In the new millennium, we can watch a police officer kill a citizen as easily as we can start a Netflix trial. These past few years of headlines, from Florida to Ferguson and beyond, have served as an archival of wrongdoing: a grandparent being beaten into the soil, black children being shot down in their neighborhoods, peaceful protestors swallowing tear gas in the night. America has swallowed its tax dollars into a whirlpool of distrust, time and again, leaving citizens clamoring for relief from the ailment of a system they can no longer trust.
More and more, a camera has been present in the eye of the storm. The body camera has risen as one of the most popular suggestions to improve accountability and document misconduct in police forces across the country. In the context of Madison, this would prove to be a worthy addition. As the dashboard camera has become an integral part of police work, accompanied by the security cameras aligning the State Street area, a citywide implementation of body cameras can provide a more comprehensive picture of police work that can ease us of speculation and increase awareness of misconduct.
The Police Foundation’s breakout report on the Rialto, California trials notes a 60 percent drop in use-of-force incidents and an 88 percent drop in complaints when cameras were tested. This finding, as well as a nationwide outcry in wake of the deaths of Michael Brown, Kajieme Powell and many others, has led to more departments giving the cameras an experimental round of trials across the country. More numbers have not been brought to fruition just yet, but there will be more evidence to clear the skepticism if body cameras become more normalized.
If officers like Michael Vagnini, and others in the District 5 anti-gang unit in Milwaukee, wore body cameras, perhaps 47 people would not have had reason to sue the city over illegal, racially motivated strip searches dating back to 2008. The same may apply for the officers who tased and publicly humiliated Chris Lollie in St. Paul last January for sitting down in a bank lounge while waiting for his children to exit daycare. The second of which gave yet another firsthand account of black men being discriminated against in policing; Lollie documented his own arrest and was later cleared of all charges.
Furthermore, the Department of Justice published a report this year with suggestions on how to effectively implement these systems, and how to navigate issues of consent, storage and privacy. That report can serve as a baseline for any weary departments who are unsure how to manage such a program effectively.
It would give us extreme pleasure to say that body cameras are the godsend to end this streak of bloodshed. That is not true for several reasons: the first being a question of agency. How will footage be stored, and for how long? The footage obtained from these cameras should be handled and stored by agencies independent of the government to prevent internal corruption in light of “corrupted” or “lost” data in controversial cases. These agencies should hold the data for a period long enough to give time for an investigation to potentially unfold, with a similar system to dispose of data that is deemed unhelpful or unnecessary to keep accountability in check.
The next question is a matter of privacy: if we want a boy like Michael Brown to move to college instead of a casket in Missouri, and a daughter like Aiyana Jones to go to sleep instead of being shot down at age seven in a raid in Detroit, we as citizens should deem their lives enough to sacrifice a bit more of our privacy in the hope that the police we are supposed to entrust will not continue to betray us any longer.
And although we wish it were true, a camera does not singlehandedly eliminate the systematic oppression that has been packed into how our law enforcement agencies have dealt with us for decades on end.
Corrupt officers will undoubtedly find ways to maneuver around and manipulate the new systems to their advantage if they please, but what will the legal precedent be for dealing with officers who do so? How much will more video evidence reduce the benefit of the doubt the police usually carry in legal incidents without video evidence? A camera is supposed to protect the people as well as the police, but this change should not signify another bite into the strange fruit of a police state where our every motion is documented with no justifiable cause.
We are supposed to learn from the tragedies we continue to withstand, and body cameras should provide a learning opportunity to put more faces to the issues like racism and sexism in policing, and policies like stop-and-frisk and arrest quotas. They do not serve as a substitute for changing the way we educate our police not to profile people of color or kill in situations where it is not necessary, nor do they singlehandedly alter the standards for accountability of higher-level officials as well as officers on the ground. The work must be done at the root to foster more transparency in police practices and investigations, while producing more well-equipped crops of officers that are as competent in the cultures they serve as the weapons they grasp.
It is time to rethink investing in a war-ready Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle or spending an excess of $275,000 on a BearCat for our local forces, and banking on an innovation with the potential to improve policing on both sides of the badge.
Yet, with every innovation comes a word of warning: body cameras should not remove our responsibility to continue to film the police. Our cameras and phones have become our greatest weapon to document and archive injustices the police commit against our humanity. It would do us all a grave disservice to disarm ourselves of that responsibility by laying down our voice and surrendering our trust so easily.
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