Part II: The Body Camera

I am excited to share today another excerpt from my study of ten years of copaganda about police body cameras in the Yale Journal of Law & Liberation. First, my apologies for the bad link in my prior post—the full article is available here, and I hope you’ll take the time to read it and share it with friends. It’s relevant to all forms of government propaganda and liberal “reform” across a range of issues.

[The artwork above is a mosaic I made from a couple thousand wine corks given to me by friends and colleagues. It depicts the flowers placed in the middle of the street where Darren Wilson shot and killed Mike Brown, and the repeated times that Ferguson police drove over and ruined the flower memorials with their cars afterward.]

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Reform can be used to distract people from critical insights and solutions

The public discussion of body cameras fits a pattern in the history of U.S. policing. In the wake of historical police violence against marginalized groups, followed by historical police violence against people protesting the original police violence, there are always calls by people who care about violence to address the underlying root causes. Addressing root causes–such as reducing inequality or making specific investments in housing, health care, education, transportation, toxic cleanup, nutritious food, sustainable ecological practices, the arts, and building strong networks of community members helping themselves through mutual aid and self-empowerment—are mostly ignored by politicians, even though evidence suggests that these strategies lead to short, medium, and long-term violence reduction.^[1]

Instead, the segment of the public who cares about improving the lives of marginalized people is distracted and ultimately appeased with the promise of a “reform” like the body camera. At virtually every key moment in U.S. history, those “reforms” have made the government’s punishment bureaucracy bigger, more profitable to private profiteers, more politically powerful, and thus less accountable to local democracy.

Stuart Schrader has documented that this phenomenon occurred on a broad scale in the wake of the Kerner Commission in the 1960s after widespread uprisings by the urban poor and the brutal police repression that followed them:

President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed the [Kerner Commission] in July 1967 to investigate the causes of unrest in twenty-three U.S. cities—and to devise prophylaxis against future unrest. In its bestselling Report…the commission offered recommendations to alleviate racial and economic inequality, urging a vast federal spending program on jobs, education, and housing to address the socioeconomic conditions underlying the political unrest.

President Johnson spurned this proposal, but most of the subsidiary recommendations the Kerner report delivered on how to transform policing were adopted… And the way to assure security was to reform its technical apparatus. Police chiefs, national security officials, and social scientists concurred. This coalition helped produce some federal legislation in 1965 and a huge bill in 1968 that put federal money in cops’ hands. Elected officials offered this “war against crime” to concerned voters as a way to control political unrest. What it actually did was offer resources to police and prisons to enhance their capacities and repertoires . . . .^[2]

Instead of adopting the Commission’s recommendations on housing and inequality, politicians from both parties poured federal money into police, prisons, and courts to modernize and “professionalize” the southern policing bureaucracies.^[3] One popular idea in the progressive 1960s zeitgeist was that the problem of southern police forces was a technical one that could be fixed with more training and better resources.^[4] Sound familiar?

As Naomi Murakawa has shown, outrage at police brutality and the sight of fire hoses and police dogs used by southern police against protestors led progressive reformers and politicians to propose exactly the kind of punishment expansion and police investment (e.g. more police, standardized training, professionalization, riot control policies, tanks, body armor, police “intelligence” divisions to infiltrate protest groups, chemical weapons, standardized sentencing, better technology, etc.) that later became the source of public outrage during, say, the 2014 and 2020 uprisings.^[5] On the whole, to put it crudely, people in power chose to invest in infrastructure that could much more broadly manage people enduring inequality rather than passing policies to reduce inequality. A 500% rise in overall U.S. imprisonment followed—along with new forms of legalized racial discrimination that Michelle Alexander famously has called “The New Jim Crow.”^[6] In this way, the federal government’s reformers actually helped local southern governments build police bureaucracies to professionalize and make their repression more efficient, and the news media repeatedly and continuously portrayed it as progressive reform to the consumers of liberal coastal newspapers.

The results of those “reforms” have been breathtaking. Several decades later, by the time Michael Brown was killed, the professionally trained, fully equipped Ferguson Police Department averaged 3.6 arrest warrants per every household, most of which were related to unpaid debts arising from the city police, court, and jail.^[7] Texas confined more than 500,000 people a year in jail cells to “sit out” debts from unparalleled numbers of arrests by highly trained professionalized police forces, the largest of which were using algorithmic analytics attached to license plate camera readers to help track and arrest people.^[8] A professional punishment bureaucracy, complete with contracts for training and technology and armed with publicly funded public relations teams,^[9] was now the largest of its kind and was jailing higher rates of Black people and poor people across the South than in the segregation era.^[10] To top it all off, the professionalized legal system was extracting far greater amounts of Black wealth for profit through a variety of bureaucratic collection schemes run through police, courts, jails, and private companies.^[11]

How is this process working today with body cameras? Not only does a conversation about body cameras as a solution to police violence take attention away from the more foundational questions I listed above, but it also distracts from the lawful but entirely unnecessary police violence that now constitutes the vast bulk of professional police behavior.^[12]

For example, it would be seen as “violent” if police sent SWAT teams to arrest anyone who picked a wild blueberry.^[13] Or anyone accused of sexual harassment at the workplace. Or any woman who seeks an abortion. Or to arrest students at a mostly white boarding school where children illegally drink alcohol or smoke marijuana. We see each of these examples of government violence as unthinkable in a free society even though we live in a society that has made tens of millions of forcible arrests of individuals for marijuana possession. Each of these situations demonstrates the role of settled cultural and legal norms in shaping what we see as violent and what we see as a normal part of functioning government.^[14] But think, for example, about the daily police arrests and corresponding family separation for unpaid debts, technical probation violations, trespassing, and the other low-level offenses that constitute the vast majority of police arrests.^[15] Only 5% of all police arrests and 4% of police time are devoted to conduct the police themselves categorize as “violent.”^[16] This is the vast bulk of police activity which, incidentally, is captured on the body camera and used against the poorest people in our society in courtrooms every day.

The body camera framed as “reform,” however, helps punishment bureaucrats focus our attention away from this systemic issue of the sheer level of legalized government violence that our contemporary society has been socialized to accept. Crucially, body cameras also tend to focus debate on single incidents of (mis)conduct. Was this cop right or wrong? Should prosecutors charge this bad actor with a crime or not? Not, why was this cop there in that neighborhood, and what does the evidence show about how the particular social problem to which the cop was responding could have been avoided through other social investments instead of through policing?

In city after city, the everyday violence committed by “good cops”—what we now might refer to as “mass incarceration”—is deprioritized in the public and political consciousness because the very purpose of an “accountability” measure like body cameras is to focus attention on only a small subset of police activities that deviate from the larger atmosphere of “legitimate” police violence. Each time a bad act occurs, the public demand become to increase the amount of bodycam footage available so we can understand that particular incident and whether the officer’s actions in that incident meet a certain standard of criminal or civil liability.^[17] In almost every case, there will be people on each side arguing over whether the police were justified in what they did.^[18] In rare cases in which police cameras captured something beyond the pale, and in the even rarer situations in which that video evidence eventually became public and there was no other bystander video, people would demand that an officer be fired and prosecuted based on a body camera recording.^[19] In this way, even in the ideal case, body cameras fit perfectly into the narrative of police bureaucrats: what matters is that we identify and isolate the “bad cops.”

The same can be said for every major contemporary response to police violence supported by mainstream politicians: their narrative highlights criminal prosecution of bad apples, more money for different training consultants, tweaks to written policies, implicit bias awareness, better surveillance technology, bigger data platforms, hiring more police from racial minority groups, etc… All of them have at their core one theme: they distract people from asking questions about the primary role that armed agents employed by the government play in an unequal society.

To see more concretely the way discussion about particular incidents captured by body cameras distracts the well-meaning public, it is helpful to see that the police bureaucracy has a hierarchy of narratives it prefers, and it goes something like this:

1. Blame any problems on individual “bad apple” cops;

2. Blame any problems on bad units, squads, precincts, or particular police leaders;

3. Blame any problems on particularly bad police forces.

In conversations about police accountability, police will attempt to push their narrative up this hierarchy. If they have their way, we’ll talk only about “bad apple” cops.^[20] But it often becomes necessary for police bureaucrats to engage and even encourage conversations within the other categories, applying the same “bad apple” reasoning to each slightly larger group of officers.

Under no circumstances, however, do police want the public to entertain conversations outside of this hierarchy about problems with policing itself as a method of social, economic, and racial control. In fact, conversations about each of these three categories are designed to avoid the deeper conversations. Most easily, “bad apples” like Derek Chauvin can be thrown under the bus, fired, and sent to prison. Bad squads and units like the Scorpion Squad following the murder of Tyre Nichols or the corrupt gun squad in Baltimore can be scapegoated and (temporarily) disbanded^[21] Bad police forces can also be scapegoated—indeed, I have observed over fifteen years that my clients across the country simply assume their local police force is generally recognized as one of the worst nationally. People in City A are always surprised to hear that people in City B do not recognize City A as having the worst police. People assume that police must be better elsewhere. When traveling for cases, I routinely hear things like the following about many dozens of cities: “Yes, but cops are worse here in [X].” All of my clients can point to embarrassing scandals and histories of rampant, unaccountable, and pervasively violent police in their area.

When necessary, such as with the LAPD after the Rampart scandal or Ferguson after the 2014 uprisings, police themselves will support this narrative that entire departments are in need of “reform.”^[22] After the 2020 uprisings, many liberal politicians pointed to Camden, New Jersey as a model because the town had “disbanded” its police force after repeated police violence. (What is often left out of this story is that the city simply rehired far more officers on lower salaries, expanded lucrative surveillance contracts, and made even more arrests of almost exclusively poor people in the subsequent years for low-level crimes.)^[23] Similarly, it is common for powerful local or state officials to ask the Department of Justice to investigate an entire troubled police force in their area.^[24] Dozens of mayors, governors, and even police chiefs have done this in recent years, not out of a belief that federal intervention will make their police force behave differently in fundamental ways, but to distract from local attempts at more radical solutions. Cooptation like this routinely happens through federal intervention because of the well-understood, well-trodden periods of delay, expert consulting, rationalization of more resources which often becomes court-ordered additional spending, and pacification of liberal residents who are only passively interested in knowing that something is being done.

In this political and narrative act, the state and local officials who request federal intervention are asserting that the police force in question is somehow deviating from standards acceptable to federal prosecutors and not acting in the same way as U.S. police forces have always acted.^[25] It is an attempt to cast a police force as an outlier from the norm—a “bad apple” in an otherwise legitimate, good-faith system. But this very act itself is one of propaganda; it reinforces that there are democratic standards of U.S. policing as we know it and that the department in question is a deviation. After years of studying the history and present of U.S. policing, I have found no evidence that any particular major department is somehow a significant outlier. Everyone that I have investigated—and that I have seen anyone else investigate—is substantially similar to the others in terms of what they do and do not do. Just as with bad apple individual cops, the very creation of this category implies that there is a meaningful category of good cops or good police forces such that the harms mass incarceration causes are attributable only to the bad ones.

This kind of scapegoating of particular police forces is often welcomed by police, not just because it tends to mean more investment in more resources for those “bad” officers, squads, precincts, and departments for “training” and technology, but because it also distracts people from asking too many fundamental questions about the enterprise of mass processing of punishment as a way to make our society less violent. This framing discourages people from asking the core, unorthodox question: “is there something about this bureaucracy, and the social and economic arrangements it protects, that simply is not amenable to reform (because its primary function is not to promote holistic human equality and flourishing)?”

What might it suggest that each local police bureaucracy in each of thousands of cities and counties has similar policies, technology, demographic disparities, statistics on their activity and arrest patterns, infiltration by right-wing groups, and recurring scandals of illegal corruption and violence? A national conversation flares up every few years about how U.S. police are violent and unaccountable, but the public discourse does not connect it to the prior conversations that society just had several years before.^[26] What might it suggest that every generation of people in the United States for 125 years has had the same conversation on newspaper editorial pages about pervasive police corruption, violence against marginalized people, and surveillance of progressive social movements?

At this point in U.S. history, there is a virtually unlimited reservoir of videos capturing illegal police violence. And before cell phone videos became pervasive, there was already an unlimited catalog of undisputed crimes committed by police. None of these videos of horrific crimes have made police less violent or more accountable to the populations they patrol. If more overt evidence of police brutality was going to spur less police violence, it would have already happened.^[27]

I ask a modest question: if a primary function of people who control government bureaucracy in an unequal society is to control poor and marginalized people and to prevent social movements from achieving more serious change that weakens bureaucratic power and reduces the wealth of the wealthiest people in that society, might government bureaucracies use surveillance technology to further those ends rather than to make themselves less violent? This question helps us see an enormous opportunity cost that we suffer when we promote “reforms” that do not alter the size and power of the systems that cause us harm.

            In the final analysis, the contemporary push for body cameras is based on a strange notion of “accountability.” The cameras mean (rare) consequences for individual "bad apple" police officers, but a bolstering of the power of police generally. A “reform” like the body camera is therefore the exact opposite of accountability because, from the perspective of the interests behind the policing bureaucracy, body cameras are a reward.