Washington DC Police Officer Debra Domino models a body camera at City Hall September 24, 2014 in Washington, DC. Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images
The Obama administration wants to set aside $263 million to improve law enforcement training and fund the purchase of 50,000 cameras that police officers can wear on their bodies.
The White House proposed the move in a review of local-law-enforcement funding, released on Monday. It arrives one week after a Grand Jury decided not to indict Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson in the killing of teenager Michael Brown, a decision that has sparked widespread upheaval across the country.
Some of the feelings of hopelessness and frustration surrounding the decision arise from discrepancies between Officer Wilson’s testimony and what other eye witnesses say happened on that August day when Brown was fatally shot. And without documentation, it’s a tragic tale of he-said-she-said, which many believe could have been lessened, if not completely avoided, had Officer Wilson been wearing a body camera at the time.
The proposal arrives one week after a Grand Jury decided not to indict Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson in the killing of teenager Michael Brown.
No one believes that more than the Brown family. In the wake of the Grand Jury verdict, Brown’s parents even released a statement, encouraging the public to join their campaign “to ensure that every police officer working the streets in this country wears a body camera.”
Now, the Obama administration is answering the call. About $75 million of its $263 million budget would fund the purchase of body-worn cameras, and the new Body Worn Camera Partnership Program would provide a 50 percent match to states who buy their own body worn cameras. This funding, of course, will only be enough to outfit a small fraction of police officers with cameras, and yet, it’s a major vote of confidence from the federal government in a new method of police surveillance that is already proving to be incredibly effective.
Where It Works
In Rialto, California, where police began wearing body cameras back in 2012, citizen complaints against officers fell 88 percent in the first year, and use of force by officers declined 60 percent. That’s an indication that cameras don’t only document the events as they unfold, they actually change the way everyone involved behaves. As Rialto police chief told The New York Times: “When you put a camera on a police officer, they tend to behave a little better, follow the rules a little better. And if a citizen knows the officer is wearing a camera, chances are the citizen will behave a little better.”
And in Washington D.C., where a $1 million, 6-month body camera pilot program is underway, officials expect to see complaints against officers fall by 80 percent. “This gives us that independent, unbiased witness…This will make our officers safer,” police chief Cathy Lanier told The Washington Post . “It will make our department more transparent. It will reduce the amount of time supervisors have to spend investigating allegations.”
Video Still Open to Interpretation
Some criminologists, however, say that videos aren’t always as unbiased as they seem. In an article on Slate, Arizona State University researchers Justin Ready and Jacob Young write that even video is open to individual interpretation. “People interpret what they see on video through the filter of their own experiences. An officer may interpret what he sees on a video differently than a civil rights lawyer or a young person from an urban area,” they write, citing their own research on the subject as evidence. “The technology doesn’t provide this context—being human does.”
They also note that even body worn cameras have blind spots, events and occurrences that they miss or don’t catch. Holding the video as truth, then, can be just as dangerous as not having a record of the police interaction at all.
And of course, there are questions about who gets access to video footage as well. In Washington State, for instance, public records law requires government agencies to release almost all records in a timely fashion, or face a fine. With thousands of hours of video, which must be blurred and muted to protect people’s privacy, that could become a serious logistical burden for police departments.
Police That ‘Think More Carefully’
Still, despite the obvious challenges, Ready and Young note there are some clear cut benefits to body worn cameras. In one study, they strapped cameras on 50 police officers for one year and compared their behavior to officers without cameras. They found that the officers wearing cameras conducted fewer stop and frisks and arrested fewer people. That suggests, they write, “that the presence of a camera may have led officers to think more carefully about what constitutes reasonable suspicion in stop-and-frisk situations and probable cause during arrests.”
The funding proposed by the White House still needs to undergo congressional approval. Meanwhile, President Obama has also created a Task Force on 21st Century Policing, which has been asked to come up with ways “to promote effective crime reduction while building public trust,” and prepare a report within 90 days. The hope is that better training and increased transparency can play a small role in mending the parts of our law enforcement system that this summer has proven to be fundamentally broken.
No comments:
Post a Comment