In recent weeks, body-mounted cameras have taken police departments by storm. More than a dozen cities, from Forth Worth to Chicago, have already implemented preliminary programs. The Denver Police Department has been using the cameras for two months, and now the city of Aurora plans to spend $300,000 on unrolling its own program.
With the specter of Ferguson, Mo., still looming large in the national conscious, the desire for video evidence seems more acute than ever. Under siege from the media, even police officers in Ferguson were recently outfitted with cameras in the hopes of bolstering the department’s waning credibility.
An extensive report released by the Justice Department this month concluded that the technology will enable police “to demonstrate transparency and openness in their interactions with members of the community,” and that it will “promote the perceived legitimacy and sense of procedural justice that communities have about their police departments.”
So far, issues of privacy have been the primary concern of critics and institutions such as the American Civil Liberties Union. Beyond that, however, there has been a rather uncritical investment in the potential of the new technology. Aurora City Manager Skip Noe even affirmed, “Video is a very powerful tool … . When you do something wrong, it’s obviously wrong, and when you do something right, it’s obviously right.”
Although videos often have the effect of seeming immediately verifiable, the extent of their legibility is another matter entirely. While body-mounted cameras are a boon to promoting accountability around police activity, there has been no attempt to articulate what evidentiary role the images from these devices will play in the judicial process. Past events and recent reports demonstrate the predicament of interpretation.
In March 1991, following a high-speed chase, the brutal police beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles was caught on camera. The video, captured by a witness on a nearby balcony, begins after King was already on the ground (having been subjected to a Taser a second time). He was then shown rising amid a swarm of officers, which, most controversially, prompted yet another vicious round of beating.
During the hearing, the court was mired in a dispute over interpreting King’s legs in the video. The defense averred that King belligerently rushed towards the police. At stake, as the philosopher Avital Ronell noted, was: “Did he take a step or was he charging the police? The footage seemed unclear.”
This very issue of interpretation will prove to be unavoidable as body-mounted cameras become a new orthodoxy in departments across the country. Other domains of law enforcement have recently employed recording technology and are expected to confront similar problems. Just this summer, the FBI and DEA, among other federal agencies, implemented a policy to require video recordings during the interrogation of criminal suspects. Prompted by the plight of false confessions — such as that which put Henry Lee McCollum on death row for 31 years in North Carolina until earlier this month — Eric Holder noted in a release from the Department of Justice that the new technology would provide “clear and indisputable records of important statements and confessions.”
Despite Holder’s resolute faith in the clarity and verifiability of recorded content, there is evidence to suggest risks that could plague the supposed advances offered by the technology. One experiment, conducted at Ohio University by the psychologist G. Daniel Lassiter, revealed that compelling video-recorded confessions swayed mock juries to false interpretations all too easily. By narrowing the camera frame to the defendant, and thus blocking the interrogator from view, participants (which in one study involved judges and other law enforcement officials) tended to affirm the legitimacy of confessions, regardless of whether the interrogator acted coercively. Across many related experiments, including ones at New York University and Yale, numerous psychologists have confirmed the problem of what Lassiter calls “camera perspective bias.”
Videos of the strangulation of Eric Garner in New York this past July and the shooting of Oscar Grant in 2009, among others, have been admittedly vital to corroborating instances of police violence and brutality. Yet, the seemingly ‘self-evident’ qualities of images have prompted juries, prosecutors, judges and the public alike to invest in their unequivocal nature all too hastily.
Countless cases, such as Rodney King’s, show the often inscrutable nature of what we see and think we understand. In our image-saturated culture, where most individuals have become both avid consumers and producers of images, there should be a willingness to question their contents, beyond light critiques of photoshopping or concerns about privacy.
From issues of framing — in other words, what is excluded from the image — to inquiry into the intentionality of certain gestures that are recorded, such as a lunge or a step, the limits of the technology are vital to the current public policy debates. Videos and photos offer us a crucial glimpse into the world, yet they never provide us a means of fully mastering it.
Zachary Fine studies philosophy at New York University.
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