which actually helps to compress the video file sizes so that it can occupy less storage. How-ever this compression methodology maintains the high video quality.

Night Vision ­-The camera must be capable enough to capture videos in low lighting conditions with amazing clarity.

Resolution Settings ­- Various resolution settings allow recording in low or high definition such as 480, 720 or 1080.

Easy Start and Stop - Touch and go capability of video recording allows officers to quickly start and stop the cameras, eliminating any complex procedures to follow.

Storage Capability - We must check the storage capacity of the body worn camera while selecting it. Many devices come with in-built storage and others have expandable storage capacity.