As in today’s debate, in-car cameras found support from both police chiefs and police reformists. Law enforcement claimed video evidence would protect cops from post hoc citizen grievances, while reformists claimed that surveilling cops would reduce racial profiling.

At the end of the 1990s, a combination of those arguments helped secure federal and private funding to purchase in-car cameras en masse. Dash cams are now everywhere. The most recent federal data, from 2007, states that 67 percent of state or local police departments had at least some squad cars with cameras, and experts say that they’ve only become more popular since.

The body camera debate now, in other words, is where the dash-cam debate was 15 years ago. We can look back at the promises that dash-cam advocates made and see where they fell short—we can, in a limited way, predict the future from the past. And while history doesn’t exactly repeat itself, understanding what was supposed to happen with dash cams—and what actually did—takes us out of the the fanciful future of shining screens and dystopian omniscience and puts us in our own—where cops get tired, camera lenses get scummy, and it’s harder to fix things than it is to buy them.

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1. The adoption of body cameras will not all happen at once.

“I was skeptical of the cameras at first,” Michael Creamer, the chief deputy of the Franklin County Sheriff’s office in Ohio, told a New York Times reporter. “We’re not in the movie business. But they’ve been fantastic for us.”

He was speaking in April 1990 about the power of dashboard-mounted, in-car cameras. During a six-month test run, he boasted, all 17 people who had been arrested for drunk driving pleaded guilty because their arrests were caught on film. (Most people who get arrested for drunk driving, the Times added, plead not guilty because of the crime’s “severe fines and jail terms.”)

“We’ll show the judge, the jury, and the courtroom how they really looked driving on the wrong side, falling down by their car, unable to walk a straight line or recite the alphabet,” Creamer said. “It’s very hard to rebut that kind of testimony.”

With such a strong endorsement, it seems like a no-brainer for the government—at the local, state, or federal level—to immediately pitch in and finish purchasing cameras. Creamer mused to the Times that he wanted cameras in every car in his fleet.

But Franklin County had never purchased those first, test-run cameras. In fact, no government agency had purchased them. Creamer’s dash-cams came from Aetna Life and Casualty, the private insurance company. Aetna was one of a number of insurance firms at the time that hoped to reduce the drunk-driving-related injuries—and their attendant medical bills—by making enforcement of the law much more consistent and severe. A prime way it could accomplish this? Ensuring that drivers arrested for DUIs could be prosecuted for them.