I’ve been following this debate closely, and I’ve struggled with it.
It’s been said that body cams reduce violence committed by police. If convincing data comes in on that, I might have to revise my position, because it means that a widespread problem is alleviated by this extreme step.
And I went through a period where my attitude was, “This is a dilemma, but they spy on US,” which frankly is fully defensible, but that was my struggle. I knew, on some level, that that was an F’d up, petty position.
I believe in privacy because I believe in the American dream. The last 15 years have done damage to that dream. As I’ve written, the one thing I wanted from the Obama presidency is a return to normalcy, a retreat from the constant war and encroaching police state. He has not fully achieved that, but he has come closer than any other 2008 candidate would have.
So now we have this body cam debate, and Commissioner Evans, who seems like an honourable man, is the most vocal advocate for cams. This is noteworthy, because he might know more than we do about police violence.
This is an awful, unacceptable situation. We need to address the violence.
But principles are principles for a reason, and the most basic principles here are quality of life and trust. We hire and train people to protect and serve us; most of them do it honorably. We owe those people the benefit of the doubt.
I oppose the use of body cams, for anyone: cafeteria workers, T employees, pilots, lawyers, chefs, and office workers like me.
And yes, I oppose them for police.
but I never fully connected it with negative actions by police officers. It could actually help police and in court. That’s where I’m on the fence, you have a video recorded with encounters with people, are they mirandized? Do they know they are being recorded? That’s more the issue to me.
Video of the booking room or at the police station is admissible in court and has been used quite often. You know that they have been mirandized prior to going to the station and there are probably signs noting that they are being recorded.
I have never seen this a a pro or against police thing.
There is a reason that the term “secret police” is regarded as a term of terror. Police are agents of the state, given the power to use force against citizens on behalf of the government. The idea that this power should ever be exercised in secret is simply wrong, and dangerous.
I didn’t address secrecy. As petr notes, police work is public.
But there is a line that most of us draw. If I walk by your house at night and I can see the Red Sox game through an open window, you probably won’t mind I stop to watch an instant replay. But if I’m out there for four innings, you’re going to notice.
The analogy is imperfect, but American privacy is under siege. This is an instructive moment that tests our resolve. The police union says: body cams are too much, too intrusive. After considerable thought, I agree with them.
That’s the most ridiculous claim you make in a post full of ridiculous claims.
and I uprated your previous comment.
… yet, while I agree with it, wholeheartedly, it caused me to wonder if people, and in particular JimC here, are using ‘privacy’ as a cognate of ‘secret’? Not just for the police but for the general population.
I’m not certain it’s the case that privacy == secrecy…. or, if it is the case, it’s only very superficially the case. I have privacy in my home, but it’s no secret that my home is where I eat, argue, sleep, go to the bathroom and do a variety of other things that are easily guessed at…
I mean, if it’s true that privacy equals secrecy always then then police will never ever be able to derive ‘probable cause’: a situation wherein they have, or think they have, knowledge of something criminal for which they seek a writ in order to search for concrete evidence. ‘Probable cause’ breaches the veil of secrecy and, if secrecy == privacy, then ‘probable cause’ breaches the veil of privacy also. This seems intractable unless you divorce the notion of privacy from the notion of secrecy.
I think all crimes involve an element of withholding knowledge (i.e. secrecy) but I don’t think the same holds for privacy. With privacy I’m not free to withhold knowledge, but I’m free from having anybody do anything with the knowledge… It’s not the same as secrecy and, in fact, involves a social contract. (Dare I say covenant?) To a reasonable extent my neighbors, and indeed the police, know what I do in my home… that is to say in the privacy of my home… but they aren’t empowered to do anything about it unless they obtain, somehow, the knowledge that I’m doing something criminal in my home… I guess you could call it ‘social secrecy’, but it sure isn’t absolute secrecy.
Body cams are for interactions that are already taking place out in public. They are the closest we can get to seeing the interaction through the cop’s own eyes. They have the potential of supporting either the cop’s or the citizen’s account of what happened. I see them as a win-win.
With bodycams: (mostly) unimpeachable evidence to either confirm or contradict police officers version of events.
Without bodycams: your word against the police.
Videos will not create a situation. They will only record it.
This is not about privacy. The police are, by definition, public safety officers and your interaction will (mostly) happen in public. They are still not allowed to enter your home without a warrant, bodycam or no. They are still not allowed to hassle you without probable cause. Conversely, you are not allowed to enter anybody else’s home without an invitation and cannot hassle someone in public without a really good reason.
I believe this is about training and that the bodycam is, functionally, no different than ‘this call may be recorded for quality purposes.’
I suppose there is a danger that some of the more hilarious busts could ‘go viral’ much like youtube videos do now: that cops might be tempted to share videos for the fun… But that would be an abuse of the system and not the purpose of it. If we declined to implement every system that had the potential for abuse… I’m not certain what we’d be left with…
And I disagree on all of them.
In the first, “mostly” is the key word there. If there is any motion at all, good luck bodyvam.
On the second, my word against the police is fine. If I’m right I’ll prevail, if everything works right. (The system’s tendency to favor police is another issue; for example, the system certainly doesn’t favor teachers over students.)
The last is really laughable. Cameras create and/or change situations every day.
I do like your customer service analogy, but it has too many problems. Also, customer service generally isn’t life or death.
There WOULD be abuse. Every situation where we’ve crossed the line has produced abuse. It’s why we have the line in the first place, because crossing it has consequences.
“my word against the police is fine. If I’m right I’ll prevail, if everything works right.”
Besides all the preponderance of evidence that says that the system favors the police virtually all the time, and the police have the capability to gather witnesses who also have been shown to be okay with lying (other cops) or otherwise add bogus evidence to your interaction, the general population is against you.
Have you every been on a grand jury or a jury? I have actually heard in the jury room “the cops wouldn’t have arrested him if he hadn’t been guilty”.
It’s only natural that the system favors its chosen agents, the police.
But if everything works right and everyone is rational, then the outcome should be justice. Obviously not in every case … but hopefully most.
I have not been on a jury; I came close once.
I assume you challenged the other jury who made that argument, so the system worked, thanks to you.
We now have the perfectly rational police — or at least the police striving to be perfectly rational. We also have the perfectly rational press corps waiting for their perfectly transparency-creating press conference with Mrs. Clinton.
It is as if you’ve stepped out of a world of Platonic ideals where everything and everyone is just 2% away from perfect, and so we can rely on the perfectness for the sake of planning and policy because it’s a close enough approximation.
Our constitution affords the rights to innocence until proven guilty and equal justice under the law. Both of these rights are at severe risk by how our justice system has been proven to work in practice to defend and uphold white supremacy. There is nothing natural about white supremacy, it’s a social construct designed to systematically oppress black people and keep them from enjoying their constitutional rights. While I respect your courage in posting this contrarian view coming from a principled stance, it’s an idea who’s validity and morality rests on a system that isn’t as corruptible and frankly racially oppressive as the system we have. When police stop killing unarmed black people without just cause, maybe we can talk about workplace privacy. For now the onus is on them to prove they are capable of reform, not the reformers to prove the system is broken.
…innocent until proven guilty is actually not a constitutional presumption. Neither the number of jurors is set, nor jury unanimity constitutionally required. Beyond a reasonable doubt does not appear in the Constitution either. To be clear these protections are all appropriate, but sometimes people assume things to be of constitutional status when they are not.
… ?
I think this is the crucial point, and not at all laughable. Cameras change perceptions of situations all the time. I think you are used to accepting perceptions as the sole truth… because that’s what humans do.
But we know perceptions can be inaccurate. This is not to say cameras will be accurate… but in the instance where the perception and the camera differ we will be given cause to examine the perceptions.
There are arguments against body cams, but this one doesn’t seem to be a very good one. There’s a pretty fundamental difference between (1) a claim that the state shouldn’t spy on everything the people do and (2) a claim that the people shouldn’t be seeing everything that employees of the state – the ones with a monopoly on the lawful use of force – do.
The police, in my view, have nobody to blame for themselves. They have lost the right to the benefit of the doubt through the actions of the “bad” ones, and the disappointing decision by the “good” ones to close of ranks behind the “bad” ones following those actions, every single time.
Saying they should continue to operate in the shadows because “American privacy is under siege” is like saying that you’ve come to agree with the arguments of Fortune 500 CEOs that they’re underpaid because, generally speaking, we have a problem with inadequate wages in this country..
to say, “my word against the police is fine. If I’m right I’ll prevail, if everything works right.”
n/t
be an asshat Jim, and I don’t think you’re racist or anything, but seriously, you’re a middle-class white guy, you have relatively little to worry about from the police. The question is warranted.
In general, Boston and Massachusetts do a much better job of policing than the rest of the country, but a substantial portion of the American people risk being beaten and killed, often for being in “contempt of cop” and sometimes because the police got the wrong address.
I’m a middle-class guy with connections to the legal system. I can’t speak for the experience of people of color, but it seems one lesson from BLM is that cameras can help, though in the recent police killing of a likely car thief, cameras “malfunctioned” when they shot and killed the suspect.
I should mention that BLM seems to be ambivalent about police cameras:
monitored or recorded for quality assurance…’ We hear this in situations when people’s lives or freedom are not at stake. But not for police because their privacy in public might be at stake?
Because “not for police” means not for you and me and everyone else in society.
For the record I’m not a huge fan of customer service calls being recorded, but that’s not the topic at hand.
should be afforded to a public employee doing a job in public? Particularly when the consequences can be so dire?
n/t
The public employee authorized to do physical violence to me, smash my face into a wall or car, or to put a bullet in my brain if I don’t adopt a ton of sufficient deference, and which violence can be justified in the eyes of a criminal prosecutor because I posted a photo once that looks “thuggish”?
There can never be enough scrutiny.
Top story is breaking news that judge ruled in favor of the BPD commissioner and against the union regarding body cams. The judge was critical of the union for not working with department leadership and that body cams should be considered as standard as uniforms and weapons. Pilot program will start Monday.
but I don’t see how a camera changes working conditions.
Employees may have a right to privacy, but I don’t think that applies to doing their job. Supervisors can monitor employees any time. They certainly don’t have a right to secrecy.
The problems with putting cameras on teachers would have less to do with our privacy and more to do with interfering with student privacy and academic freedom.
Your post ignores the most important single difference between police and everybody else — only police are issued lethal weapons with an implied license to kill.
You write:
NONE of those other people are issued lethal weapons by the government.
Your privacy argument is similarly unfounded, as christopher has observed upthread. An argument was made against street photography more than a century ago, with its proponents asserting that a photographer taking their picture in public was an invasion of their privacy. That argument was soundly and loudly rejected by our courts.
ANYONE in a public place has NO “reasonable expectation of privacy”. That means that news photographers are able to take photos of subjects in public even if those subjects prefer the photos to not exist. It means that voyeurs can videotape couples making out in public even if some of us find such photography disturbing. It means that any of us can videotape cops parking their cruiser in a no-parking zone while they get their breakfast in their neighborhood Dunkin Donuts (a daily occurrence in Brookline Village for the ten years I lived in Coolidge Corner).
Police, like everyone else, have NO reasonable expectation of privacy while in public.
Private citizens have the right to videotape their encounters with police, that right has been properly reaffirmed over and over. There simply is no reasonable privacy argument that precludes private citizens from similarly — through their elected governments, the same governments that recruit, train, and arm those police — requiring that police wear body cams.
In my view, the argument goes well beyond that. I argue that the resulting recordings are public property that should be available to ANY private citizen (following some reasonable process).
I’m sure you’re aware that at virtually ANY public gathering (in Somerville, this includes people who gather to watch an in-progress fire emergency), police walk through the crowd videotaping its members. Police have immediate access to face-recognition tools so that they have the ability to identify virtually any person who chooses to attend such a gathering.
I find it disturbing and specious to, in that context, argue that police should, under the guise of some non-existing “privacy” argument, be excluded from perfectly reasonable measures taken to protect the public from all too frequent police abuse.
Finally, while it might be awkward to admit, the flagrant and shameful racial component to police abuse must not be ignored.
I find the videotaping you describe (by police) disturbing. I find the NSA disturbing (and specious). You and I are in loud agreement. The current situation is F’d up.
I’m going to back away from this thread for a while, but I simply must reply to “awkward to admit” linking to my reply to Mark above. I don’t deny my white privilege, and I don’t find it awkward to admit. But Mark’s comment was off base because a) my point wasn’t about me per se, but any citizen, and b) I reject the notion that I’m ignoring white privilege. We’re having this discussion in the context of police brutality. And that’s important context, because (like I said in the original post) if body cams really do reduce police brutality, then I’ll have to revise my position.
But for now, the most sound solution seems to me to put some faith in our system. And if we can do that … the next conversation, too long neglected, is personal privacy.
Incidentally privacy is a tricky word here, because you’re right, there is no right to privacy. But there’s an expectation of privacy that, I believe, is one of the pillars of our society.
I hear you about all of the above.
I have a hard time putting faith in our system while our system is doing such an abysmal of job of protecting us from out-of-control cops. This is particularly true for our minorities.
I better understand your comment that I linked to after this explanation. I still fear that in our desire to focus our discussion we assume away a key part of what we’re discussing. I’m reminded of my feminist friends who have finally, after several decades of effort, helped me understand that as a male I simply cannot conceive of what it is like to be a female in our culture. I have never had to worry about whether I could safely walk from one place to another in an otherwise “safe” neighborhood. I have never had to wonder whether a colleague’s approval of some professional act of mine is, in fact, just another way for the individual to persuade me to have sex with him.
The rules and guidelines about a “reasonable expectation of privacy” are relatively clear for public places. If I am in a public place, I have no right to expect that I will not be photographed or videotaped. Interestingly, in most states, it is illegal to record my voice without my knowledge and consent.
I share your sense that there is something disturbing about forcing police to wear a body cam. It’s disturbing for the officer, and disturbing for each and every person the officer encounters.
At the same time, there is something even more disturbing (at least to me) about the enormous number of black people (especially young black men) who are killed and beaten by police, and by the vanishingly small number of police who are actually prosecuted, convicted, and punished for their abuse.
I guess that I land in a place where, for me, one of the consequences of putting on a uniform and accepting custody of a weapon is that I give up certain rights that I might otherwise have.
Our military has, by and large, learned that while they are in uniform and speaking on the record in public, there are restrictions on the right of free speech that they otherwise have. Our society has determined that the negative consequences of creating the appearance of military endorsement of a particular side of a political issue are enough to overcome the free-speech rights that each of us otherwise have.
I view the question of body cams for police through a similar lens. I think they are required until we have made MUCH more progress at ending the horrific toll that police abuse takes on our minority communities.
I think you clarified for me what I did not want to suggest, i.e. that you were guilty of something. I think I I know you well enough to know that you realize your privileges, such as they are. I don’t think you deserve to feel guilty about them either.
I still think it’s easy for white, middle-class guys in low-crime neighborhoods to be worried about privacy when people of color disproportionately worry about unfair treatment and worse. Balancing the privacy of a public employee with the dangers experienced by people of color raises the question.
You are so so so so very much ignoring white privilege and pearl-clutching “Oh no! You can’t say that!” are very much signs of it.
I don’t know what pearl clutching you’re referring to.
I’m not a big fan of the term, but I’m as white as they get and I’m not sure I’d want to bet any “white privilege” I supposedly have on things always working out OK for me either.
I have mixed feelings about the mandated use of body cams. One of my major concerns derives from the fact that all recordings, video and audio, will be a public record subject the Commonwealth’s public records law. I wonder how many people who witness an organized crime premeditated execution, or even an example of domestic abuse by a neighbor, will be unwilling to report to the police if they know it is being recorded and open to scrutiny by the perpetrators of the activity and their friends.
How many of you who disagree with me in this thread are willing to wear body cams at your place of work?
I think you need to rephrase your question as follows:
n/t
regularly, but I’d give it a shot. I see problems with my wearing a camera that would pose contractual issues, potential academic freedom questions (I showed 3 Guns ‘n Roses videos with mature content today to illustrate the ideas of the 1890s Decadent movement), and the privacy of my students, which, I think, is where the real issue with police cameras is. If I were a DPW worker, there would be none of these objections. Ditto the police. And office workers.
The more I think about it, the closer I come to your point of view. It’s not a issue that personally moves me either way, but the idea of total surveillance is creepy. Amazon already does this to its workers, not with cameras, but with other trackers. Would the world be a better place if everyone were being watched? If there were a record that could come back to you years later or video that could be released to the public and then edited to remove context?
There are definitely issues to be considered. One of them is mundane, but nonetheless significant: storage. Then access to the videos as public records.
… ? If you strapped a body cam to me, all you are going to get is either random computer parts being assembled and shoved into network racks and cabled… or a constant cycle between three separate computers: two Linux boxes and a Mac — each one, at any time, either full of work (code, analysis, graphs, reports, etc) or not-work (BMG, mostly…)
Sounds recursive to ask if BMG wants to monitor somebody monitoring BMG… I wouldn’t object to wearing a body cam but I’d pity the person who has to review the film since It’s actually pretty boring. I LIKE the work, but I still find it tedious at times… Some might find the pranks we pull to be funny (I once absconded with a co-workers laptop and replaced it with an equivalent weight of dessicant in his laptop case. He almost made it out the door and on the way home before realizing…)
As others have pointed out, there is exactly ZERO chance that anything I do will (either deliberately or accidentally) involves harm (either legit or not) to another person… except, that is, for my mosh-pit-diving-much-pierced-death-metal loving officemate who asks me to hurt him on a daily basis (… I respectfully decline each day anew.)
If, for example, I flew drones over enemy territory… I would not object to extra oversight and recording of same. If I performed surgery over the network, or even in person, you can be sure I’d agree to have someone over my shoulder.
Your argument essentially boils down to ‘why should we take (seemingly) extreme measures to ensure the cops do what they are supposed to do?” I don’t know that the measures are all that extreme and I do know that cops don’t always do what they are supposed to do… and, in fact, the ‘not doing’ part has fallen into a fairly systematic pattern that is far more troubling to me that remote likelihood that somebody is going to get video of me doing something I don’t want them to see me doing.
That’s what we’re talking about here: watching people while they work.
Sure, we can rationalize it for cops — but my point is, it IS a rationalization. We do other things to prepare cops: train them extensively, etc. Then we have to watch them?
I’m so old I can remember when drug-testing pilots was a radical idea that many people opposed. Now it’s accepted, and many other professions are drug tested.
As noted upthread, “privacy” is not a right, but the assumption of something-like-privacy-at-work (right to independent judgment? I don’t know what to call it) is something most of us take for granted.
The fact that some cops have done bad things, and the fact that this is getting more attention than it used to, have brought us here. Well I say — wait a second. If a cop gets a body cam, how long before you and I get one?
There’s a Dunkin’ Donuts near my office with five surveillance cameras in its ceiling. They’re not watching me. They’re watching the staff. Do you suppose the dozen or so law firms near my office have cameras watching their staff?
A school district in Pennsylvania got in trouble a few years back because they issued computers with cameras — and guess what? They used the cameras to spy on students. Cameras get abused.
We had camera footage of four cops shooting a guy in a CVS parking lot. It turned out that they were watching the guy (reading his e-mail) for a long time. So he was suspicious, but HE HADN’T DONE ANYTHING OVERT yet, and now he’s dead. Are we really all comfortable with this? (By the way those cops faced no penalty. Surprise! The camera “proved” they acted appropriately.)
Of course cameras can be useful, and cops have been caught on camera doing awful things. I just think we need to step back and think about this. What type of society are we building? For one thing, are the cameras a fix that makes us not address other issues?
Your assumptions about privacy at work are mistaken.
For as long as there’s been email, that email has belonged to the employer. An employee has ZERO right to privacy while on the job, especially if using employer-owned equipment. My understanding is that employers have pretty much free rein to monitor and record telephone conversations, to monitor ALL internet transactions (email, web browsing, etc., whether using private or employer-owned equipment), to videotape whatever and wherever they want, and so on.
I suspect that if there is a place in that law office where cash is handled, it has a videocam monitoring it. Every bank has multiple cams monitoring every teller and ATM.
I really can’t emphasize enough that workers have ZERO expectation of privacy on the job. ZERO as in NONE. NADA. It’s actually worse than that — if someone is a salaried employee (“exempt” in HR-speak), the employer typically owns a great deal of what they do in their own homes. The argument an employer makes in classifying an employee as “exempt” is that the employee has value whether or not they are at their desk. If an engineer has a brainstorm in the shower, the resulting idea belongs to the employer.
A salaried employee who has a conversation on personal phone about company business is subject to a wide range of investigation and possible prosecution about that conversation.
In many ways, those lawyers you mention have less “privacy” than the cashiers at Dunkin Donuts.
It is FAR FAR too late to get the videocam cat back into the bag. The technology is pervasive and its benefits widespread enough and valued enough that its use will almost certainly expand rather than contract.
I think the more important questions are, therefore, how are the resulting records monitored and preserved and who has access to them.
If my job required me to use physical force, including deadly force, against other people when, in my judgement, it was necessary to do so, sure, I’d wear the camera.
Short of that, I’d need to evaluate it on a case by case basis.
I haven’t worked a single job, other than my current position, where my computer wasn’t monitored or capable of being monitored by my employer. Every public job I’ve held required a drug test and background check, which we already mandate for law enforcement and is far more instrusive than a body can. I went through metal detectors and body searches every day as a Court Clerk for my last firm and when I worked at the State Department and the Chicago’s Mayor’s office. Body cams for cops don’t seem nearly as instrusive as the TSA looking at my junk.
Unlike any of us at the airport or at our offices, they are far more likely to commit acts of violence, and are even expected to in the course of their career to protect the public. The public has a right to know if the violence committed in its name is actually fulfilling the purpose of giving ordinary citizens that immense power. We share the same right to privacy, I don’t share their right to kill in the name of protecting my community.
The trade off for that immense power we entrust to them is far more accountability and far less privacy than ordinary citizens are subjected to. This really is a situation where only the wrong doers need to be worried, and if dismays me the police unions continue to hold ranks instead of purging their department of racism and bad behavior.
Since you’ve based your anti-police cameras argument on a privacy rationale, I’d be curious what your position is on things like:
(1) The Freedom of Information Act.
(2) The Open Meetings Law.
(3) Campaign finance disclosure rules.
The first two violate privacy interests of public employees. The third violates privacy interests of private individuals/corporations. Yet I would argue that the privacy interests in all three cases are outweighed by opposing considerations.
The same goes for police cameras. When sitting in the station talking with fellow officers, those opposing considerations likely do not outweigh privacy interests of the officers and the cameras should be off. When interacting with citizens armed with the implied threat of violence, the employee’s privacy interests are outweighed and cameras should be on. I don’t think the question is even a close one.
Police work is public, and we have built safeguards to ensure the good conduct of police officers. In fact our entire legal infrastructure is based in part on ensuring police do the right thing
To me, body cams are a bridge too far. They’re over the line I’d like to draw. I don’t know exactly where the line is, but we train someone, give them a gun, and we trust them to use it. I don’t think we need to film everything they do, they’re entitled to some measure of trust and independent judgment.
The question is a close one, because (like every other abridgement of privacy), we are next.
Everybody underrates the importance of privacy until their privacy is at risk.
The point about trust is an important one, and the contemporary lack of trust in public institutions — however justified in many instances — is problematic for the proper functioning of government.
That said, two points. First, I’m not sure why you couldn’t just say the same thing you do about trusting the police and apply it across the public sphere. After all, the entire political infrastructure (i.e. democracy) is based in part on politicians doing the right thing in the public interest. So why not just trust them to do the right thing? Why do we need FOIA and Open Meetings, which you said you support, as oversight?
Second, there is good reason to believe the greater transparency provided by cameras will increase trust in police. If police had cameras on during interactions with civilians, it helps eliminate questions of what really happened and can overcome assumptions that “I don’t trust cops, so the cop must be lying.” In some cases, it can be used to exonerate an officer. In others where there is egregious conduct, the police can win back some trust if they respond not as they largely have to date, but instead by taking decisive action against the officer and to improve their procedures. In short, cameras can help document that police act professionally most of the time, and when they do not, they are promptly punished.
I fully support body cams because of the potential for force and I don’t see the countervaling privacy argument as germane because we are talking about interactions which take place out in public anyway. I do sometimes think that FOIA and OML are too broad, though I think campaign finance disclosures are appropriate. Especially in the Citizens United era I would say that how you vote yourself is your business, but if you are trying to influence my vote I want to know who you are.
Maybe a right to be free from being killed? To be free from unnecessary violence?
Policing is pretty difficult. Police officers are very aware of colleagues who have died in the line of duty — something which would make anyone fearful and possibly trigger happy. Their job relies on quick, instinctive decisions and correct responses in high stress situations that those of us without training would screw up with terrible consequences. Training police well is crucially important and it is crucially important both to attain the safety a police force should provide and to keep the police from causing harm.
In a sense, policing well is a bit like playing a sport well. Playing soccer one doesn’t subject one’s moves to long reflection, rather one relies on what one has practiced, what one has baked into muscle memory. Just as athletes get filmed by coaches so too does one need police officers filmed because this is an area where constant improvement is essential to the task. One has to train instincts.
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This intersects with racism in two ways. First, policing seems to reinforce racial stereotypes. Not clear why this happens. Historically, it would seem unsurprising: northern cities in this country were consciously segregated. Police were part of enforcing that segregation. But there’s also that it’s easier to see “people not like me” as more suspicious than “people like me” because people not like me are harder for me to read.
Second, minority communities suffer a lack of policing. Since the police aren’t trusted and since police don’t seem particularly effective in such communities, such communities actually suffer from the effects of a lack of a monopoly of force that Hobbes identified. When the state doesn’t have a monopoly of force, three things can ensue: 1. revenge violence, 2. pre-emptive violence, and 3. conquest (i.e. crime). This is how the Black Lives Matter movement could end up reducing black-on-black crime: by actually getting well-training effective policing rather than the danger or — as in Ferguson — the plundering to which African Americans have been subjected.
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So it seems to me, we want a thoroughly professional police force, well-paid, with high standards that constantly sets out to improve itself. Any training tool we can get is a good one.
n/t
There are actually some serious arguments against this prescription of body cams on police, but this isn’t one of them.
n/t