NYT has an excellent long read that evaluates the use of body cameras by police departments. It’s a sobering reminder on the limits to the use of technology in governance.
Body cameras were once considered the holy grail to get police officers exercise restraint and thereby address the chronic problem of abuse and excess.
When body-worn cameras were introduced a decade ago, they seemed to hold the promise of a revolution. Once police officers knew they were being filmed, surely they would think twice about engaging in misconduct. And if they crossed the line, they would be held accountable: The public, no longer having to rely on official accounts, would know about wrongdoing. Police and civilian oversight agencies would be able to use footage to punish officers and improve training…
In 2013, Judge Shira Scheindlin was hearing testimony in a federal lawsuit in which multiple advocacy groups claimed that the Police Department’s aggressive “stop and frisk” policy was racially biased and unconstitutional… Two months later, Scheindlin issued a historic ruling that New York’s stop-and-frisk practices were unconstitutional. She ordered the Police Department to begin piloting body-worn cameras, writing that they were “uniquely suited to addressing the constitutional harms at issue in this case.” Scheindlin laid out three different ways the cameras would help: “First, they will provide a contemporaneous, objective record of stops and frisks.” She continued: “Second, the knowledge that an exchange is being recorded will encourage lawful and respectful interactions on the part of both parties. Third, the recordings will diminish the sense on the part of those who file complaints that it is their word against the police.”
… the technology represented the largest new investment in policing in a generation... Body-worn cameras were adopted by police departments across the country in the wake of widespread Black Lives Matter protests in 2014, sparked when Michael Brown was killed by the police in Ferguson, Mo... President Barack Obama put the cameras at the center of his plans to restore trust in policing. Cities quickly began spending millions on the devices, expenditures that continue today for storage and software. Los Angeles has spent nearly $60 million since getting cameras in 2016... New York City has spent more than $50 million...
But its outcomes have turned out very different from expectations.
As policymakers rushed to equip the police with cameras, they often failed to grapple with a fundamental question: Who would control the footage? Instead, they defaulted to leaving police departments, including New York’s, with the power to decide what is recorded, who can see it and when. In turn, departments across the country have routinely delayed releasing footage, released only partial or redacted video or refused to release it at all. They have frequently failed to discipline or fire officers when body cameras document abuse and have kept footage from the agencies charged with investigating police misconduct... But whether citizens benefit from the cameras they’re paying for is often up to the police, who have often been able to keep footage hidden from the public in even the most extreme cases... The reporting reveals that without further intervention from city, state and federal officials and lawmakers, body cameras may do more to serve police interests than those of the public they are sworn to protect.
To Seth Stoughton, a former police officer who is now a professor at the Joseph F. Rice School of Law at the University of South Carolina, body cameras represent the latest chapter in America’s quest for a technological fix to the deeply rooted problem of unchecked state power. “Dash cams were supposed to solve racial profiling,” he says. “Tasers and pepper spray were supposed to solve undue force. We have this real, almost pathological draw to ‘silver bullet’ syndrome. And I say that as a supporter of body-worn cameras.”
Technology does not address the problems of poor governance, political economy, deeply rooted cultural attributes etc. If the stakes associated with some issue is very high, not even the most sophisticated the technology can address it.
The secrecy undercuts the deterrent effect on officer behavior that many had presumed body cameras would produce. Three years before the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck, body-camera video caught him kneeling on the necks of others. In 2017, Chauvin dragged a handcuffed Black woman out of her house, slammed her to the ground and then pressed his knee into her neck for nearly five minutes. Three months later, Chauvin hit a 14-year-old Black boy at least twice in the head with a heavy flashlight, choked him and pushed him against a wall. The boy cried out in pain and passed out. Chauvin pushed a knee into his neck for 15 minutes as the boy’s mother, reaching to help him, begged, “Please, please do not kill my son!”
The footage was left in the control of a department where impunity reigned. Supervisors had access to the recordings yet cleared Chauvin’s conduct in both cases… “Chauvin should have been fired in 2017,” says Robert Bennett, a lawyer who represented both of the victims… A Department of Justice report from this summer found that the secrecy and impunity was all part of a larger pattern in the Minneapolis Police Department. Shootings, beatings and other abuse had routinely been captured on video. But the department didn’t make the footage public or mete out punishment… There was a similar dynamic in Memphis, where officers in a street-crimes unit regularly abused residents. They wore body cameras but faced no consequences until the case of Tyre Nichols, who was beaten to death this January by officers in the unit, attracted national attention.
There’s the issue of policy intent, as illustrated by the NYPD’s body cameras policy of 2017,
No video would automatically become public. Anyone that requested it would have to go through an opaque, often slow-moving Freedom of Information process — in which the department itself would be the arbiter of what would be released (though the courts could review that decision). The policy blunted the technology’s potential for accountability in other ways. Officers could decide when to start filming, instead of at the beginning of all interactions as the public wanted. And while the public had little access to footage, the police had privileged access: Officers who were the subjects of complaints would be allowed to watch the footage before having to give any statements — something that could allow them to tailor their accounts to the video. The policy was “so flawed that the pilot program may do little to protect New Yorkers’ civil rights,” Ian Head and Darius Charney of the Center for Constitutional Rights wrote in a guest essay in The New York Times. “Instead, it might shield police officers from accountability when they engage in misconduct.”
The lack of policy intent is demonstrated by the obfuscation and excuses given by the Departments in response to requests to release video footage of incidents under the Freedom of Information Act.
After it rejected her initial request, she appealed the decision. The department sent her some redacted footage but again rejected her request for all of it. Disclosing the full footage would be an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy,” the department wrote. Whose privacy — the dead man’s or the officers’ — was not explained. Releasing the full footage, the department insisted, could “endanger the life or safety of any person.”
Even oversight institutions within the government struggle to access the video footage,
The city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board had been vested with the responsibility to investigate New Yorkers’ allegations against the police… Nicole Napolitano… joined the review board as its new director of policy and advocacy in September 2017… As with most civilian boards across the country, the agency did not have its own access to footage. Like the public, it, too, had to rely on the cooperation of the department. To try to obtain footage, the board had to navigate a baroque multistep process. Written requests were submitted to a department “liaison” unit, which in turn forwarded them to the legal unit for review. Then the department had to locate the footage, which was a significant undertaking because it wasn’t cataloging the footage in any systematic way. Unlike in many other cities, the department’s cameras had no GPS location data. If a civilian making a complaint didn’t know an officer’s name or badge number, investigators and even the department could have a hard time finding footage. Perhaps most problematic for Napolitano, though, was the fact that the review board’s investigators had to agree to a strict set of conditions before watching videos of incidents. If they spotted other, unrelated misconduct, they were not allowed to investigate it… Napolitano and her colleagues noticed an even more troubling trend: The department would often tell the review board that the footage it requested didn’t exist — only for the civilian agency to later discover that wasn’t true. According to an analysis the agency put out in early 2020, this happened in nearly one of every five cases.
Internal controls just breakdown completely and egregiously when there’s no institutional resolve to address the problem.
This year, a federal court monitor wrote a scathing report about persistent problems with stop-and-frisk, the unconstitutional policing tactic that prompted Judge Scheindlin to order the department to adopt body cameras a decade ago. The monitor found that contrary to Scheindlin’s expectations, police supervisors weren’t using footage to flag misconduct. In a sample of cases the monitor looked at, supervisors reviewing footage of stop-and-frisk encounters concluded that 100 percent of the cases they looked at were proper stops. The court monitor reviewed the same footage and found that 37 percent of the stops were unconstitutional.
This conclusion about the reluctance of the Police Departments to use footage to enforce accountability is apt.
“Body cams are essential, if done right,” says a high-ranking commander who just retired and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he still works in law enforcement. “They are a game changer.” He added: “If there’s a problem, you flag — and potentially there’s discipline. But that’s not happening in most cases.”… “Body-worn cameras have not been exploited the way they should be,” says Jeff Schlanger, the former deputy commissioner. “The way to true reform is through using body cams as an early-warning system, as a way to correct small mistakes before they become big mistakes. But there weren’t a lot of discussions about it. The N.Y.P.D. needs to do a lot better.”
This is the kind of commitment required to make such technologies succeed.
One of the most comprehensive studies of the use of body cameras, a 2019 meta-analysis led by researchers at George Mason University, recommended that police departments consider using footage the way sports teams use game tape, to regularly review and improve performance.
Some observations:
There’s no denying that body camera is a very effective device to capture police actions and incidents. But body cameras are not very effective in reducing the problem of abusive actions and use of excess force by police officers. The difference between the two lies in the challenges arising from the use of body cameras to monitor and administer the actions of officers in police departments.
This is the challenge with new many new ideas. Translating an idea or innovation to implementation at scale is a near universal problem, and involves the issue of how the new idea interacts with the system’s environment.
Impact evaluations done in sanitised environments and supervised by energetic and committed research assistants merely assess the technical efficacy of body cameras in detecting abuses and excesses. They do not evaluate the efficacy of these cameras in reducing the systemic problem of abuses and excesses by police officers. In fact, they cannot ever evaluate such efficacy since there are too many confounders and systems vary widely in their characteristics.
The technology innovation, body cameras here, have to be complemented with its effective deployment (positioned to capture actions, should not be possible for the police officer to tinker with it etc) and its effective adoption by the primary stakeholder (the police department in monitoring errant actions and administering disciplinary action). The last, in particular, is dependent on state capability, systemic culture, and governance. And none of these are addressed by the technology innovation.
Technology solutions are rarely the solution to intractable systemic problems on social/public issues. At best they can improve things at the margins. In any case, without addressing the institutional structures or incentives or cultures that create these problems, technology solutions are unlikely to be of much use.
The most important requirement for successful adoption of such new technologies is institutional commitment. Without such commitment, the innovation is a non-starter. The system will easily stifle the innovation and leave it a failure or even worse than before.
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