The day after video surfaced of a North Charleston, South Carolina, police officer shooting Walter Scott in the back, the town’s mayor announced plans to outfit all its police officers with body cameras. The New York Police Department has started to put cameras on officers, and the White House has announced a $263 million program to supply 50,000 body cameras to local police.

Advocates for these cameras hope that they will hold police accountable for their behavior. Skeptics point out that unobstructed video footage did nothing to win an indictment in the police killing of Eric Garner. But this debate has overlooked another possibility. Even if cameras reduce police violence, they could transform how citizens interact with police once facial recognition technology allows officers automatically to identify each individual they lay eyes on.

Facial recognition technology isn’t science fiction. Police in the United Kingdom, Dubai and Canada already wear cameras that can recognize faces to identify suspects and missing persons. Apps for Google Glass allow wearers to automatically connect faces to photos, and Taser — the leading seller of police body cameras — is developing cameras that integrate facial recognition with police databases.

This technology will amplify rather than resolve some of the problems highlighted by recent police killings. As last month’s Department of Justice report on Ferguson, Missouri, revealed, one cause of the unrest that followed Michael Brown’s death was the town’s abuse of warrants and court fees to squeeze revenue from its poorest residents. In 2013, Ferguson issued more than 1,500 warrants per 1,000 people, a rate twice as high as in any other town in the St. Louis area. Each of these warrants furnished a valid basis for an arrest. Residents have described police aggressively hounding them through warrants for offenses as minor as using the wrong trash collection service or rolling through a stop sign.

In communities where warrants and debts for minor infractions are so pervasive, body cameras could fundamentally transform the relationship between police and the people they ostensibly serve. The Fourth Amendment forbids police from stopping individuals without a concrete reason to believe a crime has occurred. This restriction sets the baseline for thousands of police-civilian encounters on streets and sidewalks across the country every day.