Add a Little Happy Cloud

Are police body-cameras making us safer and police more accountable?

If you haven’t noticed by now, I’ve gotten’ back to writin’ again. I can’t take any more of these hacks-called-writers, myself included. Someone has to up the ante. Some of the writing here is just bad. Some of it is just fodder for the internet. Most of it now is like a hyper-realized Twitter or X or whatever. So I guess I need to start writing to get that “thought” and other thoughts out, like this one.

Body-Cams Bring Us Closer to “Minority Report”

Boy, do I hope this is cohesive (tells AI to make this cohesive). Police use of body worn cameras have been standard practice for the last decade +. We have watched multiple people die on them (George Floyd, Eric Garner, Tyre Nichols to name a few) which has resulted in a combined four convictions, with all officers in the Floyd case being convicted to some degree, none being indicted for killing Eric Garner, and the Tyre Nichols officers getting a new trial set for next year sometime. Derek Chauvin walks free in 2037 while the rest of the officers involved already getting out of prison this year or early next.

The biggest benefit has been in evidentiary modes I would assume. It makes telling the jury an interesting and attention-grabbing story easier for prosecutors. Prosecutors don’t need to talk to the officer on direct examination nearly as long, which has been killer for boring prosecutors in the past.

“So Officer Kip, what did you see when you got to the home?”

- Kip, a bald police officer from Baraboo, Wisconsin with a mustache and a bad penchant for chewing gum at inconvenient times -

“Yeah, I saw a guy. He was moving around.” -CHEW-

“Did you see anything else?” -Prosecutor, nervously sweating

“Yeah” -CHEW- “a woman. She was laying down.”

In direct examination you can’t lead the witness, so really, after this description anything else would be a leading question. What a disaster!

With a body cam, this now goes like this.

“So Officer Kip, what did you see when you got to the home?”

“Yeah, I saw a guy. He was moving around.” -CHEW-

“Did you see anything else?”

“Yeah” -CHEW- “a woman. She was laying down.”

- Judge, who looks visibly pained:“For fucks sake, play the video please.”

So from an evidentiary standard, it makes the process a lot easier for juries, prosecutors and judges to get through. Too bad the only people who are paid for their time are the latter two.

So insofar as the purpose for bodycams, the DOJ states it is to maintain legitimacy in the eyes of the public as it relates to law enforcement procedures and use of excessive force. The guy who invented policing as we know it, Sir Robert Peel, seemed to think this was important or something. But did he ever think the police would be so militarized in a short 150 years?

I’m doing this differently since getting unfettered and total rejuvenation from writing on my phone. I’m gonna take a page from Aquinas, and just do counterarguments and see how I fare. You can decide who wins.

Counter Argument:

But we are better off with them than without, no? This is the best way we know how to ensure accountability.

Okay first off, you sound like my Russian friend and that guy is a lunatic. But yeah, I guess this is a solid point. What I would say to that is it makes things that bodycams don’t capture (e.g., slight movement or facial expressions), that a witness testifies about, in fact unbelievable to a jury or even worse, the court of public opinion. What I mean is, if the camera never captured it, and I have a bias against cops or criminals, who am I going to actually believe? My eyes or the person’s testimony? Most people would say that if they didn’t see it (because of camera position or other limitations) it just didn’t happen.

Think about it. The cam is strapped on someone’s head or chest, thus allowing them to manipulate the position whether accidental or not. If there was a weird orb camera thing that floated around, I suppose that would give you the complete picture. But until we decide to sanction that in our environs, that’s just not available.

Body camera technology does also carry with it some latent risk associated with this previous caveat. What’s the risk you might say? A false sense of security. This becomes even more difficult when you realize that Deep Fakes are only one evil genius away from an actual manipulation of crime video by AI. We are lulled into this sense of accountability and “change” when we should have been reforming the immigration code all along. Zing!

Ultimately, the argument that “this is all we have, so it must be good” is unavailing because it doesn’t challenge us to take steps beyond the tip of the iceberg. I’ve always felt like the British and Euro CCTV fixation was a step too and their current Orwellian power slide into thought-police type behavior does prove my point, at least for the time being. So that to say, you can have body-cams in America, but there also needs to be substantial measures taken to address policing in general. But what does that look like?

I have a few ideas:

1. Address educational and ethical requirements for police in America.

I know a lot of police officers and law enforcement, and the really good ones that are there for the right reasons are typically extremely educated (in their craft and beyond) and have no agenda. Here, I will use a comparison that I know: attorneys. We have rigorous requirements for ethics and education, yet we never are the ones with guns. Sure, a good attorney can ruin your life allá Daniel Petrocelli v. OJ, but it’s not the same thing as ending someone else’s with a bullet. Why do we not put the same safeguards up for law enforcement?

That feel when you do what the prosecutors failed to

2. Address inequality and actual systemic issues in communities.

The unfortunate part of this is that this is typical window dressing by AOC and her conglomerate democrats, which hasn’t been solved. We can agree that far more black men have been killed by other black men than police officers. In 2019, 88% of black firearm homicides were committed by black perpetrators. For what it’s worth, in the same period, 79% of white victim homicides were perpetrated by white people. During that same period, 17-29 unarmed black men were killed by police. For perspective, in 2023, 22,828 people were murdered in the U.S. As i’ve stated before, the biggest threat to men (and women) in our society is other men with a gun. This becomes disproportionate when you talk about race and black homicides.

But this being said, it doesn’t mean radical change like defunding police has to be sought. Incremental change, like reforming criminal codes or changing political roles to appointed ones has the tendency to reform these spaces a lot quicker. The supplanting of white voices with those of color to encourage change goes a long way too. Maybe even working together across party lines would help (what an idea!). These are just broad strokes, but body-cams don’t obviate the necessity of reform.

3. Re-establish the credibility of law enforcement and the judiciary

Peel would likely agree here. As I said before about the “fear” vs actual crime rate way long ago, trust is in the mentality. Most people, at least from my view, are apathetic to change because it seems futile from the beginning. It makes us have major disdain for those who also scream at us for the same. This kind of apathetic thinking is why our faith in the judiciary has sank to record lows.

Americans’ confidence in their nation’s judicial system and courts dropped to a record-low 35% in 2024.

The result further sets the U.S. apart from other wealthy nations, where a majority, on average, still expresses trust in an institution that relies largely on the public’s confidence to protect its authority and independence.

…

The decline in confidence in the U.S. judicial system not only means the U.S. ranks below other rich nations, it is also among the steepest declines Gallup has measured globally on this metric.

Few countries and territories have seen larger percentage-point drops in confidence in the judiciary (over a similar four-year span) than the U.S. These include Myanmar (from 2018 to 2022) overlapping the return to military rule in 2021, Venezuela (2012-2016) amid deep economic and political turmoil, and Syria (2009-2013) in the runup to and early years of civil war, and others that have experienced their own kinds of disorder in the past two decades.

Gallup, 2024

So we are more like Venezuela, Syria, and Myanmar than we appear, at least in this metric. All three were ruled by authoritarian governments during those times, which in turn seeped into the judiciaries role to bulwark against executive overreach. Whether this is reality or just a collective psychosis doesn’t matter really here, because the perception is what is damaging. This perception breeds political deadlock, a TikTok generation plussed out on vibes, and the ultimate continuation of the CJS meat-grinder on American society. But is this what America will ultimately fall to?

Guess so, still incredible in escrow.

Madvillan - Meat Grinder

Look, I’m lucky to not have seen the inside of a prison cell, but I don’t falter in knowing there are some people who may have wanted me there. When my wife was also charged with a felony earlier this year, this fear of the proverbial CJS boogie man kept me up at night. It still does. But my case is not entirely unique, and to claim so would do injustice to the preceding paragraphs. I just experienced the same fear that millions of Americans fear from a system they feel like hasn’t given them a fair shake - at all.

But maybe that’s just a sentiment. The perception of the judiciary and actual behavior are a bit different. The fact that the Supreme Court didn’t have an ethics code was somewhat perplexing, but no one seemed to complain for the previous 200 years of existence. Then again, lobbyists didn’t exist in the 1800s and corporate profits were not what they are now. Maybe we just assumed they would do the right thing and that’s the difference.

Subversion is Submission

Say whatever you want about CCTV, at least that doesn’t hide the fact you are under control intimately by the bobbies. Body cams can be, in this way, used to usher in a new era of mass surveillance. As pointed out below, this is lacking in the accountability dept. I posit that it acts somewhat like an opiate for the masses, for a time, until the dissatisfied masses will require more accountability and thus, more cameras. It’s the easiest solution.

Remember the orb thing I fantastically described earlier? Yeah that thing would be terrifying if it became a normal thing in society. More than that, constant surveillance makes us less accountable to each other because we don’t need to trust institutions when we supposedly see everything.

So the sum of this work is this: bodycams are cool, but you need to enact reform and policy too to really take accountability.

https://youtu.be/xPhQD70a8KQ

Not sure if this shows up, but NSFW video probably so open appropriately.

Thanks for reading!

-HJRC