Benefit of Body Worn Cameras for Law Enforcement

We’ve learned from live, reality, and all types of news, that people act differently when they know they are being filmed. The fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown Jr. on August 9, 2014 in the city of Ferguson, Missouri ignited an uproar of protest and lots of questions on the over insensitivity and militarized response of officers in Ferguson. Body cameras should be worn on law enforcement at all times because it encourages security of the public and police, holds officers accountable for inhumane actions and protect officers from false accusations of misconduct, and also prevents excessive brutality in the future by teaching future officers how to compose themselves in controversial situations. Like other new forms of technology, body-worn cameras have the potential to transform the field of policing.

There have been hundreds of cases in
which the police have unloaded their weapons to suspects of crimes, legally.
Witnesses in shock or juries and judges influenced by their emotions in
judicial cases can confuse the defense of protocol with excessive brutality,
only due to the unfortunate problem of barbarian officers who unapologetically
kill innocent civilians as young as 6 years old. It’s amazing to consider that
only a two-square-inch economic device is needed to provide the crucial
evidence needed to defend the innocence of a genuine police officers who protects
those in their community.

 An applicable example is the event in relation
to the Cleveland police officer, David Muniz, who acts heroically in trying to
calm a violent and suicidal man even after the man shot and injured the
policeman. Michael E. Miller, an enterprise reporter who has won several
national journalism awards including three Sigma Delta Chi awards from the
Society of Professional Journalists, wrote the article “A body cam caught a
Cleveland cop acting heroically. So why are cops afraid of them?” covering the
publicly released footage. At the start of the one-minute video, Officer David
Muniz’s body camera shows him climbing the stairs of Theodore Johnson’s
apartment, because he had been threatening his wife and the owner with a gun.
David received two shots from Theodore when he reached the top of the stairs
and hit him in the chest (Miller, 2018). Although he was shot, he offers
Johnson the opportunity to lower his weapon and surrender (Miller, 2018). Unfortunately,
Theodore raised his gun and Muniz is forced to open fire on Johnson. The body
camera worn by Officer David Muniz effectively justified the open fire.
Although it did not stop Theodore Johnson from shooting Muniz, he easily proved
Muniz’s innocence.

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The protection of the public is just as
important as our officers regarding the necessity of BWCs. The human brain is a
remarkable organ, especially when considering the effect of memories in our
lives today. We can visualize an event through our eyes, encode that
visualization in our brains and can later retrieve a memory at our own leisure
(Acrobatiq, 2018). As fascinating as they may be, our memories are not perfect.
They fail sometimes due to our poor encoding and storage of memories, and
because we are unable to accurately retrieve the stored information in brains
(Acrobatiq, 2018).  But memory is also
influenced by our environment and the subsequent events after a traumatizing
situation. Although we as humans can attend, rehearse and organize information,
it’s still possible to have distortions and errors in our judgments and
behaviors (Acrobatiq, 2018).  Psychologists have put years of time and
research into observing cognitive bias, which are the errors in memory or
judgment caused by us using our cognitive biases in an unfitting way.

In 1984, a 22-year-old college student
in North Carolina named Jessica Thompson unquestionably experienced the
scariest day of her life. She wrote an article in the New York Times called “I
Was Certain, but I Was Wrong”, reciting what happened on this unimaginable day.
 A man broke into her apartment, put a
knife in her throat and raped her. According to her own account, Jennifer
studied her rapist throughout the incident with great determination to memorize
her face. “I studied every detail of the rapist’s face, I looked at his
hairline, I looked for scars, tattoos, anything that would help me identify
him, when and if he survived (Thompson, 2000). Thompson identified Ronald
Cotton as the rapist, and later testified against him at trial. She was sure it
was him, no doubt in her mind. It wasn’t until after Mr. Cotton served 11 years
in prison for a crime he did not commit, that the conclusive DNA evidence
indicated that Bobby Poole was the real rapist, and Cotton was subsequently
released from jail.

It’s not fair to victims or those
accused to have fate of their future decided by a witness’s memory. Occurring
only a couple of months ago, the fatal shooting of Maurice Granton was
recording using a BWC. Maurice was shot by an officer as he tried to jump over
a fence while running from police. The camera footage shows no instance of a
weapon, and more importantly, no threat of harm to the police or public.
Without the use of the BWC, how would this injustice be proven?

2018 began with the trial of a Baltimore
police officer charged with fabricating physical evidence, a misdemeanor, and
common law misconduct in office (Gorner, 2018).  Jacey Fortin, a freelance journalist for the
New York Times, and International Business Times, wrote an article about the
conviction. A body camera video taken a year ago appeared to show him planting
of a bag of drugs near an arrest scene and staging the discovery. The body
cameras used by the Baltimore Police Department begin recording and store the
first 30 seconds of video before the camera is manually turned on. Footage
shows the officer, Richard A. Pinheiro Jr., placing a bag of white capsules
inside a can in an alley (Gorner, 2018).  Richard can then be seen walking back to the
street, at which point he appears to switch on his body camera and announce
that he is going to search the alley (Gorner, 2018).  He then surprisingly “finds” the bag he had
just placed there. Not only was the use of BWCs imperative to Richard’s
conviction, but also the new software being implemented into them. If the
camera didn’t automatically begin recording before it was turned on, how much
valuable, justifiable information would have been lost? Do you think justice
would still be served?

There has been a dramatic increase in
protest over the use of BWC by the police recently. The use of various media
has caused the public to vocalize the issues occurring within interactions
between law enforcement and the public. Many people think that BWCs have the
potential benefit of a greater amount of reliability and accountability for
both citizens and officers. BWCs are now commercially available with more than
60 different cameras, designed specifically for the use of law enforcement.
“A Primer on Body Worn Camera Technologies” is a research report prepared
by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Sponsored by the
National Institute of Justice, the laboratory was able to conduct a randomized
experiment with the Orlando police department to study officers’ amount of
force toward citizens. When department officials complied with the experimental
protocol and did not use their own judgement to turn the camera on or off, the
force use rates were 37% lower (“A Primer on Body Worn Camera
Technologies”, 2016). On the other hand, when the agents did not comply
with the treatment protocol and instead decided when to turn the cameras on and
off, the rates of use of force were 71% higher (“A Primer on Body Worn
Camera Technologies”, 2016).  In
both cases, “force” was defined as any application of physical
restraint beyond the handcuffs (“A Primer on Body Worn Camera
Technologies”, 2016). This amazing experiment suggests that the use of
full-body cameras for the police reduces the use of force when the officer has
no control over the duration of activation or deactivation of the camera.

Video footage from police body cameras are already being used to train new and existing officers on how to conduct themselves during difficult encounters with the public. The Miami Police Department has been using body cameras for training since 2012! Revision to the Departmental Manual, New Policy (2016). The Miami-Dade police department issued a new policy effective April 20th, 2016 on the body worn camera systems. In the new policy, one of the supervisory inspection and audit responsibilities regards the review of data contained in the BWC system shall be to assess training needs and to ensure compliance with departmental policy. Instead of conducting arbitrary compliance reviews by word of mouth, supervisors can now conduct a proper review by looking at unbiased video footage of every officer on duty. They have more insight on the daily lives of the officers interacting with the public most.

The Office of Community Oriented
Policing Services (COPS) is the portion of the U.S. Department of Justice in
charge of promoting the practice of community policing by nations different law
enforcement agencies. On their government website, they claim that “Community
policing begins with a commitment to building trust and mutual respect between
police and communities. In 2014, they issued a report called “Implementing a
Body-Worn Camera Program: Recommendations and Lessons Learned” to discuss the
perceived benefits of deploying body-worn cameras, privacy implications, and
policy recommendations. In fact, their report concludes that police agencies are
discovering that body-worn cameras can serve as a useful training tool to help
improve officer performance. For example, agencies are using footage from
body-worn cameras to provide scenario-based training, to evaluate the
performance of new officers in the field, and to identify new areas in which
training is needed (Implementing a Body-Worn Camera Program: Recommendations
and Lessons Learned, 2014). By using body-worn cameras in this way, agencies
have the opportunity to raise standards of performance when it comes to
tactics, communication, and customer service (Implementing a Body-Worn Camera
Program: Recommendations and Lessons Learned, 2014). This can help increase the
amount of reliability and trust citizens have in their officers to follow
intended protocol on controversial situations, while also eliminating cases of
officers handling a situation they have never come across or are inept in
rectifying the issue without proper training.

In conclusion, the importance of BWCs in today’s law enforcement has proven to increase as the public begins to respond with protest. I continue to press BWCs should be worn at all times by police officers because they encourage security of the public and police, hold officers accountable for inhumane actions and protect officers from false accusations of misconduct, and also prevent excessive brutality in the future by teaching future officers how to compose themselves in controversial situations. It is unfair and unwise to depend on witnesses for justice.

References

• Community Oriented Policing Services Outlines Best Practices for Use of Body-Worn Cameras for Police Officers. (2014, September 12). States News Service. Retrieved November 6, 2018, from http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-382235538.html?refid=easy_hf
• Fortin, J. (2018, January 25). Baltimore Police Officer Charged With Fabricating Evidence in Drug Case. Retrieved November 6, 2018, from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/24/us/baltimore-officer-video-drugs.html
• Gorner, J. (2018, July 31). Family of man fatally shot by Chicago cop files wrongful death lawsuit against city. Retrieved November 5, 2018, from https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-met-wrongful-death-lawsuit-maurice-granton-20180728-story.html
• Hung, V., Babin, S., & Coberly, J. (2016). Primer on Body Worn Camera Technologies(Rep. No. 250382). Retrieved November 6, 2018, from https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/250382.pdf
• Miller, M. E. (2015, October 09). A body cam caught a Cleveland cop acting heroically. So why are cops afraid of them? Retrieved November 5, 2018, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/10/09/a-body-cam-caught-a-cleveland-cop-acting-heroically-so-why-are-cops-afraid-of-them/?utm_term=.0bced91ff46c
• Revision to the Departmental Manual, New Policy. (2016). Retrieved November 6, 2018, from https://www.miamidade.gov/police/library/bwc-policy.pdf
• Ripley, A. (2017, October 20). A Big Test of Police Body Cameras Defies Expectations. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/upshot/a-big-test-of-police-body-cameras-defies-expectations.html
• Thompson, J. (2000, June 18). ‘I Was Certain, but I Was Wrong’. Retrieved November 5, 2018, from https://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/18/opinion/i-was-certain-but-i-was-wrong.html