Explainer: How police bodycams are used in the U.S.

Police bodycams are increasingly being used by U.S. law enforcement agencies.

Capturing everything while an officer is on duty.

From arrests to chasing pigs to saving a lost 2-year-old girl.

But they also record police killings.

Most notably, prosecutors used recordings from the body camera of former police officer Derek Chauvin to convict him for the murder of George Floyd.

Here’s how body-worn cameras are employed and when the footage is made public.

Let’s go back to 2014, when the police shooting of a Black man named Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri had conflicting witness accounts.

That led the Obama administration to fund body-worn camera programs across 32 states.

As of 2016, about half of the country’s general-purpose law enforcement agencies had bought the cameras.

That’s according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Larger agencies are more likely to adopt the devices.