ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses that the United States is convulsed in an intense discussion about the desirability and operationalization of so-called "body cameras", lightweight, miniaturized digital video cameras that can be mounted on the clothing of police officers to record their interactions with the public. One of the earliest technologies to invoke mechanical objectivity was that ancestor of the body camera, the photograph. The technological development has transformed expectations so that any police encounter that takes place in front of bystanders may be expected to be filmed by these third parties: the cameras, to some extent, have been turned on the police. The fingerprint—at least the deliberately captured fingerprint—was widely described as possessing this quality of mechanical objectivity. More sophisticated technology brought the interpretation of high-quality, single-source samples much closer to "automatic" status, but many issues remain in Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) interpretation, especially in cases involving what are called "mixtures", samples with more than one contributor.
