FOR THE RECORD
LOUISVILLE REMINDS US THAT POLICE BODY CAMERAS CAN’T JUST BE DECORATIONS
It’s hard to look for significance in the news when the news is coming at you in tsunami form, but the police killing of David Mcatee stands out to me. Mcatee, the popular 53- year- old owner of a barbecue restaurant in Louisville, Ky., was killed on the threshold of his own business during a riot Monday. Surveillance video released by the Louisville police — in less than a day; it’s amazing how fast the police can distribute information when it favours them — showed that Mcatee was holding a gun while cops and National Guardsmen were using capsaicin projectiles to clear a neighbouring parking lot.
No one’s sure who Mcatee meant to aim at, or whether he knew at all whether there were police around. There is general agreement that Mcatee had always treated the police well even by the standards of a restaurant owner, and the police, reciprocating his friendliness, had advised him to buy a firearm two days before his death.
Riots create the circumstances of this sort of tragedy as surely as SARS- COV-2 causes COVID-19, but it is unclear for the moment exactly what the hell happened. Louisville beat police are equipped with body cameras to document interactions with the public. But when investigators asked to see the body-cam footage of Mcatee’s death, it turned out that, oops, the cameras weren’t switched on.
What’s notable about this is that the mayor of Louisville decided he needed a new police chief whose luck with cameras was a little better, and he immediately fired the old one. “Fired” here actually means “fired.” The chief, Steve Conrad, was on the way out anyway. In March, Louisville cops had poured lead into an apartment after allegedly taking fire in a “noknock” drug raid, and they had slaughtered a black hospital technician, 26-year-old Breonna Taylor. In that case the cops belonged to a unit that had been exempted from the requirement to wear cameras. Conrad, facing appropriate political pressure after this horror, had agreed to retire at the end of June.
Mayor Greg Fischer fired him anyway, and made it clear that it was about the cameras. “This type of institutional failure will not be tolerated,” he said. “An immediate change in leadership is required.” The point here is not easy to miss, and no law officer is likely to miss it. The switched- off cameras might have been switched off purely by mistake — the mayor couldn’t possibly have known for sure within 24 hours of the shooting — and for all we know ex- Chief Conrad promoted their proper use to the best of his ability.
But if body cameras are going to be effective, police can’t be allowed to decide for themselves when to use them. And the best way to discourage pre- editing of this nature is to impose a strict liability standard on police leadership. If your men shoot someone to pieces, and they had their cameras “accidentally” turned off, well, that’s on you, fella. There’s a reason Napoleon wanted his generals to be lucky.
Body cameras have faced a lot of resistance in Canada from police chiefs — only the City of Calgary makes routine use of them — and, well, I think I’ve just explained why. In Calgary the frontline officers seem quite keen on cameras. “They seem to really enjoy having them,” a spokesman told CBC News in August. “As a matter of fact, they hear from some of the officers they don’t want to go without it. There is a comfort in knowing that you have the video to back up your words.” This comfort is only available, of course, if you know that it will always be possible to reconcile what comes out of your mouth with a video record.
In the U.S., personal police cameras are widespread enough that body-cam footage of all kinds has become a post- television genre unto itself. You have to have a morbid sensibility to watch videos like this; a few of them document amusing or zany interactions between police and civilians, but a lot of them obviously end with someone bleeding.
You come away from most of them impressed with the professionalism of the police — although Louisville reminds us that the professional members of any force will be the ones who have their cameras on at all times, so there’s some sampling bias there.
But even if you don’t like or trust the police, or approve of the concept of “police,” you must end up being struck by the omnipresent danger of their jobs, and sometimes by the lengths that they will go to save the life of a troubled person who is waving a knife or a blunt object at them, or trying to run them down with an SUV, or sprinting toward them at 30 feet a second, or simply whimpering “Kill me” over and over.
We were led to believe that police body camera technology was expensive and impractical until the American experience showed that this was obviously untrue ( suckers!). Now Canadian cities, having had a few days to contemplate the American crisis in trust in the gendarmerie, are almost literally racing each other to announce that body cams are on the way.
Toronto police have been sticking to the “body cameras are impossible because they just are” line for years, but the current Toronto chief, confronted with his own dead black female civilian and a city full of rumours, says he is “fast- tracking” their adoption. Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante, who used to moan about the cost of body cams, has had a miraculous damascene conversion.
We will see if these agencies follow through. But either way, Canada does not, in general, make police immediately accountable to elected city officials. If we are going to recapitulate the American experience with police body cameras, it would be best to skip the five- or 10- year period in which the cameras sometimes prove to have been inconveniently turned off at awkward or dangerous moments. Ultimately this does mean having a rule that the chief can be sacked, or otherwise punished, if some sergeant’s camera doesn’t work.
That’s the logic that police administrators, as opposed to street police, are afraid of. It’s a consequence that body cameras ultimately bring with them, as if it were packaged with the instruction manual and the power supply. But it isn’t much of an argument against the cameras themselves, unless there is some ethical rule that cheap ubiquitous 21st- century cameras are only to be used by the police in investigating civilians, and must never be deployed to regulate their own conduct.
BODY CAMERAS HAVE FACED A LOT OF RESISTANCE IN CANADA.