When police are given body cameras, are they using them?

After a six-month pilot program, 800 Denver cops — more than half the force — are expected to start wearing body cameras later this year. Officers are supposed to start recording as soon as they respond to a call or enter a scene.

But Noelle Phillips, who covers the police for the Denver Post, tells NPR’s Arun Rath that an independent monitor’s evaluation of Denver’s pilot program found that in many cases involving use of force, the cameras weren’t rolling. Approximately one in four of these incidents was recorded.

Sometimes this was because “either the people involved weren’t assigned cameras,” says Phillips. “Also, officers forgot to turn them on or said the situation deteriorated too quickly and ‘we didn’t have time’ or there was a technical malfunction and the thing just wasn’t working.”