With yet another round of riots in a major U.S. city having sprung from anger over the death of a black man in police custody, the nation is once again in the midst of a debate about violence — both the violent deaths of criminal suspects and the violent reactions to those deaths.

Adding fuel to this fire are the ubiquitous videos of both the riots and the arrests that spurred them. In 21st-century America, anybody with a cellphone can capture news as it happens, disseminating the video they capture on YouTube, Facebook and other social networking sites. That’s a good thing for all the parties involved.

Video evidence in the case of the Ferguson, Mo., case of Michael Brown, for instance, might have supported the conclusion of prosecutors and the U.S. Department of Justice that Officer Darren Wilson was justified in fearing for his life in the fracas that resulted in Wilson shooting Brown. Video shot by a bystander in North Charleston, S.C., on the other hand, will be crucial to prosecutors pursuing a murder charge against Officer Michael Slager, who shot an apparently unarmed Walter Scott five times in the back as Scott fled the scene of a traffic stop.

With these cases as the backdrop, the Suffolk Police Department is preparing to deploy body cameras for all of its patrol officers, Neighborhood Enforcement Team members, school resource officers and supervisors. Deployment of the cameras had been in the works even before the Ferguson incident last August. That incident and the others that have captured the national attention since then have only served to underline the potential import of Suffolk Police Chief Thomas Bennett’s decision to move forward with the program.

“Cameras don’t lie,” Bennett said while describing his plans to City Council during a recent meeting. Indeed, the camera that captured the South Carolina shooting helped prosecutors make a quick determination to discount Slager’s claim that Scott had grabbed his Taser and instead charge him with murder.

Body cameras also will protect the police who wear them. Reasonable people have little doubt that police work is dangerous, that suspects sometimes turn dangerously violent and that the vast majority of police officers have no desire to hurt, much less kill, the suspects they encounter. Video footage taken while police officers are engaged in their work has the potential to exonerate honest, conscientious officers who are falsely accused of committing brutal acts in the course of their duties.

But the video captured by Suffolk’s body cameras will do little to assuage the police department’s critics if it’s not routinely released to the public. If the department routinely hides behind claims of investigative privilege when it comes to releasing body camera video, the public will have little confidence in the program when the department chooses to release video purporting to exonerate officers.

As the Suffolk Police Department prepares to go live with its camera program in June, it is vital that the chief settle on a policy that makes the decision to withhold video a rare exception to the rule.

Suffolk has a well-earned reputation of using Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act as a means of obfuscation instead of transparency. The police department has a rare opportunity with its body camera program to turn the tables in favor of transparency. Citizens can only hope the department makes the best of the opportunity that lies before it.