How Police Body Cameras Work | Stuff You Should Know Podcast (Transcript)
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How Police Body Cameras Work | Stuff You Should Know Podcast (Transcript)
Length: 47 mins
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from howstuffworks.com.
Josh Clark: Hey and welcome to the podcast. I’m Josh Clark, there’s Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there’s Jerry over there. So this is Stuff You Should Know, the ever-expanding law enforcement edition.
Charles W. Chuck Bryant: Yet another.
JC: Yeah. [Laughs] We just did one, didn’t we?
CB: Yeah.
JC: I can’t remember which one it was.
CB: Yeah, we’re in together now.
JC: Yeah, we’ve done a lot.
CB: Yup, body cameras and kind of, when I picked this one thought, “Well, I don’t know if there’s a whole lot there,” but it ended being a little more interesting than I thought, to be honest.
JC: Yeah, there’s a lot there, at least culturally too.
CB: Yeah, totally.
JC: So we’re talking body cameras and they’re pretty straightforward at their base, but once you kind of start looking at the cultural baggage associated with them, why they’re being used, it is a pretty mushrooming topic for sure. And, apparently, back in 2005, the Brits started using them.
CB: That surprised me.
JC: Yeah, because, I mean, the city of London, I don’t think there’s a square inch that isn’t under surveillance, you know?
CB: Yeah, and they’re just pretty technologically forward I think.
JC: Sure.
CB: The first cellphone I ever saw was in London.
JC: Oh, really?
CB: Yeah.
JC: I always think of Japan and Korea for that kind of stuff.
CB: Well, maybe there too, but I didn’t go to either one of those places in the early 90s.
JC: I got you. So you’re like, London’s in your head for that.
CB: Yes.
JC: So with, I guess the UK in particular, once they started using body cameras, they started using them more and more and more, and that’s definitely the case with the United States more recently. And, apparently, there’s a pilot program that really started the whole thing off back in 2012 in a little town called Rialto, California, which is about 50 miles east of Los Angeles. And in Rialto, I’m not sure what the impetus was, but the police chief and a criminologist got together and said, “Let’s try this.” They gave half of the police force body cameras to wear and then switched and gave the other half, I guess the second half of the year, throughout all of 2012
CB: Yeah, and what they were mainly tracking were two different things, incidences of police force and then civilian complaints against officers, generally, after use of police force, but just complaints period, basically.
JC: Yeah, and the results are pretty surprising, I think.
CB: Yeah, the officers who wore the cameras used force half as often, just generally, would use 50%… Not 50% less force; that’s a little misleading. They would use force 50% less.
JC: Of the time.
CB: Of the time, yes. And then, the complaints filed, they said they couldn’t really… There were so few complaints, they couldn’t really draw a good statistical conclusion, but there was a 90% reduction, compared with 2011, of complaints. And they found out other stuff too. I looked into the study, and this is just the commentary from the research team, these aren’t facts and figures, but you do a study like this and then they analyze it and then they say, “This is what I think.” They say that their research shows that people tend to adhere to social norms and change their conduct once they’re aware that their behavior is being observed, and that the body-worn cameras can be a straightforward, pragmatic message, “You’re being watched to videotape and expected to follow the rules,” and apparently this, what they call self-awareness effect, is a neutral third eye that works on both sides. They said, “Suspects tend to cool down their aggressive actions more and it deters officers from reacting excessively or unnecessarily with force.” So it kind of works both ways. And the final thing I thought was really interesting was it had what they call a spillover effect, which was even officers that weren’t using the cameras, because they did, like you said, with half the force at a time, they had fewer incidences of force used and they speculate that they just think there’s a conscious effort, then, going on to improve their behavior so that the officers that had the cameras being watched didn’t have an advantage or a disadvantage. They sort of normalized the whole thing even if they weren’t wearing a camera.
JC: I had not heard that part at all.
CB: Yeah, I mean it’s a speculation, but it sort of makes sense.
JC: So the Rialto study is really often cited because it was the first of its kind in the United States and because the results were so surprising. So Rialto, the city, immediately was like, “Okay, all officers now have body cameras,” after the results came in. And it just happened that this took place, the study took place, right before a couple of very high profile police-involved deaths; Eric Garner and then Michael Brown. And Michael Brown’s death, in particular, raised the issue of body-worn cameras, which is the general term for the cameras police are wearing, because Darren Wilson, who shot Michael Brown, the police officer who shot him 6 times, gave one account of the story and witnesses gave another account of the story. And so, when Michael Brown’s death kind of became part of a national conversation, and especially with Eric Garner’s death, too, which immediately preceded, I think like a month before, back in 2014, Eric Garner’s death was full-on videotaped by a guy who was standing there recording it on his cellphone, and it got out and it was released to the public and it started this national conversation about police brutality, but it also had this other real aspect to it that this conversation might not be happening were it not for video documentation of Eric Garner’s death. So the fact that this is happening at a time right after Rialto has had this study, people are looking around saying, “There’s the entire swath, these communities have had this, what was called a simmering distrust, of the police.” They’ve had it forever, but now, all of a sudden, the rest of the nation’s paying attention to this very important issue. And, “These body cameras worked so well for this little town in east of Los Angeles, maybe we should start to institute those,” and, all of a sudden, the Department Of Justice starts shelling out $43 million in grants for local law enforcement to buy body cameras, and there was this idea that, “Good. The problem is solved,” but to a lot of people, at least in part, myself included, it kind of seems like this could just be a Band-Aid. Does it actually solve anything or does it actually just underscore the distrust on both sides? Like, “I don’t trust that you’re not going to file a false report about me being brutal on you, so I’m recording you and I have to wear this because the federal government knows that you don’t trust me and I might beat you up extra-judiciously.” So if neither side trusts one another, and you just have a video camera observing the whole thing, does that actually solve anything or does it just underscore the distrust? That’s probably the biggest question to me that came out of researching this episode.
CB: Yeah, I think, for me, it’s not a magic pill by any means, but it’s another tool that can help is what I think.
JC: Right, but then issue to me then is you can’t just overly rely on that one tool. I think it kind of has a tendency to lull people into complacency like, “Okay, we’ve got this tool out there now; we don’t have to worry about the actual underlying issues.”
CB: Yeah, and we’ll get into… I mean, there’s a bunch of reasons why it’s not a magic pill. We’ll get into all those later, but as of right now, it was hard to get 2017 statistics, but I got one from about a year ago that said, 43 of the 68 major cities now, what they call the major police forces in the US, now use body cameras. However, 95% say that they will begin to use them and are taking steps to do so. But however, and this is one of the issues of why it’s not a magic pill, only 3% of these, and this is a survey, only 3% of the officers reported recording 7+ hours per day; and that’s in a typical… I think, what do they work, generally 12 hours at a time?
JC: Yeah, from what I understand.
CB: So only 3% are recording 7 of those hours, 49% recorded… Less than 50% recorded 3 or fewer hours per day. So that’s one of the big issues, is some departments… Well, I mean, it varies from department and locality to locality on what the rules are. Some of them say, “All right, well, here’s your body camera, but you don’t have to use it.” Some of them say, “Use it during any confrontation with a citizen, any call that you have to make.” Some say, “Well, you got to turn it off when you go into a private residence,” because, as we’ll talk about a little later, the ACLU, you know, it’s a privacy issue when you’re filming people without their consent that could, potentially, be released, but surprisingly a little bit, the ACLU eventually kind of said, “No, we would rather have the officers wear these even though it’s a privacy issue for citizens.” It’s a tricky thing.
JC: Oh man, it is a can of worms like no other.
CB: I mean I think everyone knows what these are, we haven’t even said yet. These are cameras that police officers wear on their body. The ones I’ve mostly seen, they wear sort of on their chest.
JC: Yeah, where their CB used to be.
CB: Yeah, some of them, though, are on the shoulder or on the helmet or on the collar, but mostly, I’ve seen the one that… It kind of actually looks like a little CB whatever you call it, not a CB handle because that’s Rubber Ducky in the truck. [Laughs]
JC: What?
CB: You know, the CB handle is what your name is.
JC: Right, right.
CB: And Rubber Ducky was from Convoy I think, wasn’t it?
JC: Was it?
CB: I think so.
JC: The movie or the song?
CB: Well, the song was from the movie.
JC: Or the improv troupe?
CB: [Laughs] Oh, man, those guys are great.
CB: Yeah. So, the receiver? But you talk into it, the mouthpiece.
JC: Okay. I’ll just call it the walkie-talkie part.
CB: The walkie-talkie part? Anyways, generally mounted on the chest and there are many manufacturers that make these now, some of them are wireless, some of them have high def, some of them have one-touch activation and ultra-wide angle. Because that’s one of the issues why it’s not a magic pill; the view that they get, if it’s not a wide angle, is a chest high view of whatever the officers’ body is pointed at, not necessarily what their face was looking at or where their eyes were looking. It’s okay, but it’s not a solve for everything and all issues.
JC: No, it’s not because, as we’ll get into later, if something happens off camera that isn’t captured, like a suspect reaching for a gun, but on camera, all of a sudden, the cop is just standing there and then the next thing you know, he pulls his gun out and shoots the guy, is like, “Well, that cop just went berserk,” because the camera didn’t capture that thing.
CB: Most of them have a time and date stamp, some of them have the badge number of the cop, some of them have GPS coordinates, some of them take still photos, some stream to remote devices. Very few of them can you actually, like an iPhone where it has a screen that you can watch it, but some of them can hook up to an app to your phone where you can watch it. It’s very advanced.
JC: Right. I read this article about the one that Taser’s putting out; it was largely about that. It was a Motherboard article by Alex Pasternack and he talks about how one of the big concerns is the addition of facial recognition, like computer facial recognition, because supposedly, I didn’t know this, half of Americans have their face in a facial recognition database already. So if you’re just somebody walking past one of these cameras and it has facial recognition attached to it, it will say, “Oh, well, there went Josh Clark. He was here on this day at this time.”
CB: “And he’s wanted for murder.”
JC: Right. Well, that was part of the point. It’s like, well, the camera can pick it up and then the database can let you know, “Go get that guy; he’s wanted for murder.” But also, if you are a private citizen, is your right against unlawful search and seizure being violated by that kind of thing? And, apparently, that is definitely a direction that these cameras are starting to go now. Facial recognition will soon be the next step as they’re deployed further and further; it’s gonna be a common feature on them.
CB: Yeah, another feature that most of these cameras have now, and this is a very interesting one because this kind of played out recently to be significant, is a buffering pre-record. So if this camera’s on, it’s recording, but it records in 30-second or 60-second intervals with no audio most of the time. So what’s happening is, even if the cop has not pressed record, it’s recording and erasing over itself constantly if it’s turned on. So what happens when the cop hits record is it’s gonna have that 30 or 60 seconds tagged onto it and that gets saved, which can be a big asset if the cop, you know… A lot of times, a cop will see something and turn it on, but they have just missed what’s happened, but it’ll grab that 30 seconds, which can be a big help, or, in the case of Baltimore, it can bust a cop planting evidence.
JC: Yeah, I saw that too. So that, to me, was more like interpretation of video. What was your take on it?
CB: Well, no, there were two of them. The most recent one was interpretation of video; I think there was one previous to that where it actually caught the cop planting evidence because he didn’t know that the 30-second buffer was happening.
JC: Oh, really? I didn’t see that one.
CB: And then that may have been, I’m not sure in this case, but sometimes it’s uploaded to a cloud and it’s there.
JC: Right.
CB: The second one, I think, was… What it looks like is the cops made a concerted effort to organize and deploy their cameras at specific times to get away with planting evidence. That’s the speculation. This is all very brand new in the news, but there are cops saying, “Do you have yours on? You’re not supposed to have yours on yet,” saying things like that. And, of course, the ACLU and the prosecutors are saying, “This is clearly the cops trying to coordinate this thing with their cameras.”
JC: Yeah, staging reality.
CB: Yeah, and that’s something that’s gonna start happening more and more. I mean, ideally, all cops are doing really good work and you don’t have to worry about that, but there’s been plenty of cases over the years of bad cops doing bad things, and now, with these body cameras, they’re gonna have to find a way to get around it.
JC: Yeah, can I just say something real quick? So the whole issue to me is this, right? I think I probably come off as distrustful of cops sometimes and, to me, as a society, we give cops a tremendous amount of power over us, right? And we give it to them in exchange for them upholding the law and protecting us, right, when we need it. But the problem is, if that trust is broken, then that’s a huge issue because you go, suddenly, from… Because you can’t do anything about it and you go from being a protected citizen to being a hostage of the state, right? So that means, to me, that police have to be above reproach. They have to be as angelic as possible, right? If they’re called into question for something, there shouldn’t even be the slightest hint that they’re being protected or it’s being covered up or anything like that and government needs to step in and do something about it and that has not been the case. Government has broken down in its role of overseeing police when the question of trust is brought up and what you’re left with then is a citizenry that says, “I don’t trust the cops any longer,” and just as bad as that, “I don’t trust the governments to root out bad cops when that trust is broken.”
CB: Yeah, but that power structure is still there; that doesn’t change.
JC: Exactly, exactly. So we’re all hostages now to the cops, it’s clearer than ever now. That’s my problem. I’m not saying that that is necessarily the case or that even if it is the case, it’s the case across the board. I think there are plenty and plenty and plenty of good cops out there who really do hold themselves to a very high standard, but the fact is there are bad cops out there too and I don’t believe that bad cops are rooted out and prosecuted like they should be and that the trust between the citizens and the police has eroded as a result and the government has totally dropped the ball in repairing that.
CB: Yeah, and especially tough, too, when every bad cop documentary you’ve ever seen, 100% of them, the first thing you hear cops saying is, “Well, the first rule is you got to cover for your buddy cops.” Even if you don’t agree with them, you don’t rat out a cop. And so then you’re like, “Man…”
JC: I think cops also subscribe, almost across the board, to what’s right is right, though, you know what I mean?
CB: Yeah, sure.
JC: And that they do kind of tend to go toward that. I like to think that, I want to think that and I hope I’m not being naive in thinking that.
CB: All right. You want to take a break?
JC: Yeah.
CB: All right. Let’s do it and we’ll talk a little more about body cameras.
CB: All right, we’re back with a little more of the mundane, which is the cost of these things. They can go up to about 900 bucks or as low as the low hundreds, so let’s just say an average of 400 or 500 bucks for a system. And if you have a large police force, of 6–800 cops, that’s a lot of dough.
JC: It is, but Uncle Sam is offsetting a lot of that.
CB: Yeah, for sure. And I think everyone is in favor of these. I think our article points out, in a very astute way, ideally, these things can provide clarity, but at the very least, it’s just another measure in place to help protect citizens and police.
JC: Yes, but there is a group who say, “No, these are kind of a bad idea and I find this suspicious that the government is supporting this so whole-heartedly, that it’s just advancing the surveillance state that much more, normalizing the idea of people being recorded everywhere they go all the time even in interacting with other people.”
CB: Yeah.
JC: So I think there are some people who just don’t even like the idea of body-worn cameras at all.
CB: Well, citizens and cops probably.
JC: Right.
CB: So another big problem, or not… Well, I guess it is sort of a problem or challenge at least, is how to store this information. Depending on where you are, they use Oakland as an example in this article, 600 cops, 600 body cameras generates about 7 terabytes of video every month and storing this stuff is a big challenge because, depending on where you are, you have a lot of rules in place because this is evidence, potentially, and you can’t just store it any way you like. In Oakland, they have to keep it for two years; if anything that’s involved in an investigation, it’s longer than that. Duluth Minnesota, they point out, it’s 30 days; Laurel, Maryland has 6 months. That’s a lot of data and the security standards are really strict and they got to figure out how to store this stuff, how to do it safely. And, because people that know how to make money are behind this, there are companies that, very smartly, are coming up with complete systems that will offer a police department and say, “Hey, we got you covered. We will take of your storage, we will comply with all your rules and regulations, we’ll train your people,” because you got to hire in house people just to keep track of the data, “and we’ll do it all for you.”
JC: Exactly, Taser, apparently, has one heck of a system where, when the officer puts their body-worn camera on the dock to charge, it simultaneously starts uploading all of the day’s recording, right?
CB: To the cloud, right? Yeah.
JC: So yeah, and it goes to the cloud and multiple people have access to it, but any interaction with the video is logged automatically by the system. If somebody goes to delete it, only certain people have access to delete files. But again, multiple people do, and so, if somebody goes to delete it, the other people who have the ability to delete it are notified, so it spreads out accountability. So it’s like, “Well, wait a minute, I’m going down too for letting you delete it, so what are you deleting this for?” kind of thing. It’s a pretty smart system. From what I read from Pasternack, in particular, his article, Taser’s got it going on. But if you take the software away from it and the LED light attached to it and all that stuff, what you have is basically a GoPro camera. It’s the highly encrypted and protected software that goes along with it that really makes it law enforcement specific.
CB: Yeah, and I think, in a lot of these places, the DA even has access, remotely, to this footage, which is pretty interesting.
JC: Yup. The thing that worries me a little bit is the situations where the local police department has their own employees who are responsible for keeping and maintaining and storing the video. It should be larger than that; that’s too localized.
CB: Yeah, I mean this… It’s sort of like… It makes me think of all the movies I’ve seen where the evidence locker is guarded by a dude and someone comes down there and they’re like, in the movie, it’s, you know, “I jacked up my hand, man, I can’t sign in today. Just let me in, I got to look at something for my case,” and then, they’re in there taking apart a gun and putting it in their pants to take out.
JC: What movie was that?
CB: Pounds of Cocaine. That’s every movie. That’s every movie ever made.
JC: Anne of Green Gables even had a scene like that.
CB: Yeah, absolutely. That Frogs! movie you were talking about?
JC: Yeah.
CB: That had it in there.
JC: Yeah, I was right. Apparently, I added a superfluous exclamation point.
CB: Yeah, what’s it called, Just Frogs?
JC: Not Frogs! It’s just Frogs.
CB: Was it Frogs?
JC: Frogs. So one of the criticisms I’ve seen, though, is it’s like, “Well, wait a minute. Why don’t you trust us? Surely, we can police our own video, be trusted to police our own video.” It’s like, “No, the very fact that the video exists means that you aren’t trusted. So, no, you shouldn’t have full jurisdiction over it.” Because if this video it’s meant because we don’t trust you, the citizens, and we don’t trust you, the cops, but you, the cops, are the ones who are actually in control of this video, that’s lopsided; that’s not a good solution. It’s not a full solution, I should say.
CB: Right, because they wouldn’t turn that over to the citizens and say, “Why don’t you keep track of this?”
JC: No, that’s a big issue too, is who gets to see it.
CB: Yeah. Well, a lot of cities have laws in the books where a TV station can ask for it and they have to give it to them.
JC: Yeah, through not FOIA, but local state disclosure laws.
CB: Yeah, which is another big can of worms.
JC: It is because you got to give the other side as well too, right? Like if a police officer dies in the line of duty and their body camera is recording it, which happened in Arizona not too long ago.
CB: Man, did you see that video?
JC: I did. I had anxiety the whole time watching it. It was an officer named Tyler Stewart.
CB: Yeah, very sad.
JC: It was extremely sad to see. He was murdered by some guy named Robert Smith who just drew a gun after three minutes of questioning.
CB: Yeah, and I don’t… I don’t know about you, but I didn’t see that coming from this guy.
JC: I didn’t either. It was just like everything’s normal.
CB: He didn’t seem super shady, and then, of course, you find out afterward that he had been contemplating suicide and the reason he was there is because he trashed his girlfriend’s apartment and he had a lot of problems going on, but yeah. I mean I was putting myself in the cop’s shoes and I’m like, “I would’ve not suspected anything out of this guy either.”
JC: No, he was disarming for sure.
CB: Yeah.
JC: But Officer Stuart recorded his own death at the hands of this guy and the local media was like, “Well, we want to see it,” and apparently, Arizona has FOIA laws that say, “Okay, well, the media gets it. You have to release that,” which is, apparently, pretty rare. But in this case, doesn’t the family of the officer have any rights to be spared this being out there on the internet for anybody who wants to see this guy’s death forever?
CB: Yeah. I mean, of course, they cut it, but still, you know? Anyone can look this up on YouTube. That’s just, I don’t know, it’s shameful.
JC: So the issue cuts both ways, especially privacy. Do you protect the citizen’s privacy? Do you protect the cop’s privacy? Do you take that WikiLeaks approach and protect nobody’s privacy? Like, it happened, just keep it raw and, if it’s open to interpretation, then settle in court kind of thing, you know? Who knows?
CB: Yeah. All right, you want to take another break?
JC: Man, I keep working us into breaks man, I’m sorry.
CB: [Laughs] No, you’re doing great. All right, we’ll take another break and talk a little bit about how these things work and why they’re not magic pills right after this.
JC: Ok, Chuck, we’re back.
CB: I’ll tell you one thing; I looked up Taser’s stock. If you bought in 2000, I think 10, you’re doing pretty good.
JC: Yeah, because of their body-worn camera program.
CB: Yeah, it was like $5. And before this, I think they just only made Taser’s and nonlethal weapons, but when they got into the body camera market, their stock went from 5 bucks, I think it peaked at 35 or 40. Not bad.
JC: Yeah, not bad at all.
CB: Good for them.
JC: Yeah, but, again, I can’t remember the name of it, but if you read that Alex Pasternack article, it’s really a sharp system. And I own zero stock in Taser; I’m just a fa6n. I’m not a fan even of their non-lethal weapons, but their body-worn camera system is pretty smart it seems like. I’m a fan of smart things.
CB: Sure. If you’re going to design a system, it should be full proof and work well and store everything you need to do and not break down. It seems like they got it going on. So one of the other reasons that, like I said earlier, it’s not a magic pill because you’re only getting this one… Our article points out, very astutely, that it’s not an unbiased view, still. If you had six or eight… Like if you were in London, you had six or eight cameras in different angles on different light posts, and you could coordinate this thing and fully see everything that happened, it may be unbiased truly, but just a single shot from a body camera, that single angle is not unbiased by any means. It helps, and that’s about it.
JC: Did you see the Nurse Wubbels arrest? The Utah nurse who refused to draw the blood of the suspect while he was unconscious?
CB: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
JC: So if you just watched the arresting officer’s, Jeff Payne’s, body camera, I mean, because it’s up close and personal, it goes suddenly, just basically goes dark when it’s pressed up against her back and it shows very little of anything. It was because of the other officer that was with him’s body camera that you get like, “Oh, wow. That really was a lot of force, unnecessary force, that this guy was using on this lady,” that you wouldn’t have gotten just from the footage from his body camera. And having supporting video evidence definitely expands the context one way or the other.
CB: It’s interesting, though, we’re getting to a point where you’re gonna have, say, a crime on an officer’s stop of a car with a car camera, dashboard camera, let’s say two officers’ body cameras, the people inside their car filming with their iPhones, let’s say two. So you got five different points of view going on that people, courts and juries, are gonna have to sift through, DA’s, defendants are gonna have to look at all this stuff and try and piece together what happened and this is all new. Previously, you did this from testimony only.
JC: Right, exactly.
CB: So are we opening ourselves up to a time when DAs are less willing to bring up charges unless there is footage, you know?
JC: Yeah, I wonder. But, I mean, it doesn’t sound like there’s going to be much lack of it. There’s a company called Wolfcom who makes body-worn cameras for police, is also releasing one for civilians. It’s basically the same thing without their police software.
CB: Like just somebody just wears at all times?
JC: Yeah, basically to film the police while the police are filming them. And they say it’s perfect for protests, improving legality. And there’s a button, the power button or stop or the record button has to be pressed a certain way, so even if somebody’s bumping into you or beating you up, your camera won’t stop recording. It’s like, “Good lord.” The fact that this is the climate, that that’s a selling point, is really unsettling and sad, you know?
CB: It is.
JC: Like, “Hey, everybody, come get your body-worn cameras because you need to film the people who are filming you because you can’t trust even this measure that’s been used to, supposedly, protect your rights.” It’s just crazy. It’s crazy that we’re in this state in this country.
CB: It’s depressing.
JC: It is. That raised another point to me too, Chuck. The idea of having all these different points of view or video documentation, this is also coming at a time when we are starting to see editing software where you can take video and make it do anything. You can make it say anything; you can do anything with video.
CB: Yeah, like there was a moon landing. [Laughing]
JC: [Laughing] How is that going to affect the use of video in documentation for court cases too?
CB: Well, and we’ve already seen, just with Baltimore, what can happen when cops now have to wear these and where they’re try to coordinate who’s got his camera on, “Did you have your camera on? What about that 30-second buffer?” Jeez, it’s all just sad that we’re at that state now. But it’s also a good thing that, for how many years, were bad things happening without any citizen… There was no recourse for so long and there still isn’t to a large degree, this is just a little small thing.
JC: No, it’s true, I mean, there has to be a certain level of, at least, gratification among people who have lived with distrust of the police or have been abused, as a whole, by police for decades. That people are now finally starting to be like, “Oh, man. This is crazy. How long has this been going on?” because there’s a light being shined on it. And so, in that sense, yes, it’s crazy that we’re at this state right now in our country, but maybe it’s just a growing pain toward moving to a better place.
CB: Yeah, the Rialto study too, in their summation, they also said something about, I can’t remember exactly how they put it, but something about how they think that it also requires police to take more verbal abuse from people which, isn’t fun, but sort of like the days are over where, if you smart off to a cop, they can’t just throw your face on the ground and put their knees through your cheekbone because you smarted off to them. So I don’t think they weighed in either way on what that means; they just said it looks like cops are gonna have to start enduring a little more talkback from the drunk guy at the bar without diving right into excessive force because they were pissed off.
JC: Now the drunk guy at the bar notwithstanding, one of the big things that these body cameras are touted for, and I think you said it early on, is that people behave differently when they know they’re being recorded, so that officers won’t have to take verbal lashings from people as often and so the very presence of the camera, supposedly, can keep situations from escalating or can actually de-escalate a situation. If the officer’s like, “All right, I need you to know you’re being recorded right now,” that people supposedly straighten up.
CB: Do they have to say that?
JC: I don’t know if they have to or not.
CB: Well, we’re in such the early nascent days of this, this is sort of an early podcast to see what ramifications are gonna happen later on, who knows?
JC: Yeah, and one of the things that I saw was that this is a situation, this is a technology that’s gotten a lot of press, but it’s still very early on in actual academic study of it. Supposedly, and including the Rialto study, most studies are not published in journals and aren’t peer-reviewed. They’re just studies, largely carried out by criminologists or scientists, but also by the local police departments carrying the studies out on their own department, right? There’s, supposedly, only been two peer-reviewed journal studies published on body-worn cameras so far, and one of them was on the effect of giving an officer leeway on when to press record, how does that impact things like the use of violence. And this 2016 study in the Journal of Experimental Criminology found that, compared to the control group, if the officer had very little leeway in deciding when to record, meaning they had to record all the time, the use of physical violence decreased by 37%. But in situations where officers had a lot of leeway in deciding when to press record or not, it was 71% higher than the control group.
CB: Yeah, this whole when is it recording when is it not seems like the biggest sticking point right now, and are we gonna move to a future where they are absolutely required to record any interaction with a citizen or they get suspended or something? Who knows what we’re headed toward?
JC: Yeah, like it’s a big deal if they’re not recording, not like, “You know, you’re supposed to be recording,” kind of thing.
CB: I mean, I guess from a good cop’s point of view, they should say, “Man, I want to record this thing because this is what’s gonna exonerate me in this atmosphere we have today because I do it right.”
JC: Yeah, but I think cops are also scared that that footage could also be… Like footage can be used against them even if it doesn’t show anything. You know I mean?
CB: Yeah.
JC: Man, it’s just so fraught as a technology to be used like this, you know? And, again, the fact that we’re using it says, “Hey, you guys don’t trust you guys, so we’re gonna keep these cameras here. So everybody be cool.” Like that solves anything.
CB: I wonder when cars are gonna come equipped with built-in cameras that record all around the car, let’s say. I mean the cameras are already there with a lot of these safety features, all that’s lacking is a record button.
JC: Well, the cops have those for running license plates. While they’re driving down the street, their cameras are just looking at license plates of the cars they’re driving past to run them. There was one other thing I saw in that Fast Co/Motherboard Pasternack article, he just kind of casually made mention that department stores, hospitals, airports, they’re already using video facial recognition systems. So if you walk into Macy’s or something, I don’t know specifically but I’m just picking on Macy’s, that when you’re on camera, your face is being run against a database to see if you’re somebody that they should be worried about or maybe even call the cops about. Did you know that?
CB: Oh, I thought you were gonna say that somebody that likes neckties and cologne.
JC: [Laughs] They may have that too. It depends on whether they got their software from Taser or from Neiman Marcus.
CB: Yeah, I did not know that, and that just takes profiling to a higher level, huh?
JC: Yeah.
CB: Well, or maybe not. If they’re getting good information, then that’s probably…
JC: Right.
CB: I mean that’s not profiling, is it?
JC: It’s ultra-tailored profiling.
CB: If someone walks in and they’re like, “Well, this guy committed three acts of shoplifting in the past year, might want to watch him,” is that profiling?
JC: No, because it’s specific to you not, say, your racer or something like that. So, yeah, it’s difficult to argue that point of it. It’s more just like, man, being surveilled everywhere.
CB: Yeah.
JC: So this was a good one.
CB: Yeah.
JC: You got anything else?
CB: No. I’m interested to see where this goes. Plenty of follow up stories over the years, I’m sure, will happen.
JC: Yes, I’m sure as well.
CB: If you want to know more about body-worn cameras, police cameras, just look up “police body cameras” and it’ll bring up this really good article by Julia Layton on HowStuffWorks. Since I said that, it’s time for listener mail.
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