More years ago than I care to admit, I recall being a young law student watching the video of one of my firm’s clients being paraded into a Toronto Police detachment.

While I can’t remember what charge he was being booked for, I do distinctly recall the client, hands cuffed behind his back, lean forward suddenly and come rearing violently backwards, fiercely smashing his skull against the exposed nose of a hapless officer who had been leading him into the detachment.

Although there was no audio to accompany the video, I could have sworn I heard the sickening crack as the officer’s nose broke. I certainly saw the thick black bloody ooze (station videos back then were black and white) start to drip from his nostrils. I also saw the brief flicker of (justifiably) boiling rage as the officer’s jaw clenched and he took one stutter step back towards the client with a hand ever-so-briefly balling into a fist, before a professional calm overtook him as he curtly shoved the client into a cell before attending to his own injuries.

I can’t say whether the quick transition from anger to professionalism had anything to do with the knowledge that he was being recorded, but I never did shake the feeling that those recently installed cameras prevented a shocking incident from becoming a public inquiry.

Fast forward nearly two decades and the tiresome debate over cameras and policing has migrated from stations to squad cars to the officers themselves by way of body cameras. At each stage of the debate, the old concerns over cost, policies and privacy get rehashed until, eventually, we are dragged kicking and screaming into a world that has long since accepted the immense value that cameras bring to policing.

It’s almost laughable to think that, in an era where every passerby on the street is casting our officers in their next cellphone YouTube hit, our police are the only group whose perspective we are unlikely to see on camera.

What would a jury have done with a view through the eyes of Const. James Forcillo, staring up at that streetcar as Sammy Yatim clutched a knife? Would we even need the pending public inquest if the officers who responded to Andrew Loku had been wearing body cameras that recorded the mentally-ill man allegedly brandishing a hammer?

Cameras not only increase police accountability by creating an audio-visual record of police interactions with the public, they reduce spurious complaints against the vast majority of officers who go about their business with honesty and integrity.

They eliminate thousands of expensive hours in courtrooms when, confronted by the clear, impartial, unblinking evidence of a camera, an accused elects to enter a guilty plea rather than face the inevitability of a conviction at trial.

But most importantly, body cameras on police officers advance the interests of transparency and scrutiny while allowing the public a cop-eye view of the extraordinary challenges facing front-line officers each and every day.

— Prutschi is a defence lawyer www.crimlawcanada.com.

Twitter: @prutschi