Police bodycams are supposed to be tools for accountability. Are they? | Mike McClelland

After my nervous breakdown during a police stop, I learned a cottage industry exposes bodycam footage to online titillation

A dear friend texted me in February, saying, Hey sweetie, the bodycam footage of you getting arrested got leaked on YouTube."

My fingers typed out a quick reply - Omg lol haha what?" - as the rest of my body cramped in horror. Surely it wasn't anything too bad? I'd been arrested in Athens, Georgia, back in 2021, because my car looked like one that had been involved in a hit-and-run. It wasn't, but it then turned out that my driver's license wasn't a driver's license but rather a state identification card. A misunderstanding, but I was also in the middle of a crisis. Things went to hell in a handbasket, I went to jail overnight, but everything was eventually sorted out and I've had lots of great therapy since then.

Mike McClelland teaches creative writing at Eastern Illinois University and is currently at work on a novel