He said the cameras are helpful but have not turned out to be the game-changing reform that many had hoped. One reason: Some officers fail to activate their cameras during life-and-death encounters, he said.
An increasing number of studies also suggest the cameras do not change how often officers use force.
In Milwaukee, officers used slightly less force after starting to wear cameras at first but then returned quickly to normal levels, said Daniel Lawrence, a researcher at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., who studied their adoption.
It's not a game-changing reform in that it will cause cops to say "pretty please with sugar on top, sir, would you please enter this squad car?" That's not the point.
The point is having a visual record in the case of a dispute over the facts,
after the fact, so that it's not merely "virtuous and trustworthy policeman said X vs accused criminal with no credibility said Y". Because we know how that usually ends. Regardless of the facts, the police's statements are believed and the "perp's" aren't. But what we've seen is that when external video is available, often you realize that the police's version of the facts don't match reality.
As an example, have you followed the Masai Ujiri incident? This came up on ESPN the other day. He's the President of the Toronto Raptors. He's black. After the Raptors clinched the NBA finals last year, he was approaching the court (in a more impeccable suit than I'll ever own) to celebrate with his team, pulling out his credential, and the sheriff's deputy who was working courtside just absolutely SHOVED him out of nowhere, twice.
That's not the issue. The sheriff's deputy then
spent a year trying to sue Ujiri for initiating the altercation, and claimed he'd suffered a concussion during the incident. It's only with Ujiri filing a countersuit that anyone got access to the body cam footage, showing that the deputy not only initiated the action, but that Ujiri did not retaliate, did not escalate, and never in any way struck the deputy.
There are probably some people who believe that the cops should never use force. I'm not one of those people. The advantage of body cam footage (and other surveillance) is that sometimes cops use force that isn't justified, and prior to having video, they were never held accountable. With body cam footage we can review the incident and try to at least have a good basis for the justification. If the body cam footage shows the cops are justified, then that
protects the cops. Why would they not want that protection when someone has spurious claims of police brutality and they can go to the footage and show that they were 100% justified in what they did (or that they didn't do anything--which might also sometimes be the case).
