With President Obama and much
of the top brass in the country’s largest police departments in favour of its
widespread adoption, body cameras will quickly become the norm in police
interactions with the public across the United States and fast but there are
some major implications involved with technology that are not being addressed.
Feeling the pressure from the
nationwide protest against the decision not to indict now former police officer
Darren Wilson who shot 18 year old Michael Brown, the Obama Whitehouse and
state/local level politicians and police chiefs across the country plan to speed
up the adoption of body cameras that will be worn by cops with the Obama “promising up to $263
million in matched funding for law enforcement agencies that want to buy body cameras for their officers”[1].
Body cameras seem like a great
idea as body cameras will, in theory at least, regulate both the behaviour of
cops and the public at large as both will be aware that any interactions
between the two will become public record. However, in practice, this theory
doesn’t really hold under scrutiny. As many have pointed out, the internet is
awashed with instances of police officers using excessive force while on camera
that goes unpunished. The most recent tragic case in point was the chokehold
death of Eric Garner who, at the time of writing, is trending on twitter in
reaction to a grand jury deciding not indict the officer involved in his death.
While body cameras won’t get
rid of police brutality, there is some evidence that the technology can be
effective in preventing it. A study in Rialto, Californa is a widely cited
example where body cameras have proven effective easing tensions between police
officers and the public as during the first year of the study “complaints against officers fell from 24 to 3 percent,
while police use of force declined from 61 instances to 25 instances”[2].
These numbers
are impressive and do show that the simple theory that body cameras can keep
both cops and the public honest but there are a number of implications that
come with implementation of the technology that haven’t been discussed at any
length including the actual cost of body cameras, the management of the hours
of footage produced by the cameras, the privacy of citizens confronted by cops
wearing body cameras and legal efficacy of body cameras just to name a few.
While the
eventual nationwide adoption of body cameras by police departments may end up
being a win for both the public and police officers, there is one group who
would benefit greatly from all the footage recorded by body cameras: TV
producers of reality police shows. I tell you now, just wait a year and you’ll
see a number of dreadful, derivative, and super pro-cop reality shows pop up in
your local TV listings with names like “the beat: up close” or “in the line of
duty: a week in the cold streets of ...(any fucked up American city of your
choice)”.
I can tell you right now that these shows will be ratings monsters
and they will keep on coming with the greater demand for content across a
growing number of platforms.These shows
will really suck and I mean really suck as police officers and indeed police
officers make for shitty conversationalists as both are devoid of snappy one
liners as one would be while encountering police officers who decide whether
you’ll go to jail or go home or, in the worst case scenario, do neither.
They will turn
cops, charged with protecting and serving the public, into glorified
nightcrawlers with badge and a gun and much better access. Like shitty cop reality shows before them, the
new shows will be sensationalist and remarkably intrusive. They’ll intensely
focus on heightened situations such as cop raids and altercations with members
of the public that will largely drive the plot of these shows. Don’t believe
me, watch any shitty cop show of the last 20 years (even some good ones),
fiction or otherwise and you’ll have all the proof you’ll need.
However, the
worst thing about these shows isn’t that they would suck or profit from the
misery of others, it’s that the main antagonist of the piece would be you and
me. These shows will be based on the perspective of cops doing their jobs and
asshole citizens getting in their way with their rights and unrealistic
expectations of cops to treat them with respect and dignity.
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