A BLOW TO POLICE LEGITIMACY: BODY CAMERAS
MISUSE OF VALUABLE TECHNOLOGY IS TURNING A RESOURCE INTO A LIABILITY
(Note: Paid subscribers will have access to my first restricted access, subscription only piece next week. I am still finalizing the research, but this is either going to be a shocking and national news story expose on a frequently quoted source by all mainstream media channels or Geraldo Rivera’s Capone vaults. Whether I win or bomb, I would be honored if you checked it out.)
BODY CAMERAS ARE HERE TO STAY
I get it. Police body cameras are a part of life that are not be going away and I accept that. Getting rid of cameras is not what this article is about. Prior to any technology coming close to promising what they are delivering today, myself and many other officers considered how amazing it would be to have a video record of what just occurred - for no other reason to prove it actually happened.
However, as technology has become more refined and more widely adopted, some of the selling points presented have proved false. Worse, it brought new reasons for the public to question their faith in law enforcement.
THE PITCH: YOU’RE BEING RECORDED ANYWAY
The advantages that have been sold to the rank and file are not without merit.
Law enforcement executives presented the following pitch:
You are being filmed anyway, whether by anti-law enforcement activists, public and private surveillance cameras, and ubiquitous cell phone cameras.
Our own cameras and recordings, they promised, grant us the ability to tell our story from beginning to end and control the narrative. It included the advantage of making better criminal cases, a benefit that I have seen and made cases that otherwise would have fallen through the cracks. We also identified officers who would benefit from additional training in victim services.
Supervisors appreciate having the ability to resolve complaints quickly, unfound cases where the officer was being falsely accused and the resources to write more comprehensive evaluations on their officers. My friend, a former police chief, welcomes camera evidence to identify ‘bad apples.’ According to the research that I have read, body cameras have a negligible effect on behavior change and bad apples find their way to the door on their own.
YOUR LYING EYES
Information collected will be analyzed and reviewed by the group least qualified to interpret what they are seeing, the unvetted jury of the general public.
In a recent case, the officer pushed a suspect who was coming toward him, drunk and belligerent, only to be indicted by a grand jury with three counts of misdemeanor battery. The aim of the ‘reform’ prosecutor was to level much more serious charges on the officer. Using footage of the body worn camera footage from the accused officer and the other two officers on scene the prosecutor anticipated getting felony indictments. The sole result was ruining the career of an officer doing his job.
In other recent events, images from body camera video horrify untrained eyes which professionals clearly see as reasonable, appropriate and necessary.
HOW THESE RECORDINGS SERVE THE PUBLIC TRUST
Police agencies are social posting the perils of officers and deputies while showing citizens at their worst. Hypothetically, a law enforcement agency posts a body camera video of a disturbance call where the resident is intoxicated, spewing profanity, belligerently demanding officers leave their property culminating in violent resisting arrest with an officer injury. The intent is to show what cops face daily but the result is to post all the evidence from an untried case online.
While legal, it is morally wrong to take a person’s worst moment, when they are not in control of their own behavior, and post these ‘official videos’ to shame them in the court of public opinion. Viewed through the (now sober) eyes of the defendant, who if they are a first time offender who has zero chance of going to prison, it is a different picture.
After the data of the incident is lawfully deleted (required by law and contract) from the server space rented by the taxpayer, this recording, serving no criminal justice purpose, can be devastatingly embarrassing and circulate then resurface on social media perpetually. In doing so, have we changed their standing in both the community and their neighborhood. Has this offender been stigmatized forever? Have they gone viral and become a national laughing stock? Is the purpose of law enforcement to serve as viral content creators?
THE DOUBT AND THE LACK OF TRANSPARENCY
When video is either unavailable, poor quality, or technical issues arise, this becomes the basis to doubt and question the integrity of the officers and the agency’s narrative.
A recent officer involved shooting in Chicago where body cameras were not deployed, caused civil unrest and looting on a grand scale, due to a lack of available equipment, prompted Mayor Lightfoot to state in an AP article” We can’t have people out on the street interfacing with the public on a regular basis who don’t have body cameras.”
In a 2018 incident, three officers shot and killed a violent criminal in a hospital emergency room who claimed to be armed while holding hostages. None of their body cameras captured the incident. The first officer had not been issued a body camera, the second was at the end of his shift and the battery had expired and the third put his SWAT gear, completely unintentionally, over the camera blocking its view. However, there was no absence of video recording this officer involved shooting. The entire incident was captured by the body cameras of up to six other officers on scene and coverage from the hospital's extensive high resolution security cameras. But the seed of doubt had been planted and relatives and local media hinted at a cover up.
PUBLISHING VIDEOS REGARDLESS OF REASON
Hannah Elka Meyers writes in her November 2020 article for the Washington Examiner ‘Body Camera Footage isn’t Building Bridges’:
“And clips depicting police violence are far more likely to be seen because departments are more likely to be obligated to share them publicly. In June, for instance, the New York Police Department mandated the release of all body camera footage of police shootings and other instances involving force and injury or death. These clips then go viral — people are drawn to the violence and are fired up by perceived injustice.”
Meyers also sparked a realization that resulted my in disgust and revulsion. The practice of trying to quell the fires by withholding the video of officer involved shootings or use of force resulting in death from the public - until the family and their civil rights injury attorneys get to view it. What a grotesque and inhumane practice! So far, it has never worked. Chiefs and sheriffs are frequently of the opinion that family viewing the graphic video of the violent death of their loved one at the hands of law enforcement will result in peace and a restoration of community trust. Instead, it has a record, currently 100%, of the kicking of a bucket of gasoline on the fires of destructive protest.
In what universe does any of this make any legal sense? Thomas Hogan, a former federal prosecutor and elected district attorney points out in City Journal the duty of cops and prosecutors alike in the preservation of evidence and maintaining the integrity of the jury process. It’s not like influencers on platforms are releasing video from their devices. Sheriffs and police chiefs, supposedly in the interest of transparency, are literally releasing ‘the peoples and the states’ case information publicly.
“Most states have adopted some version of these rules for prosecutors. Thus, prosecutors cannot make statements or release materials to the public that could affect the trial or increase public condemnation of the accused. And prosecutors have a duty to enforce the same rules for “law enforcement personnel” associated with the prosecutor.
It’s hard to imagine something more likely to taint a jury pool than public release of the video of an officer-involved shooting during a criminal investigation. The video angles may be limited, distorted, or confusing. The context of the shooting regarding what the officer and the civilian were doing prior to the video is absent. Once released, the video can be reduced to certain portions or even manipulated to provide false information, then re-circulated via traditional media or social media. For anyone who views the video of the shooting prior to trial, it would be difficult not to reach a firm conclusion about the guilt or innocence of the officer.”
WHAT VALUE IS THE OATH AND THE BADGE?
Police officers were a select group worthy of trust. The hiring criteria of candidates for such a position of investment of trust was a strenuous process. Many people who could, and couldn’t, meet the standard, understood the levity of the standard. A parking ticket didn’t require a photo of the vehicle in the parking space.
In the past, the process of arrest, technically the seizure of a person and the relief of their liberty, relied solely on the sworn testimony of the officer that they found just cause take them, limited to as much force as necessary, to face charges.
Today, temporary injunctions are issued within the four corners of a document by criminals, as officer accounts are doubted and delegitimized without the availability of a backup high quality video.
FOLLOW THE MONEY AND THE RESEARCH
Following the officer involved shooting of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson in 2014, the timing was perfect to suggest the presence of body camera video would have resolved the entire issue. Instead, we had the physical evidence of the scene, the injuries to the officer, the damage to the vehicle and the plausible testimony of the officer. On the other hand, we have the testimony of Dorian Johnson. Our first view of him is being surrounded by bigger gang members, clearly intimidating him, purporting to be an actual eyewitness, and claiming to have seen the event from several different angles. At the time of his testimony, Johnson had an active warrant related to lying to the police in Jefferson City, MO.
Following his testimony, several others presented impossible viewpoints. (During grand jury, one false witness stated on the record his complaint ‘you’ve proved my account is false, why do I keep getting called back again and again?’)
While activists opined that since there was no video of the encounter, ‘I guess we will never really know,’ as the police released video of the convenience store robbery immediately prior to the encounter, the same activists expressed outrage at the ‘prejudicial video.’
Cities, towns, and counties that couldn’t outfit their officers found millions and millions of dollars for the storage of terabytes of hours of video that will never be viewed. Florida officers were told to pay out of pocket to tint the front windows of their patrol vehicles due to budget constraints while multimillion dollar contracts were being negotiated for officer surveillance. State and federal funding poured into city and county coffers with money earmarked for the constant surveillance of officials, sworn by oath, as public servants.
What does the research say? What are the results of this new level of monitoring? In 2019, George Mason University did an aggregate review of most of the large studies that have been done over the previous eight years. Pew research summarizes “the study, which looked at 70 other body-worn camera studies published through June 2018, found the cameras have not had statistically significant effects on most measures of officer and citizen behavior or citizens’ views of police.”
In one of the few research projects that has some clear answers finds that:
• The behavior of officers appears only to change in a temporary fashion.
• Some studies found that deployment of body worn cameras resulted in a decrease in use of force, but a greater number of studies found that there was no discernible effect.
• They also found that officers were embracing them as an investigative instrument.
• In as much as the studies can measure, there has been no significant increase in community trust and in certain cases, privacy issues are found to concern the public to a greater degree.
• Baseless complaints on officers are down significantly when citizens are aware they are being recorded.
If the mission of body worn cameras sold to the public and the police was to develop greater transparency and close the gap of trust, the mission has failed in spectacular fashion.
To be clear from the beginning to the end, it was not the fault of the cameras, the storage servers, the public or the officers. It falls on the decision makers who have made the choices on how this data will be delivered.
The era of universal body worn camera programs was inevitable, but the manner police executive leadership pushed these measures prematurely, both technologically and culturally, has delegitimized policing.
Police leadership squandered the institutional trust that had been hard earned by sworn officers and exchanged the honor of our nation’s officers to appease the lies of the enemies of law and order.
The usurping the of authority of their sworn oath has undermined police legitimacy forever.
Keep our officers in your prayers!
https://apnews.com/428c2fba22b418280ef3c07acf4bc39c
https://www2.gmu.edu/news/577316
Lum, C, Stoltz, M, Koper, CS, Scherer, JA. Research on body‐worn cameras: What we know, what we need to know. Criminology & Public Policy. 2019; 18: 93– 118. https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12412
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2020/01/14/body-cameras-may-not-be-the-easy-answer-everyone-was-looking-for
https://www.manhattan-institute.org/bodycam-footage-isnt-building-bridges
https://www.city-journal.org/should-prosecutors-release-videos-of-officer-involved-shootings