The draft policy does not provide answers for every situation. When officers use pepper spray against protesters, or conduct mass arrests of protesters, should they record it? Using force and arresting people are both scenarios that require body cameras to be turned on, but officers are not supposed to wear body cameras to demonstrations.

Civil rights lawyers and activists are leery of inviting the police to record political activity, because it can discourage people from participating in demonstrations and can aid the police in amassing information about individual activists. At the same time, police officers sometimes conduct mass arrests at demonstrations, and video can help determine the lawfulness of conduct by the police and by the demonstrators.

The draft policy notes that because officers must record arrests and vehicle stops it is quite likely that they will record the “initial accounts by victims and witnesses” in some instances. But officers are warned that they should turn off their cameras when “interviewing the victim of a sex crime” or when conducting strip searches of people they have arrested.

The policy also instructs officers to turn on their cameras while patrolling residential buildings, such as public housing projects or the thousands of private apartment buildings whose landlords have authorized routine police patrols.

It is unclear whether the police will make footage available to the public, particularly after police shootings. The policy states that there will be a “presumption of access” to the video. Yet the policy also states that there are numerous circumstances under which the police could refuse to release footage to the public: “when it interferes with active law enforcement investigations” or when it “would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”

In “high-profile” situations, such as cases in which the police shoot someone or someone dies in police custody, the policy states that the police will most likely confer with prosecutors “about releasing the video to the public in order to balance the public’s right to information with the integrity of any criminal investigation or criminal prosecution.”

New York has not passed a law regarding public access to footage filmed by police body cameras, although at least 21 other states have, according to a state-by-state survey by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Those laws vary widely.