I wouldn't want to be videoed at all times either. BUT, if I was in a job where I knew a good percentage of people were looking for reasons to complain against me, I might be much in favor of having it all on video.
Totally agree. Recorded interactions with the public is a benefit to a good cop.
As one of the quotes said that I saw on one of the links; this is really about collecting evidence, not playing gotcha with the cops or others. There is a more or less impartial record.
In general, yes, but I don't get the feeling that this system is purely for collecting evidence on people the cops interact with. If it were, there wouldn't be a good reason (short of bad coppery) for the cops to want to disable it. Moreover, if it were primarily for evidence collection then there isn't really a reason I can think of to spend all that extra money on a dedicated radio-based system in each car to transmit that information in real time to a centralize location. It is in the interests of police to collect good evidence, and a conventional dash-cam or on-body camera handles that pretty well for a lot less.
Thus, it makes me think some combination of the following is true:
1. This particular system is directed at catching bad cops - perhaps for good reason.
2. LAPD's budget is too big
3. Someone high up in LAPD knows (in the biblical sense) someone at a vendor that sells realtime cop car monitoring systems.