As reformers scramble to increase law enforcement accountability, body cameras have come to be treated as the panacea for all police evils. Privacy advocates aren’t so convinced.
On Friday, civil liberty advocates from 34 organizations, including the NAACP and ACLU, released privacy guidelines for body camera implementation.
They argue that body cameras, “when deployed without appropriate safeguards, can even compound problems of over-surveillance and biased policing.”
They recommend, among other things, that officers be banned from watching their own footage before they send reports. “Footage of an event presents a partial—and sometimes misleading—perspective of how events unfolded,” they write. “Pre-report viewing could cause an officer to conform the report to what the video appears to show, rather than what the officer actually saw.”
They want officials to stay away from facial-recognition software, largely because it could result in discriminatory policing. “…officers will have far greater visibility into heavily policed communities—where cameras will be abundant—than into other communities where cameras will be rare,” they argue. “Such technologies could amplify existing disparities in law enforcement practices across communities.”
The guidelines also call for rules governing the retention of and access to the footage, making it widely available to the media and public upon request–including “any filmed subject seeking to file a complaint, to criminal defendants, and to the next-of-kin of anyone whose death is related to the events captured on video.”
But police are unlikely to surrender the information that easily— Washington D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier has already said they won’t be able to release tapes without heavily redacting any sensitive information they might contain, including the inside of private homes or police passwords.
The Atlantic noted that, with just a short amount of use, body cameras are already failing to capture possible instances of abuse, in cases that “confound the idea that body cameras increase accountability”:
In San Diego, when an experienced officer shot an unarmed 31-year-old man, a body camera didn’t capture the footage, either—despite the city owning more than 600 of the devices.
And in California, a bill that was written to guarantee certain protections for citizens captured on body-camera footage has been amended—under pressure from local law enforcement—to have nearly the exact opposite affect.
