By Tamar Sarai / Prism
This year more police departments across the country have decided to join the ranks of those who outfit their officers with body-worn cameras. In March, the U.S. Capitol police began a 180-day body camera pilot program while officers in Brookline, Massachusetts, Madison, Wisconsin, and Philadelphia, Delaware, and Montgomery counties in Pennsylvaniahave all announced pilot programs of their own. Just at the close of last year, Portland, Oregon, granted its police department $10 million to use on body cameras.
Such massive investment made in police body cameras is in large part reflected in the public’s faith in them as an infallible tool for transparency and accountability. In fact, upon the announcement of Brookline’s body camera pilot program, Chief of Police Jennifer Paster described the cameras as the “best practice in policing nationwide.”
However, the promises made by proponents of body cameras don’t always align closely with the data on their efficacy or the degree to which they actually increase public transparency. In the U.S., the number of civilians whom police have killed annually has only increased each year since the widespread adoption of body camera equipment, and in many cases, promises of increased transparency remain unrealized. According to a December 2023 investigation by ProPublica, which reviewed 79 police killings captured by body cameras in June 2022, only in 42% of cases was that footage made public. Meanwhile, states such as Alabamaand Wisconsin are creating barriers and limitations for members of the public seeking access to police body camera footage.
Given these flaws, it can be a wonder why they continue to be held up as the paragon of police accountability tools. However, as civil rights attorney Alec Karakatsanis writes in a new article for the Yale Journal of Law and Liberation, looking at police body cameras as simply a reform gone bad misses the complete and far more complex origin story of body cameras and whose interests such technology was always meant to serve.
In an interview with Prism, Karakatsanis shared his hopes that the piece will spark the attention of individuals who believe in the need for reform but have been “extraordinarily misled by reform narratives” and “convinced, for a variety of reasons, to support all the wrong reforms that don’t actually do the things that they say that they want.”
When interests converge
In “The Body Camera: The Language of Our Dreams,” Karakatsanis provides a fuller and more comprehensive history of body cameras, one that reveals its genesis as something very different than a well-intentioned but poorly administered tool for accountability. Long before body cameras were introduced to the public and found themselves in mainstream conversations about police reform, Karakatsanis writes, they were first peddled to police departments by tech companies and major corporations.
With body cameras, law enforcement agencies could expand their surveillance capacity, mitigate police brutality lawsuits, create “highly controllable evidence” against the largely poor, largely Black citizens of whom police often seek to capture footage, and quell social unrest by creating “comprehensive digital archives” of attendees at protests for social change. In his paper, Karakatsanis cites a 2016 George Mason University study of prosecutors’ offices across the U.S. in jurisdictions with body cameras that found that just 8.3% had used the footage to prosecute a police officer, while 92.6% had used it to prosecute private individuals.
So how did we get to the point where police body cameras are now considered “best practice”? Karakatsanis argues that while police departments’ appetite for body cameras was quickly growing, the cost of equipment was too high for it to become a widespread tool. It was the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, that would forever change the public conversation around police accountability and allow body cameras to take center stage. Almost immediately, body cameras were no longer being pitched behind closed doors to police departments, but were rather presented to the public as an invaluable tool for police “reform” and increased “transparency.”
In a 2023 interview with Democracy Now, law professor Justin Hansford touched upon body cameras when discussing how calls for reform yield certain changes that later recede into the background. In the interview, Hansford applied the theory of “interest convergence” to the swift adoption of body cameras in the mid-2010s. Coined by critical race theory scholar Derrick Bell, “interest convergence” posits that reforms for racial justice only occur when the interests of those demanding social change and those in power overlap.
“You saw after the protests in 2014 and 2015, we called for change, and they gave us body cameras,” said Hansford. “Why did they give us body cameras, after all of the different things we called for were put to the side? Because body cameras were an intervention that ended up putting more money into police budgets.”
Indeed, body cameras have economically benefited not just police departments but the private corporations they contract with that oversee and manage the cloud-based services attached to the equipment.
In his essay, Karakatsanis explains that long before body cameras entered into the mainstream, a small handful of companies were not just developing these mobile cameras but thinking through how they could connect to artificial intelligence software and cloud computing databases.
“In their business model, the cost of the cameras themselves is dwarfed by the potential for ongoing future contracts with the government,” Karakatsanis writes. “Potential billing for proprietary algorithms, customized analytics, cloud server storage space, ongoing maintenance, training, and customized software to process and organize the data for sharing with prosecutors, courts, and other agencies is almost limitless.”
Grant funding for body cameras has also flooded into police departments, and in some states, police unions have even used body cameras as a way to win salary increases for their officers. Unions have argued that the equipment requires increased training, “extra work” and comes with a “loss of privacy” for which officers ought to be compensated.
The “original sin” of body camera propaganda
Karakatsanis argues that even recent investigations that critique the efficacy of body cameras reinforce the “original sin of the propaganda” around this technology that claims it was designed by institutions that were meaningfully concerned with police accountability and transparency.
“The [investigations] that I’ve seen all operate from the premise that they were intended to be effective and that they were a well-meaning effort to make our society less violent,” said Karakatsanis, “and that if they could just work better, then our society would be less violent and the police would be less violent.”
As detailed in his article, the news media has not been alone in co-signing this idea: academics and nonprofit organizations that use their public platforms to support body cameras lend considerable amounts of credibility to the practice.
“If it’s just the police and the companies that make billions of dollars off body cameras saying, ‘Hey, these things are really great, and they’re going to make the police more accountable and better,’ the public might not really believe that,” said Karakatsanis. “But if you’ve got civil liberties and civil rights nonprofits and fancy professors who run supposedly police accountability nonprofits who are validating this stuff, then now, all of a sudden, you’ve got a really effective propaganda operation.”
Body camera technology is also highly manipulable; its success in truly creating transparency is contingent on (and often undermined by) what an officer chooses to capture, what background commentary is made during filming, whether footage is released to the public, and how heavily it is edited. The fact that the camera is never on the officer but rather reflects their point of view also leaves many questions unanswered.
In a recent study conducted by theGrio and Big Local News, 10 attorneys, advocates, advocates, and researchers were shown the same body camera footage of three incidents depicting use of force by police in New York, California, and Tennessee and asked a series of questions about what they witnessed. The experts were not able to agree on what they saw or heard, particularly in regard to what types of forces were used by police and whether attempts had been made to deescalate beforehand.
Among the most pertinent arguments made by Karakatsanis is that the failure of body cameras to truly increase public transparency and ensure the safety of everyday civilians is less of an aberration and more of a hallmark of many popular criminal justice reforms. Reform efforts such as those made on issues including bail, probation and parole, and sentencing actually breed more of the surveillance, violence, and incarceration that they purportedly aim to eliminate. Meanwhile, other efforts, such as sending out mental health and social workers to respond to mental health crises, reducing the number of police patrols, and banning both nighttime home raids and abusive consent searches, are just a small handful of alternative measures that could meaningfully reduce police violence by shrinking the size and scope of their power.
“Essentially the key principle is, does this reform increase or decrease the size and power of the government’s policing bureaucracy?” said Karakatsanis. “Does it increase the level of democratic control over this institution or not?”
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