Body Cameras
or Band Aids
By Albert B. Kelly
Over the last year, with
stories about excessive use of force on the part of police coming from
communities large and small, there’s been a growing chorus claiming the answer
to the problem is to be found in the use of body cameras by police.
I can clearly see the
benefits of body camera’s and their use makes sense in terms of more
transparency, accountability, and as a check on individual behavior; but body
camera’s should not be viewed as a silver bullet to solve every problem and the
use of camera’s may create some unintended consequences.
When and if body cameras
become standard fare everywhere, it probably won’t be long before some
enterprising soul sees an opportunity to make money from the footage and before
you know it, we’ll all be sitting there watching a reality TV show of nothing
but body camera footage of these interactions.
Of course we have TV shows
like Cops, but my guess is that “Body Cam TV” would find a way to break some new
ground as entertainment. Body cameras would certainly make the few bad cops
more accountable, but they might also remove the use of discretion exercised by
the many good cops; something that’s part of community policing.
I also wonder about the
people captured on this footage that just happened to be nearby an encounter
but had no connection to it. Would they have any rights or would their faces be
plastered all over the media with no recourse?
Then there is the fact
that when people interact with police, they are often at their worst. Should
those moments now become entertainment for the rest of us? I could easily see
body cameras having a chilling effect so that the public (not just the bad guys)
would avoid police at all costs.
Then there are other
issues. Most body cameras can be turned off. Would we be satisfied if the
device were shut off midway through an encounter with a bad outcome and the
response were an “oops, it was an inadvertent shut-off”…like the inadvertent
whistle in sports?
What would constitute a
complete video record? Would fragments of footage be admissible in court and
what about “grainy” footage? Would exculpatory video be provided by prosecutors
to the defense or would the footage go missing before the trial began? Could prosecutors manipulate footage to
support their case?
How about tainting the
jury pool? Today there’s always the worry that media coverage of a case might
make it impossible for the accused to get a fair trial which is why there are
motions for a change of venue. How do we think it will go when prosecutors
“leak” body cam footage when it serves their purposes?
I also wonder if the use
of body cameras might not come with its own built-in bias; meaning cameras
always rolling in the low income neighborhoods but not so much in the wealthy
suburbs or amongst the rich and powerful.
I would also be concerned
that “footage” would drown out other evidence. It’s a lot easier to gawk at
footage in a courtroom than to listen to testimony from witnesses and experts providing
more technical information. Why strain the brain when you can look at video-
it’s easy to be mentally lazy. Footage might gain undue weight over other
evidence.
How about issues of
storage? If body cameras became standard practice, we’d be talking about huge
daily-weekly-monthly quantities of footage. How long would police be required
to maintain the footage and when could they destroy it?
What about the cost and
method of storing all that video? If it were stored in “the cloud” could it be
easily hacked? In terms of the costs, would we now impose a fee on those we
arrest with the idea that these “fees” would cover storage costs? Would such fees
impact low income and minority communities disproportionately?
There are a lot of
questions yet to be answered. Body cameras work for very specific purposes, but
sometimes I wonder if the use of cameras is not just a big band aid in the name
of transparency; a relatively quick fix that lets officials have the appearance
of doing something now.
Cameras have their place,
but maybe the bigger part of reigning in excessive force is tied to the culture
of “zero tolerance”. There was a time when arresting someone was the last
resort. Today, it is often a first step and the encounter, by its very nature,
creates the flashpoints. Rather than record the flashpoints, maybe we need to
lessen them.