ProPublica Argues US Police 'Have Undermined the Promise of Body Cameras'

A new investigation from ProPublica argues that in the U.S., 'Hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars have been spent on what was sold as a revolution in transparency and accountability.

'Instead, police departments routinely refuse to release footage...'

The technology represented the largest new investment in policing in a generation. Yet without deeper changes, it was a fix bound to fall far short of those hopes. In every city, the police ostensibly report to mayors and other elected officials. But in practice, they have been given wide latitude to run their departments as they wish and to police — and protect — themselves. And so as policymakers rushed to equip the police with cameras, they often failed to grapple with a fundamental question: Who would control the footage?

Instead, they defaulted to leaving police departments, including New York's, with the power to decide what is recorded, who can see it and when. In turn, departments across the country have routinely delayed releasing footage, released only partial or redacted video or refused to release it at all. They have frequently failed to discipline or fire officers when body cameras document abuse and have kept footage from the agencies charged with investigating police misconduct. Even when departments have stated policies of transparency, they don't always follow them. Three years ago, after George Floyd's killing by Minneapolis police officers and amid a wave of protests against police violence, the New York Police Department said it would publish footage of so-called critical incidents 'within 30 days.' There have been 380 such incidents since then. The department has released footage within a month just twice.

And the department often does not release video at all. There have been 28 shootings of civilians this year by New York officers (through the first week of December). The department has released footage in just seven of these cases (also through the first week of December) and has not done so in any of the last 16.... For a snapshot of disclosure practices across the country, we conducted a review of civilians killed by police officers in June 2022, roughly a decade after the first body cameras were rolled out. We counted 79 killings in which there was body-worn-camera footage. A year and a half later, the police have released footage in just 33 cases — or about 42%.

The reporting reveals that without further intervention from city, state and federal officials and lawmakers, body cameras may do more to serve police interests than those of the public they are sworn to protect... The pattern has become so common across the country — public talk of transparency followed by a deliberate undermining of the stated goal — that the policing-oversight expert Hans Menos, who led Philadelphia's civilian police-oversight board until 2020, coined a term for it: the 'body-cam head fake.'
The article includes examples where when footage was ultimately released, it contradicted initial police accounts.

In one instance, past footage of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin 'was left in the control of a department where impunity reigned...' the article points out, adding that Minneapolis 'fought against releasing the videos, even after Chauvin pleaded guilty in December 2021 to federal civil rights violations.'

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