by Dish Staff
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that two companies, Safety Visions and Digital Ally, donated about 50 cameras to the Ferguson Police Department a week ago. Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson said they are “still playing with them,” but officers started using the cameras at a protest march on Saturday. Jackson said the officers captured video of protesters taunting them.
More than 153,000 people have signed a“We the People” petition to create a “Mike Brown Law” that would require all police to wear cameras, and several police departments across the country have moved toward implementing them in the wake of Brown’s shooting. Police in Columbia, South Carolina just started testing the cameras, and last week the police chief in Houston, Texas requested $8 million to equip 3,500 officers over the next three years.
But Justin T. Ready and Jacob T.N. Young, who have done research on cop cameras and support their use, caution that “many assumptions people make about body-worn cameras simply aren’t true.” A big one:
The first myth is that video evidence is completely objective and free of interpretation. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video must be worth at least a million. Or is it? For example, we’ve been working on a study surveying residents in a large West Coast city about their experiences with police officers during traffic stops. One finding was surprising: When asked whether they observed the officer touch his gun when approaching the car, 50.9 percent of black motorists said yes. In contrast, only 11.5 percent of white motorists observed the officer touch his gun. What’s surprising is not the disparity but that police training and policy in this city required all officers to approach vehicles during traffic stops with their hand on their service weapon. Essentially, white motorists may not have been paying as much attention to where the officer was placing his or her hands when approaching the vehicle. What was a subtlety of behavior for whites was not a minor detail for blacks. The police in this city did not wear on-officer video cameras. It is possible that police were more likely to disregard their training with white motorists, but a 2007 study by the Rand Corp.found that when researchers matched stops involving black drivers with similarly situated white drivers (those stopped at the same time, place, etc.), officers were no more likely to disregard their training for white motorists. What do you think—was our finding due to a difference in police behavior or selective awareness of the officer touching his firearm?
The point is that two people observing the same police activity may see different things because each person will focus her attention on details that are most important to her own self-interest. A video clip from body cams is part of a larger story, some of which is not caught on camera.
Previous Dish on cop cameras here.
(Photo: New York City Public Advocate Letitia James displays a video camera that police officers could wear on patrol during a press conference on August 21, 2014 in New York City. By Andrew Burton/Getty Images)
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