Crimes Caught on Tape, From the Officer's Point of View

Sept. 27, 2007— -- These days, it's possible to get an officer's eye-view as a police officer breaks up a fight. How can you wrestle a man to the ground and film it at the same time?

You wear the camera on your head.

In Plymouth, on England's south coast, the police are testing this revolutionary new crime-fighting tool. So far, they like what they see.

"Without being crude, it's in your face," said police officer Tony Brown.

It most certainly is. On one quiet Sunday night, the camera captured an arrest in progress; an officer calmly addresses two people who are both yelling and cursing at him.

"All right, calm down," says the officer.

"You ain't welcome back here so f--- off," says the man being arrested.

"You can actually show what that person was like at the moment they were being dealt with by the officer, as opposed to the clean, well-presented individual as they show up at court," said Zoe Bateman, the leader of the Head Cam Project.

The U.K. already bristles with more than 4 million surveillance cameras, and most people in Plymouth welcome this new frontier in surveillance.

"The only people who would find it intrusive are people who are doing something wrong," said one person.

The police are proud of their new toy.

"So I could record something and then go back to it five minutes later. Say there was a fight or something. …I can say, he's the ringleader. He's the one who started it. So we'd have an instant arrest."

One of the main advantages of these head cams is the amount of time they save. Whatever Brown records on his camera -- whether it's a fight or an arrest in the city center -- he'll take that back to the police station, where the video is downloaded.

With this video there's now no longer a need for a written statement, and that can save a police officer about an hour every day in paperwork. And the head-cam video is admissible as evidence, so officers don't have to spend time going to court to testify verbally. They just send in the video.