The Washington Post has been collecting data on documented fatal police shootings of civilians since 2015, and they recently released an update to the data set with incidents through the beginning of 2018. Over at Sociology Toolbox, Todd Beer has a great summary of the data set and a number of charts on how these shootings break down by race.
One of the main policy reforms suggested to address this problem is body cameras—the idea being that video evidence will reduce the number of killings by monitoring police behavior. Of course, not all police departments implement these cameras and their impact may be quite small. One small way to address these problems is public visibility and pressure.
So, how often are body cameras incorporated into incident reporting? Not that often, it turns out. I looked at all the shootings of unarmed civilians in The Washington Post’s dataset, flagging the ones where news reports indicated a body camera was in use. The measure isn’t perfect, but it lends some important context.
Body cameras were only logged in 37 of 219 cases—about 17% of the time—and a log doesn’t necessarily mean the camera present was even recording. Sociologists know that organizations are often slow to implement new policies, and they don’t often just bend to public pressure. But there also hasn’t been a change in the reporting of body cameras, and this highlights another potential stumbling block as we track efforts for police reform.
Evan Stewart is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Minnesota. You can follow him on Twitter.
So, after literal years of people demanding bodycams, this organization is suddenly complaining about their use?
Also, how is this a “civil rights” issue? “Communities of color” (IE poor black neighbourhoods) are “disproportionately surveilled” because that’s where a lot of crime happens. Black people have a higher chance of being murdered than any other racial group. By other black people.
“ So, after literal years of people demanding bodycams, this organization is suddenly complaining about their use? “
What is “Reducto Ad Absurdum”?
They’re pointing out that the purpose of a Police’s Body Camera is to have an impartial objective record that can contradict a Police’s Written or Spoken statement, which is then used to confirm/deny whether or not that cop’s testimony is credible.
For example. before the police interrogate a prime suspect, they will carefully collect and review multiple forms of camera footage and eyewitness testimony.
They will NOT offer to show said footage or testimony to that suspect before interrogating them. This is so that the suspect freely present their own perspective, and if they then contradict any of said camera footage, then interrogators are then able to call them out on their lies, red-handed, and invalidate their testimony in a court of law.
These Viral videos from JCS are a great example of this technique at work:
When we allow cops free reign to review their own body camera footage before they give any written or spoken statements, we’re giving a dishonest cop the opportunity to cover their ass, and construct an airtight narrative, when they would otherwise provably lie to save their own skin.
I guess the Average Conservative can’t read above an 8th Grade level, and assumes this is some sort of contradiction, instead of basic police procedure… just applied to cops.
Which part of that Gish Gallop makes this a civil or constitutional rights issue? Or a racial one?
…The part where it applies to people’s Fourth Amendment rights to not be unreasonable searched or seized (wherein an arrest constitutes a seizure)? The point of the report mentioned in the Newsweek article is that officer reports oftentimes serve as important evidence during pretrial, trial, appellate and post-conviction legal proceedings. I can actually attest to that. In working with the Innocence Project, I’ve dealt with a ton of official police reports as an evidentiary source for what a reporting officer knew (or claimed to have known) at the time compared to their trial testimony of what they swore under oath that they knew. If an important detail is left out of the officer’s official report, that lack of detail can be used to help impeach the officer’s credibility to the factfinder (i.e. the judge or jury) and to attack the testimony as less-credible.
The issue with body camera footage is that even if an officer did not notice a crucial detail at the time of their action (which is all that matters under the law in terms of police use of force. Whether or not the officer was reasonably in fear for his or her life at the time of the incident) they very well might notice it during the post-action review of body camera footage. If this happens before the officer writes the official report, the officer can add that detail that they observed through the body camera footage to the official report as something that they remembered from the incident itself. There would also be no real way to impeach this addition as the body camera footage would back-up the officer’s “recollection.” Basically, the idea of the report is that because the criminal justice system places such a premium on officer memory and the official reports as a source of evidence, officers should be required to write the official report before reviewing body camera footage in order to preserve the accuracy of the official report as a record of the officer’s recollections. I really don’t think it’s all that complicated to understand.
As for the racial aspect, I mean. It’s probably due to the fact that the current zeitgeist in criminal justice is calling out racial disparity based on disproportionate effects of police policy (e.g. because POC are more likely than white people based on population size to be arrested, any flaw in the criminal justice system is reflected ore substantially in those populations), but there are also studies and statistics that abuse of systems, and bad police practices are more likely to affect POC than white people. However, if you were to push-back and say “doesn’t this police practice affect everyone?” I don’t think that you’d get much of an argument from the authors of this study.
Also, where exactly is the Gish Gallop? There’s one source cited, and the argument itself is a direct response to the incredulity of your original post where you seemed exceptionally surprised that this organization, and other criminal justice reform organizations, aren’t supporting body cameras absent any kind of restrictive or restraining policy. The response is that it’s not the body cameras themselves that are a problem, but rather the policy around body cameras that is the problem. This organization does not want to get rid of body cameras. That would be hypocritical. Rather, this organization is calling attention to the fact that the mere addition of body cameras doesn’t solve all of the problems and can in fact create new problems (or reinforce old problems) if it’s not done correctly. It’s a call for better body camera implementation policy surrounding police reporting.
Pointing out that something that someone still supports has had unintentional consequences and lobbying to change the system to prevent those consequences is not shifting the goalposts in any way, shape, or form. Shifting the goalposts would be if the main goal of implementing body cameras was increased surveillance and the then was to claim “actually, we wanted to reduce discrimination against POC all along!” This is just a redefinition of the goal: The goal remains to provide greater police accountability and address bad police practices. There’s just another step to doing that based on the data from the report.
If you think that’s shifting the goalposts, then you’re either (1) engaging in bad faith here, (2) not understanding the argument, or (3) not understanding the fallacy. Pick your poison. But what you’re not doing is making a good argument. But you know that.
