Little or no guidance on requests for police videos
to police, who can use them to prove that accusations against them are untrue, and, perhaps more significantly, as investigative tools.
In theory, though largely undocumented, the threat that video footage could be made public can affect, and possibly improve, both police and civilian behavior.
A study conducted over 12 months in 2012 and 2013 by the Rialto, Calif., police chief found that when police and civilians know they are being filmed, everyone behaves more calmly, and use of force is less common.
In 2015, the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University in Virginia did a survey of the state of research on body cameras’ impact on behavior and public disclosure of footage. The findings suggest that much more information is needed to measure the effectiveness of body-worn cameras and public disclosure.
The survey concluded, “The would not be used to discredit officers’ privacy or reputations, particularly during contract negotiations with police unions.
Trump answered, “The federal law enforcement agencies that will be using Body-Worn Cameras will do so with the proper balance between good management and protection of privacy. Abuse of power is never tolerated, whether such actions are taken by individual officers in the performance of their duties or by supervisors following up on procedure and protocol.”
Carlton Mayers, policy counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said the public should be able to get data that police can cull from the videos about who gets stopped by police, as well as where and why they are stopped, and that data should be sorted by race and gender. That way, he said, the public can assess whether there is any illegal profiling.
“We have been pushing to condition data collection … on having it be publicly reported,” he said. “The data belong to the community.”
There is debate over whether the body-camera videos tell a complete story of what happened. What is recorded can vary greatly, depending on the camera angle, lighting and sound quality and whether an officer narrates the video as it is recorded. tension between those who push for more public release of videos and those who say it’s too onerous.
Now that a seek-and-find and redaction system are available, it’s far easier for law enforcement agencies to zero in on one object or figure, use an algorithm to search for it and black it out, he said.
“We make it very simple,” Tuttle said. Images in a one-minute video can be redacted “in seconds,” he said. Until recently, it took at least six times longer, he said.
Along with more cameras comes more video, which creates a “tsunami of digital information,” he said.
When someone requests a video of an officer’s entire shift, that creates an extreme burden on an agency.
Police work is “a lot of walking around. It’s like war. You can go for a week and have a five-minute battle,” Tuttle said. Miranda S. Spivack, a former Washington Post editor and reporter, is the Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Professor of Journalism at DePauw University. This story was funded in part by the O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University.