Houston Chief of Police Charles McClelland supportsthe use of body cameras, but he said they alsopresent problems.

“The type of equipment, the placement ofequipment, the downloading time, and storagespace all of those are significant challenges.”

For the past two years, the Houston PoliceDepartment has experimented with cameras,deploying about 100 of them on officers each day.

But McClelland said deploying cameras on a few thousand officers and then managing all thevideo they produce will cost a lot of money.

“We will be paying officers overtime for doing their downloading and indexing of these videos,”

And those those videos can only show a limited perspective of any incident.

The body cameras used by police usually offer a wide-angle view of what is in front of the lens,much like the small consumer cameras.

Chief McClelland said that view leaves a lot out.

“An officer may turn his or her head and see something,but the video camera that is in themiddle of their chest is pointing straight ahead.”

Most officers who have worn the cameras, here and in other cities, are very much in favor ofthem.

Rita Watkins, the executive director of the Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas,said there is statewide demand for body cameras.

“I can tell you that right now there are chiefs who are budgeting, within their budget andasking their community leadership for the funds to initiate and start a fund for the bodycamera program.”

She said legal experts also are considering how photos and videos taken by average citizensshould be handled.

“We also have the public that is capturing video. So how do they maintain it and what is theirduty and responsibility for making that information available to law enforcement?”

Both she and McClelland are also concerned about what happens if a video file becomescorrupted or disappears.

“This technology is man-made and at some point any man-made object will malfunction.”

he said such a technical glitch could ignite discord in a city like Baltimore, where there alreadyis distrust of the police.

He also worries that routine communication between officers and citizens will diminishbecause of the cameras.

“The officer is recording the citizen and the citizen may be using his or her cellphone to recordthe officer.”

He said body cameras offer benefits, McClelland said, but they also represent a continuingfinancial burden for police as cameras become obsolete every few years and must be replacedby newer, better ones.