The Police Bodycams That BLM Demanded Are Now 'Essential Propaganda Tools' Of Police
Leftists reverse a decade of demand for technological accountability
In a recent piece at Pirate Wires, police body camera footage aficionado Lou Perez wrote that the body worn cameras (BWCs) introduced at the demand of police reformers a decade ago did not produce the expected evidence of broad police misconduct. Instead, they “have only succeeded in recording perps acting against their own best interests.” I share Perez’s fascination with these videos, and I can confirm he is correct.
Police, it turns out, are almost never the ones who make a situation dangerous. “In every single bodycam video I’ve watched, the civilian insists on escalating the situation with the police officer” (emphasis added). Police unions resisted the cameras at first, and departments balked at the expense, but “I can’t think of anything that’s hurt the police reform movement more than the very bodycams activists demanded.” They capture irrational, impulsive violence that no mental health professional could be asked to contain.
Citizens file fewer frivolous complaints when BWCs are in use and officers are cleared of them more easily. Conversely, when police do misbehave on camera, the footage does get used against them, but this is much less common. Most of the complaints that are upheld by body cameras do not seem to be about use of force, either, but police behavior or criminal procedure. Cops get upset and say things they shouldn’t, or get excited and enter somewhere they shouldn’t, more often than they get upset and shoot someone they shouldn’t. These are normally training issues.
Nor do body cameras seem to create the scenes they document; they are not a stimulus for bad behavior. In fact, the very first experiment with police body cameras in 2013 was correlated with both a drastic reduction in use of force and a massive decrease in citizen complaints. From any utilitarian perspective, the technology would seem like an elegant solution to long-running disputes about American policing. A way to move forward and build a more just society. A triumph of progressive policy, even.
Unless you are an anti-police activist like Alec Karakatsanis, of course, in which case the police BWCs that the American Civil Liberties Union and Black Lives Matter wanted, that the Obama administration funded to the tune of $263 million nationwide, are now “essential propaganda tools” of American police. The emergent narrative is that the police are not sharing all the BWC video they have in every incident, therefore the picture that the public gets from BWCs is a false one. Now we have to get rid of the BWCs so that we can be free of the spooky mass surveillance. Spooooooky!
Karakatsanis recently appeared on Democracy Now! to talk about his new book, Copaganda, which, per the title, is a work of propaganda against policing. He says that the cameras are now a deception program brainwashing Americans into believing that the police are not racist genocidaires. Who do you trust, this disingenuous unshaven hippie asks: Me, or your lying eyes?
