This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, September 15th, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown. The Taser Corporation, better known for weaponry,

is working on a suit to be worn by police officers to record every moment of an officer's shift.

Video technology in general from flip cameras to new iPods offers many new ways for citizens

to document cops on the job.

Bradley Valco, senior editor at Reason magazine, comments.

I think it's great.

I'm a little surprised that Tate's's doing it given their pretty close relationship with police departments.

And you know I'd have concerns about making sure that the video is is tamper-proof and that it that it can't be

destroyed or misplaced or or accidentally erased but to the extent that you know

there are there's a market for this that there are police

departments that want tasers with cameras I think that's a great thing and you know

it protects not only does it expose the bad cops, it protects the good ones, the people who, cops who legitimately use tasers, the video is going to vindicate them.

Under what circumstances would cops, aside from being bad guys, would they... would

be aside from being bad guys would they be hesitant to want to try this type of thing?

In general I found anyway with the course of my work that police departments tend to be reluctant to

to sign off on more monitoring of how they do their jobs. This SWAT transparency bill in Maryland, for example, that would just

require every police department with the SWAT team didn't issue a quarterly report to the state attorney

general. That's just a transparency bill.

All that's saying is, here's how many times we use our SWAT team,

here's what happened.

It's not imposing any sorts of restrictions or regulations.

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