Jun 17, 2020 12:41 PM

Body Cameras Haven't Stopped Police Brutality. Here's Why

Amid worldwide protests over racism and police violence, lawmakers are once again turning to the devices as a tool for reform.

After Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, igniting the national Black Lives Matter movement, everyone from then president Barack Obama to members of Brown’s family embraced a relatively new solution for reform: Equip officers with body cameras. If police knew their every action was being recorded, the reasoning went, they would more likely be on their best behavior. If not, the cameras would at least capture any misconduct, making law enforcement more transparent and accountable.

Six years later, body cameras are now used by nearly every major police department in the US, but they’ve failed to prevent more police violence. Technology didn’t prevent the killing of George Floyd while he was in police custody last month. Body cameras “were on and activated,” the Minneapolis Police Department said the next day, while alleging Floyd had resisted arrest. But it was videos from bystanders and security cameras, not body cam footage, that revealed what law enforcement failed to mention: Floyd died after one of the officers, Derek Chauvin, pinned him to the ground with a knee on his neck for almost nine minutes. Floyd’s death was later ruled a homicide, and the four officers involved now face criminal charges, including second-degree murder for Chauvin.

Body cameras have long been appealing to policymakers as a tool for police reform. Now, amid ongoing worldwide protests against racism and police violence, government officials are again turning to the devices. Police reform legislation unveiled by Senate Republicans on Wednesday encourages wider use of body cameras. In Canada, the head of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police announced this month that she would seek to equip her officers with them to increase public trust.

“People look to body cameras as some sort of silver bullet,” says Harlan Yu, the executive director of Upturn, a nonprofit focused on progressive technology policy. The devices by themselves, however, don’t create more accountability and transparency. It’s how they’re used by police that matters. Obama recognized the same thing half a decade ago. “It's not a panacea," the former president said in 2015. "It has to be embedded in a broader change in culture and a legal framework that ensures that people's privacy is respected.”

Policymakers need to balance that right to privacy with the public’s ability to access body camera footage. While there are some statewide laws governing how that data should be handled, in many places body camera policies have been left up to police themselves. A 2016 scorecard created by Upturn and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights found policies from 50 major police departments varied widely. Some cities didn’t explicitly prohibit officers from tampering with footage or allow people who filed misconduct complaints to view tapes about their cases. “Even if you’re a subject of footage in many places, you don’t have a special right to get access,” says Yu.

In New York City, the Civilian Complaint Review Board—the very agency with the power to investigate allegations of police abuse—said last year that it hadn’t received footage it requested in hundreds of cases. Sometimes, the CCRB noted, the NYPD denied that tapes existed when it had them all along. “In one case, the NYPD told the CCRB three times that no video of an incident existed, yet the footage was later leaked to the Daily News,” the agency wrote in a memo outlining the problem.

Even in high-profile incidents like when a person is killed in police custody, body camera footage is often not released to the public. Upturn analyzed 100 fatal police shootings documented by The Washington Post from 2017 where body cam footage is believed to be available, and found that it was only made public in 40 cases. In many instances, footage is only released after significant public pressure or a court order. In Texas, The Dallas Morning News spent three years fighting to obtain tapes from the killing of Tony Timpa, who died in police custody in 2016. “We’ve seen so many cases where it takes months or even years to force police departments to share body cam footage when it shows police violence and wrongdoing,” says Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project at the nonprofit Urban Justice Center.

The protests since George Floyd’s death have pushed some police departments, including in New York City and Dallas, to institute new, more transparent policies on body cam footage. In Floyd’s case, most of the available videos have yet to be released, aside from a redacted tape from a nearby Minneapolis Park Police officer. A spokesperson for the department told NBC News in late May that “body cam footage is not public data.”

Ultimately, the ability to hold police departments accountable with body cameras often depends on rules designed by those same police departments. Evidence from outside sources—like witness cell phones and CCTV cameras—is often far more accessible to the public than body cam footage. And like in Floyd’s case, those videos are often what’s used to hold cops accountable when they commit acts of violence. “Police body cam footage is nothing like bystander footage,” says Cahn. “There is such tremendous power in who controls the footage and where the footage is saved.”

That doesn’t mean body cameras can’t ever help keep police accountable, especially when the footage is released promptly. In Baltimore three years ago, one of the devices caught a police officer as he planted drugs at a crime scene; he was later convicted for fabricating evidence. After Rayshard Brooks was fatally shot by a cop in Atlanta on Friday, body cam footage of the incident was quickly released, and the officer was fired. But in general, advocates like Yu argue that body cameras haven’t lived up to the lofty expectations that many had for them after Michael Brown’s death. “Body-worn cameras simply haven’t served the interests of communities in most places, and primarily should be seen as a policing and surveillance tool,” he says.

Research on the impacts that body-worn cameras have on policing is mixed. Some studies have found that cops who wear them are less likely to use force or be the subject of civilian complaints. But a 2017 randomized control trial that included over 2,000 police officers in Washington, DC, found that the effect of body cams was too small to be statistically significant: Officers who wore the cameras used force and received complaints at about the same rate as their colleagues who didn’t. A 2016 analysis of 10 previous studies of body cameras also found that they had “no discernible effect” on the use of force, and actually increased the likelihood of an officer being assaulted.

That’s reflected in the experience of some law enforcement officials themselves. “You forget about the body camera pretty quickly,” says Betsy Smith, a retired police sergeant with almost 30 years of experience. “It doesn’t change our behavior, because most cops are just going out there and doing their job. If people think, Let’s get these cops body cameras to change their behavior, I think that’s really naive, and frankly it’s kind of insulting to law enforcement.” But Smith isn’t opposed to body cameras. She says she’s in favor of equipping every police officer in the country with one, but not necessarily because filming cops keeps them accountable.

By design, body-worn cameras point outwards into the world, often aiding police officers in monitoring communities, rather than helping communities watch police. And surveillance technology is only growing more sophisticated: At least one body cam manufacturer has pitched adding live facial recognition as a feature to police departments, OneZero reported earlier this year.

Smith says that instead of reforming police behavior, body cameras have often been helpful in exonerating officers falsely accused of misconduct. The footage can also be used to aid police as they write incident reports, though Yu points out that ability can give officers an advantage over other witnesses relying on their memory alone. Despite their advantages, Smith acknowledges body cameras can create more work for police departments. They have been plagued with cybersecurity issues; some devices have even burst into flames. And then there’s the added bureaucracy. “That footage has to be controlled, it has to be logged in as evidence, it has to be stored and maintained, and it’s really expensive to do that and it’s somewhat complicated,” Smith says. “It’s not an iPhone on your chest.”

The ongoing Black Lives Matter protests have once again sparked a wider reckoning over how cities in the US, especially black communities, are policed. A majority of Americans in recent surveys say they believe that Floyd’s death is a symptom of a larger problem and that law enforcement needs to change. While Senate Republicans have put forward proposals for reform that would expand the use of body cameras, others are questioning whether the technology is really worth it, particularly if cameras don’t stop brutality. “At a moment when we’re cutting school funding, when we’re cutting forms of public health funding in the middle of a pandemic, the idea of spending millions to preserve body cam footage that’s often hidden from the public seems like a real waste to me,” says Cahn.