Body-worn cameras could police the police, but still it’s the officer pressing ‘record’

Police wield extraordinary power over citizens. In a democracy, this rests on a critical deal: we grant police special powers, a monopoly on lawful violence and the tools to exercise them. In return, they protect us. But every deal comes with conditions. The conditions are simple: safeguards against abuse and accountability when those safeguards fail. Every new tool the police procure revisits the deal and ultimately reduces to the same fundamental question: who governs its use?

Body-worn cameras (BWCs) are South African policing’s latest tool, and they have reignited an old contest over police power. Internationally, the technology has been justified on shifting grounds, first to gather digital evidence, then to deter violence and more recently to deliver transparency and accountability. This time, we are told, the tool is different. BWCs will expose misconduct, build accountability and restore trust at a time when the public’s trust in police is in crisis.

Unfortunately, none of these proposed benefits lives inside the tool alone. The problem is both structural and simple: police are central to the very system that is meant to hold them accountable.

It is the deeper story getting lost in the political winds. Institutional power and culture have kept an iron grip on South African policing. In theory, the balance stands. Give the police the systems they need, and pair them with countervailing oversight: a system that watches “the watchers” as much as “the watched”. In practice, however, the balance collapses because policing culture treats oversight as a threat to be managed rather than a duty to be met. And the BWC system is unusually easy to manage because police control every part of how it operates. The camera may be a critical gaze, but a gaze you control is not a gaze upon you.

As it stands, police select, procure, own and configure BWC systems. Officers decide when to press record, and their movements determine what the lens captures and misses, shaping what is produced before ever needing an edit. Officers then decide what is relevant by selecting and clipping what is reviewed. Management decides what is kept, for how long, and who has access to it. At no point in this production and management process does an outsider’s hand touch the controls. And where police have both control and discretion, no camera can overrule them.

Body-worn camera systems enable greater police transparency and accountability only when other conditions are met. When oversight bodies such as the Independent Police Investigative Directorate have real capacity, proper training on BWC systems and full access to footage, metadata and systems-use data. When civilian panels can review randomly selected recordings of serious incidents. When ordinary people can obtain footage through the Promotion of Access to Information Act or during court proceedings. Only then does a recording hold police to account and give communities a real view of how they are policed.

It is pressure that produces effective countervailing mechanisms: pressure from communities and civil society to open footage to scrutiny, and to build the structured spaces where it can be reviewed. I genuinely believe enhanced transparency and accountability can rebuild public trust, and cameras can help by broadening what supervisors and the public are able to see. But in South African policing these remain radioactive ideas. I know, because I have been presenting on this topic to South African police officers since December 2023. And thus far the response has been deafeningly silent.

Oversight, not the roll-out date, should dominate the headlines and public discourse, and it cannot be allowed to be subsumed into party politics. The DA is championing body-worn cameras nationally. But in Cape Town, where law enforcement officers have had them for three years, the City is well positioned to stop calling for accountability and start modelling it. It might begin by trialling civilian scrutiny panels, where community representatives review footage of serious incidents and provide feedback on how their communities are policed. It could also publish a public-facing operational-use document outlining what its policy is, when officers must record, the safeguards and, crucially, the means of redress when the system fails.

In the meantime, the conversation must shift from political point-scoring to a united demand for regulation, independent scrutiny and operational rules based on what already works elsewhere. The UK has operated these cameras for two decades and they are now widespread across the US and Europe. The lessons (positive and negative) have already been paid for; the SAPS must be pressured into learning them.

So, our country sits at a decision point. The cameras will record police conduct, at least some of it, at least when they are activated. But a recording is not oversight. Like many police organisations before it, the SAPS can roll the cameras out this way and quietly fail to meet its end of the deal, reducing cameras to outward-facing tools for gathering evidence and watching the public rather than the police.

But what turns a recording into accountability is the governance built around it. Activation protocols that are enforced, ensuring vital moments are captured and not conveniently missed. Training that treats recording as a duty rather than a discretion. More eyes on the footage from outside the organisation and consequences when the footage is absent. Yet these mechanisms of oversight are precisely the conversation being neglected.

That work falls to citizens and their representatives, and it must be done before the cameras arrive and practice hardens into habit, processes become rigid and institutional culture sets the terms of their use, while the deal can still be renegotiated. Miss the timing and every future demand meets the same answer: “We did what you wanted, we bought the cameras.” But buying the cameras is never the hard part. DM