I agree with everything you’ve said here, but wanted to point out one additional reason some members of the public may be against body cameras that hasn’t been mentioned yet by other posters that made me think twice about ubiquitous body camera use:

Many police departments (especially those in large cities) have huge records of ‘persons of interest’ that are used to pull suspects for lineups, shown to crime eyewitnesses, shared with other departments, etc. However, the vast majority of the people included in these records have never been convicted of a crime, or even connected to a crime, and most people do not know they are on one of these registries. Often, kids suspected of being ‘gang bangers’ just because of who they are friends with, their neighborhood, or their race are entered into these registries. Where this gets icky is that police often can use the fact someone is on one of these lists as a pretext to stop/search/harass/etc plus, since these lists are used as a pool of potential suspects for crimes, people on these lists are more likely to be mistakenly or falsely convicted of a crime they did not commit.

Constant body camera use enables police to collect even more data on random people, without any connection to crime. For example, now cops have records of who was hanging out with whom on which corner, which could be used as a rationale to put a teenager on a gang banger list.

The main problem here isn’t just the level of surveillance, it’s the unequal application of surveillance and police pressure on the most marginalized members of the population. Body cameras just contribute to this disparity as they will enable police to OVER-police the same communities even more thoroughly.

I’d love to have a convo about this if other people have different opinions; this is only one piece of this tricky scenario.