A video evidence technician works in the Prince George’s County VHS locker. (IACP)
A strange coalition has formed around the police officer-worn body camera.
Their ubiquitous adoption is the sole policy change
requested by the family of Michael Brown, the teenager who was fatally
shot by an officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Police departments, too, hail
body cameras, saying that they will shield officers from false claims of
wrongdoing. Endorsed by law enforcement agencies, police reformists,
and equipment vendors, body cameras seem to promise accountability at a
time when police power seems untouchable.
Faced with cultural and political
issues that can seem intractable, the U.S. has suddenly and rapidly
adopted the little lenses and, with them, a new surveillance regime.
President Obama earlier this week announced $263 million in funding to purchase 50,000 body cameras for local police agencies.
As a Baltimore civil litigator told the Washington Post on Wednesday: “The body camera is here to stay.”
But a debate very similar to the
one around body cameras has happened before. Two decades ago, law
enforcement agencies—and activists hoping to change them—argued about a
different kind of mass video surveillance. That technology was not body
cameras but in-car dashboard cameras, tape recorders that filmed the
action in front of the car and preserved the audio of an officer’s
interactions with citizens.
As in today’s debate, in-car
cameras found support from both police chiefs and police reformists. Law
enforcement claimed video evidence would protect cops from post hoc
citizen grievances, while reformists claimed that surveilling cops would
reduce racial profiling.
At the end of the 1990s, a
combination of those arguments helped secure federal and private funding
to purchase in-car cameras en masse. Dash cams are now everywhere. The most recent federal data,
from 2007, states that 67 percent of state or local police departments
had at least some squad cars with cameras, and experts say that they’ve
only become more popular since.
The body camera debate now, in
other words, is where the dash-cam debate was 15 years ago. We can look
back at the promises that dash-cam advocates made and see where they
fell short—we can, in a limited way, predict the future from the past.
And while history doesn’t exactly repeat itself, understanding what was
supposed to happen with dash cams—and what actually did—takes us out of
the the fanciful future of shining screens and dystopian omniscience and
puts us in our own—where cops get tired, camera lenses get scummy, and
it’s harder to fix things than it is to buy them.
* * *
1. The adoption of body cameras will not all happen at once.
“I was skeptical of the cameras at first,” Michael Creamer, the chief deputy of the Franklin County Sheriff’s office in Ohio, told a New York Times reporter. “We’re not in the movie business. But they’ve been fantastic for us.”
He was speaking in April 1990
about the power of dashboard-mounted, in-car cameras. During a
six-month test run, he boasted, all 17 people who had been arrested for
drunk driving pleaded guilty because their arrests were caught on film.
(Most people who get arrested for drunk driving, the Times added, plead not guilty because of the crime’s “severe fines and jail terms.”)
“We’ll show the judge, the jury,
and the courtroom how they really looked driving on the wrong side,
falling down by their car, unable to walk a straight line or recite the
alphabet,” Creamer said. “It’s very hard to rebut that kind of
testimony.”
With such a strong endorsement,
it seems like a no-brainer for the government—at the local, state, or
federal level—to immediately pitch in and finish purchasing cameras.
Creamer mused to the Times that he wanted cameras in every car in his fleet.
But Franklin County had never
purchased those first, test-run cameras. In fact, no government agency
had purchased them. Creamer’s dash-cams came from Aetna Life and
Casualty, the private insurance company. Aetna was one of a number of
insurance firms at the time that hoped to reduce the
drunk-driving-related injuries—and their attendant medical bills—by
making enforcement of the law much more consistent and severe. A prime
way it could accomplish this? Ensuring that drivers arrested for DUIs
could be prosecuted for them.
In the United States, in-car
cameras have been purchased in two big waves historically. Creamer’s
cameras—and those underwritten by Aetna—were part of the first wave,
during the 1980s. The cameras in Franklin County weren’t installed to
monitor cops or citizens, but to solve a basic enforcement problem:
Without hard photographic evidence, it was difficult to prosecute drunk
drivers. So insurance companies and the recently formed group Mothers
Against Drunk Driving shelled out for police in-car cameras.
The second wave began during the
90s. Additional financial support in that wave came from the DEA, which
partnered with local agencies to catch drug trafficking on interstate
highways. Cameras, and especially microphones worn by cops, could
document suspects consenting to their car being searched—something
juries often had a hard time believing if police then found guns or
drugs.
But even with DEA assistance,
less than 40 percent of police departments had even some cars with dash
cams. The second wave could only kick into gear once a certain coalition
emerged—a political partnership that will look familiar to contemporary
eyes. More on that soon.
2. Most of the footage captured by body cams will be boring.
Albert J. Meehan
chairs the sociology department at Oakland University in Michigan. He’s
the son and grandson of police officers, and he’s been doing field
research with police departments since the 1970s.
About 10 years ago, he got access
to a nearby police department’s video archive and plowed through it
with an assistant. Instead of just focusing on police-citizen
encounters, he watched entire day-long shifts. It was not thrilling
work.
“If you look at the camera footage for eight hours, it’s pretty damn boring,” he told me.
Meehan saw routine traffic stops,
the car driving around and stopping for food, the officers giving out
parking tickets. And while he gained an understanding of individual
officers’ “style of policing and the community context,” it came slowly.
But he also said the tape helped him understand the contour of an
officer’s day, and where a bad encounter with citizens came from.
Something would annoy an officer in the morning, Meehan said, and you
could hear him or her stew on it through the rest of the day.
3. The cameras will record far more than just video.
In fact, they already do. In-car
cameras which exist right now record data and detail about the world far
beyond light and sound.
If a suspect throws something out
of a car while being chased by police, for instance, officers can press
a button on their dash cam to mark the area in GPS. After the pursuit
ends, cops can return to the location to see if the suspect threw out a
gun, drugs, or some piece of evidence.
They can also record whether the
officer had begun braking—an important detail if the car gets into a
crash. In short, the cameras preserve information about the car’s
location and state relevant to the image but more complete than it.
And so it would be with cop body
cameras. Even if today’s models record only audio and video, future body
cams will handle all sorts of other information. The video recording
will exist almost as a heads-up display on which to show more useful
data: GPS-determined location, weather, speed of movement, and whether a
cop had taken his gun or baton out of its holster.
4. The cameras will change how police officers see the world.
As with body cameras, the federal
government invested millions of dollars in in-car cameras without
really knowing if they worked.
“We have not performed any
research or funded any specific research within the Department of
Justice, and I have undertaken a review of social science literature
with respect to the use of audio-visual and I have not seen any
significant statistical research,” U.S. assistant attorney general Viet
Dinh confessed to Congress in 2001. It was not until the mid-2000s that
the DOJ researched whether its investment had succeeded, commissioning
the International Association of the Chiefs of Police (IACP) to report
on how departments were finding the technology.
Mike Fergus is a manager at the
IACP and was one of that report’s principal investigators. In his team’s
early interviews, he told me, police officers reported something funny:
that their attention to detail was slipping. Normally they’d rely on
their memory to fill out certain details of traffic stops, but now they
would listen to the audio recording or play the tape. Where cops felt
they once had acute memories, they now needed to see what the record
said.
5. The body camera will
change how departments see the world, too. Unless there are rules
against it, departments will use it to find subjects.
This isn’t a prediction, in fact: This has already started happening.
“If we didn’t arrest you that
night, if we didn’t arrest you later in the week, we’re certainly going
to find you and arrest you,” an Oakland, California, police spokeswoman told reporters
last week. That department made more than 200 arrests during
Ferguson-related protests Thanksgiving week, and now it plans to make
more.
Police say their investigation is just beginning as they continue to review police body cameras and other video sources.
Body cameras are already being used
to find suspects after the fact. New technology will only make this
easier. And unlike cumbersome old systems that required police
departments to store VHS tapes of dash cams, new systems store officer
footage, dispatcher alerts, and 911 calls together.
Experts talk of how much easier
it is now to link incidents into one story, tracking an event from call
to dispatch to first response to multiple cops’s arrival. Advances in
facial-recognition software and algorithmic video monitoring make
after-the-fact arrests even likelier.
6. But it will also become entertainment. Cops will trade video like Pokemon cards, and we’ll watch them too.
Both Fergus and Meehan noted that
the rise of filming officers matched a rise in popular broadcast of
police film. Fergus said it was “chicken or the egg” whether dash cams
or the TV show Cops came first. And both mentioned episodes of officers taking home footage from their own in-car cameras.
Fergus talked of how many cops
liked to learn from their own tapes. Officers would watch VHS tapes
after their shifts and replay incidents throughout the day, to learn how
they could do better.
One New York state trooper,
Fergus said, would regularly replay video of his own stops at his home,
to try to notice and correct mistakes in his work. One night, that
trooper’s school-age daughter asked him why a truck had sailed by so
close to him on the highway. Because he was focused so intently on
interacting with drivers, he hadn’t realized he was regularly standing
in a moving traffic lane.
But tapes were used for far more
than learning, said Meehan. As in-car cameras began to proliferate in
the late 1990s, he said that he noticed cops would begin to hold onto
audio and video recordings of their stops. But not just their own:
Officers were building personal libraries of notable audio and video
recordings. To Meehan, the sociologist, police officers were augmenting
what had been a mostly unwritten cop culture, full of dishy stories of
terrible stops, with AV.
“Officers were using technology
to supplement their stories, and reinforcing certain stereotypes about
police,” Meehan told me. He found cops who had built libraries of tapes
that depicted their work as dangerous, funny, or horror-filled. But he
also found cops whose libraries “reinforced negative stereotypes” about
policing.
That is: Their libraries were
racist. “There was an officer holding dispatch tapes from the 1967
Detroit riots,” Meehan told me. “I thought that was notable. This was
the late 1990s, so those tapes had floated around for 30 years.”
Video—especially digital video—is
slippery. If cops have body cams, they’ll get personal access to the
videos they record. And then they can view them whenever they want.
7. Getting cops to actually use the cameras will be hard.
When Meehan got access to a police department’s VHS archive, he found something striking: “Close to a quarter were degaussed.”
That is, 23 percent of the tapes were blank or staticky.
To the department’s sergeants and
police chief, he said, “this was not really a surprise.” While some
police departments lock their video-evidence room, many leave them
unlocked. Degaussing machines are often available in these unlocked
rooms too. (As to whether the tapes were blank because of equipment
failures, his study noted that “few malfunctions were reported in the
video logs.”)
“They don’t want to know,” he said of supervisors. “They have what I call a studied inattentiveness.”
Meehan spoke of a complicated
cat-and-mouse game among equipment designers, beat cops, and the
supervisors who manage them. Many officers resent in-car cameras,
feeling that they reveal a lack of trust in officers, and didn’t use
them. So dash-cam designers programmed the cameras to turn on
automatically as soon as a patrol car’s emergency lights went on.
But cops still got to decide whether to turn on the microphone or not.
As Meehan and two other sociologists wrote:
In terms of actual microphone use, the microphone was turned off 95 percent of the time, with partial or complete audio the other five percent of the time. This demonstrates the limited application that audio recordings might have on examinations of issues such as consent searches. […] The researchers found that officers selectively turn on microphones at certain parts of the encounter, and turn them off during other parts of an encounter.
“These technologies try to design
and decrease opportunities for human resistance,” Meehan told me
Wednesday. “But typically police departments still provide an
off-switch.”
Or, if not an off-switch, they
provide an analog one. Many dash-cams are on swivels. When cops pull
someone over, they’re instructed to swivel the camera so it faces the
driver.
“I can tell you from looking at
thousands of hours of tape: Officers aren’t swiveling their cams when
they make a traffic stop," said Meehan. “Sometimes they’ll pull over in
an odd direction for safety reasons, but won’t swivel. It’s understood
they’ll swivel it when it serves their purpose.”
This kind of dance between
technologies trying to hold cops accountable and cops themselves has
been going on for centuries, Meehan says. Back when cops on patrol had
to pull certain levers to signify they had walked their beat, they’d
stay in the station and pay just one cop to go out and pull levers for
them. Or, huddling inside during a cold night, they’d place their metal
badges by the window so they stayed cold. When the sergeant touched
their badges in the morning, it would have seemed like they had spent a
chilly night outside.
And when the tapes were
allowed to work, Fergus said, they revealed many things about the cops.
Reviewing tape later, he said sergeants “could tell if an officer had
problems in his personal life because it would show up in their work.”
8. Storage will be a headache.
Many police departments aren’t
ready to handle the thousands of hours of digital video—and accompanying
metadata—body cameras will generate. Fergus remembered a sight his
investigative team encountered: the Prince George’s County video archive
in Maryland, where the archivist was surrounded by piles and piles of
tapes. Some were in green boxes—meaning they were run-of-the-mill
footage and could be discarded after two years—and some were in red
boxes, meaning they were evidence relevant to an investigation.
In some ways, digital video has
made storage less burdensome. But especially for large fleets, body
cameras will generate thousands of hours of footage every day. Storing
those files for years—or longer, depending on local records laws—will be
exceptionally costly.
9. They won’t reduce certain types of racist policing.
As with body cameras, in-car cameras were supported by an unusual alliance.
When a government report revealed
that most assaults on police officers happened while he or she was on
uniformed patrol, departments turned to dash cams. As one of the authors
of the IACP report said, in-car cameras could speak for officers when
they couldn’t speak for themselves.
But in-car cameras were also seen
as a way to stop—or, at least, document—police racial profiling. Cops
would act differently, advocates claimed, when they knew they were being
monitored. With in-car cameras and audio recordings, the same officer’s
interactions with white and black drivers could be directly compared.
This case was so strong that when Seattle tried to reduce profiling in
the early 2000s, its mayor proposed that officers should fill out a
race-based survey after every traffic stop—and also be monitored by dash cams.
Sometimes, in-car cameras were
seen as a way to avoid that kind of expensive data-collection in the
first place. According to a 2003 Northeastern University report, Texas,
Minnesota, and Missouri all allow for in-car cameras to function “in
lieu of or in addition to collecting data” about racial profiling. That
is, if police departments installed dash cams, they didn’t need to go
through the costly work of monitoring racial profiling statistically.
Backed by this unlikely alliance
of activists and law-enforcement agencies, support for in-car cameras
surged. So did funding. From 2000 to 2004, the DOJ handed out $21
million in grants to state and local agencies so they could purchase
their own in-car cameras. At the beginning of that period, only 11
percent of state police cars had in-car cams. By 2004, 72 percent of
them did. The grants ultimately put dash cams in cars in 49 states and
the District of Columbia.
This was the second wave of dash-cam adoption. In 2000, while the first grants were being handed out, only 40 percent of sheriff’s offices
had dash cams. Three years later, that percentage had jumped by 18
points. By 2007, it had increased by nine more—such that 67 percent of
sheriffs had in-car cameras.
But did all that investment stem racial profiling?
I can find no large-scale
national or state studies of the effect of in-car cameras on racial
profiling. But anecdotal evidence and smaller studies suggest the answer
is no.
In one of his studies, Meehan
examined a suburban police force whose largely white municipality
bordered a heavily black area. Officers in that force still pulled over
black drivers at a rate two to three times what the population would
predict. Racial profiling, in other words, was rampant—in a force that
had installed dash cams five years prior.
In Seattle, too, racial profiling
remains a problem. Almost a decade after that city installed in-car
cameras, the Department of Justice found “routine and widespread use of excessive force by officers”
and racially biased policing. It mandated stronger controls on use of
force, many of which are now being implemented. Though it's not clear
how far they’ll get. In August, 100 Seattle police officers sued the DOJ, calling the new policies “mechanical” and burdensome.
10. Just because a public record is made doesn't mean the public will ever see it.
As any crime reporter
can tell you, obtaining public records from the police can be an
enormous challenge. Many departments lack the resources necessary to
fulfill such requests—which, conveniently, makes a great excuse for the
departments that have have something to hide.
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