Claire McCaskill, the Democratic senator from Missouri, says police departments nationwide should require their officers to wear body cameras in order to qualify for the hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding they receive each year.

McCaskill's comments come in the wake of the Ferguson, Missouri, shooting death of Michael Brown and is one of a myriad of calls in the episode's aftermath for police officers to wear video cams.

Further Reading In wake of Ferguson shooting, calls escalate for cops to wear body cams said Tuesday during a question-and-answer session with voters in her home state. "And police officers are now at a disadvantage because someone can tape the last part of an encounter and not tape the first part of the encounter. And it gives the impression that the police officer has overreacted when they haven't."

The lawmaker did not offer legislation to support her words.

McCaskill, however, is not alone in her thinking. Last week, an online petition asking the White House to require all police departments to wear lapel cameras hit 100,000 signatures. The Obama administration has promised to publicly address petitions reaching 100,000 signatures.

All the while, Ferguson, which is still reeling following the shooting death of an unarmed African-American teen by a white police officer on August 9, is "exploring" whether to outfit its police force with pager-sized surveillance cams in patrol cars and on officers' vests that record everything the officer is seeing. There is no video recording of Brown's death.

The mayor of Hawthorne, a Los Angeles suburb, has also called for police to wear body cameras in the wake of Brown's shooting, as did New York City's public advocate, who said the New York City Police Department should wear them, too.

Only a small number of US police departments have outfitted their officers with body cameras, including forces in Fresno, California; Oakland; Rialto, California; Pittsburgh; Salt Lake City; and Cincinnati. A recent study with the Rialto Police Department showed that use-of-force incidents and citizen complaints have been dramatically curtailed since the department began wearing body cams (PDF).

The American Civil Liberties Union has said that the body cams "have the potential to be a win-win, helping protect the public against police misconduct, and at the same time helping protect police against false accusations of abuse."