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Most body cams are always in record mode but not saving the data. They record and save it in a loop of from 1 to 5 minutes. When the officer turns on the body cam it then saves all of the data it has plus the incoming data until it is turned off again. This allows for the memory inside the unit to be small enough to fit plus saves on tremendous amounts of storage for the agency. If you remember old VCR tapes, an average officer would fill four of them during a normal 8 hour shift if the cam recorded everything. With electronic storage, this gets converted to a smaller space but is that much data. Multiply times the number of officers in the agency, and the data storage needs become tremendous and very expensive. Luling PD, for example has 15 officers for a city of 5000 people. Or look at San Antonio with 2500 officers for a city of 1.5 million.

It is better to only record when needed. Car cameras work the same way and have a manual turn on button, but are usually wired into the lights and siren to turn on when they do also. Unfortunately, that doesn't work for the body camera.