The Body Camera

The Language of Our Dreams

I am excited to announce the publication today of my study The Body Camera: The Language of Our Dreams. The article appears in the fantastic resurrection of the historic Yale Journal of Law & Liberation. I am reproducing a short excerpt here, and I hope you like it!

Studying the little-known history of the copaganada surrounding the police body camera is vital at this moment, and it had a profound effect on me. Few stories help us better understand the fraud of “criminal justice reform,” the failure of liberal elites to solve urgent problems, the threat of the punishment bureaucracy amidst rising fascism, the real forces that determine public policy, and how powerful institutions can use propaganda to turn their own failures into more power and profit.

I worked on this project during my research and writing sabbatical last year away from my daily civil rights litigation because the public conversation around the police body camera is one of the greatest achievements of modern copaganda. I studied a decade of public discourse about body cameras as well as the internal statements of police, prosecutors, and industry insiders to understand a simple question: how did a coveted tool of repression that police and prosecutors desperately wanted (but couldn’t get funded) come to be seen by the public—especially liberals—as an essential police reform? If we can understand the answer to this question better, we can begin to learn many of the most important lessons about how powerful institutions trick well-meaning people into tolerating a society that does not live up to its own stated values.

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Of course, the wise and the learned
Who pen editorials in the papers,
And the gentlemen with Dr. in front of their names
White and black,
Who make surveys and write books
Will live on weaving words to smother the kids who die,
And the sleazy courts,
And the bribe-reaching police,
And the blood-loving generals,
And the money-loving preachers
Will all raise their hands against the kids who die,
Beating them with laws and clubs and bayonets and bullets

            --Langston Hughes

"How do you defend yourself from a fantasy—a fantasy that shoots real bullets?"

--Fred Moten

In August 2014, a police officer shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.^[1] The city exploded in protest over police violence. Every night, people around the country watched as the news covered confrontations between ordinary people and militarized police on the streets of a small town almost no one had ever heard of. The protests spread across the country.^[2] People demanded accountability and change.

One of the key responses by political leaders was a coordinated national effort to buy body cameras for police departments from several large corporate vendors. Following the lead of President Barack Obama—who quickly sought hundreds of millions of dollars for purchasing body cameras^[3]—a lot of politicians, “experts,” and news outlets championed body cameras as a “reform” in direct response to Michael Brown’s homicide. They portrayed body cameras as a way to make police more “accountable” and “transparent.” As a result, they presented body cameras as a primary answer to the question of police violence.  But internal documents, public statements, and industry materials reveal that police—working with the for-profit manufacturers of the cameras and related software—had been desperate to get them for years.

Police and their corporate contractors had a problem: They were unable to get local governments to spend the billions of dollars needed to outfit every cop in the U.S. with a mobile surveillance camera that the cops themselves would control. Local police bureaucracies and carceral tech companies were also unable to procure the public money to fulfill their dream of integrating vast amounts of government surveillance data into expensive new cloud-based computing databases that would connect reservoirs of police data to facial and voice recognition software, license plate trackers, and proprietary behavior prediction algorithms.

After Officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown, these sophisticated actors were savvy: they used a moment of public outrage and the many calls for change to get self-professed “progressives” in local and national government and well-meaning people in the general public to support one of the most lucrative expansions of surveillance technology in modern history.

How did they do it? As I show in this article, they portrayed Orwellian government surveillance infrastructure as a “reform” for police violence at a moment of extreme uncertainty over what had exactly happened to Brown. In reporting on this “reform,” journalists almost always cut out of media coverage the views of scholars, social movement leaders, and directly impacted people who were warning that unprecedented investment in mobile surveillance cameras, cloud computing networks, and proprietary biometric algorithms controlled by police bureaucrats would have little effect on police violence but instead usher in a more totalitarian era of state repression. Virtually every post-2014 mainstream news article that exists on the subject omits the history of how and why the body cameras were developed and marketed, removing the ability of the general public to understand the primary reasons that the devices were being promoted. When the full story is understood, the scope of propaganda surrounding police body cameras is staggering.

According to their own statements, police and their profit-seeking industry allies used the media to focus the public on the supposed need to capture incidents of police violence on video. They repeated the talking point that police lacked funding for technology that could provide the public with “accountability” and “transparency” surrounding those police-initiated incidents.^[4]

In reality, in addition to a new surveillance infrastructure, police and prosecutors wanted body cameras because the cameras gave them the most powerful new form of evidence: outward looking videos that bureaucrats could create, direct, curate, edit, and control both in terms of what is captured, what is left out, and at which political moment what is captured is publicly released.  Body camera videos are now routinely used in almost every prosecutor office in the U.S. as evidence to get mostly poor people to quickly plead guilty to things like drug possession and trespassing. They are almost never used against police officers. To the contrary, the videos are often given privately to police officers prior to those officers’ internal statements about controversial incidents in which they used violence to create and standardize initial police narratives with the goal of reducing potential civil and criminal liability. The benefits of body cameras to the punishment bureaucracy unfolded exactly as police chiefs and corporate sales representatives from the companies discussed the devices over a decade ago when formulating their goals before Michael Brown’s death. 

This process is not only still happening, it is expanding. As with Michael Brown, the state killings of Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, Eric Garner, and many more human beings were added to the public relations chorus that body cameras were a “reform” solution to police violence.^[5] After the murder of George Floyd, the idea of body cameras as “accountability” and “transparency” became supercharged. At the height of the largest protest movement in generations, the cameras were presented as a centerpiece of the Democratic Party’s policing agenda as a key part of their failed George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.^[6] Despite the Act not passing due to separate provisions to which Republicans objected (such as modifications to the civil liability standard of “qualified immunity”),^[7] the government money continued to flow for body cameras. In the subsequent years, body cameras have remained one of the primary, reflexive “accountability” responses to police violence promoted by politicians, the police bureaucracy, corporate profiteers, “reform” consultants, and the news media.^[8]

And yet, body cameras have not prevented police killings: In each year after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, U.S. police have killed more people than they had the previous year^[9] despite deploying hundreds of thousands more body cameras.

After a decade-long public relations campaign, police obtained more cameras than they ever dreamed, investors in multi-billion-dollar companies got a lot richer, and body cameras are routinely used to gather evidence to convict poor Black people. Perhaps most significantly, I show below how the public discourse about government violence has been distorted away from discussion of material changes that could actually reduce all forms of violence.

The story of the body camera is more important than one technological boondoggle. The body camera is part of a larger dynamic in powerful institutions are able to preserve the worst parts of our society, including not only unjustifiable (and unpopular) inequalities, but also the promise that they are always working hard to address them.

The progression from violent, ineffective bureaucracy à “reform” à delusion of well-meaning people à more powerful bureaucracy à even more violence and inequality has been and will be the cycle of virtually every “reform” to the punishment bureaucracy until we recognize and stop it.^[10]

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To read past the introduction, check out the full article here.

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^[1] Timeline of Events in Shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Assoc. Press News (Aug. 8, 2019, 1:28 PM), https://apnews.com/article/shootings-police-us-news-st-louis-michael-brown-9aa32033692547699a3b61da8fd1fc62 [https://perma.cc/PKR5-TBHY].

^[2] Ellen Wulfhorst, Daniel Wallis, Edward McAllister, More Than 400 Arrested as Ferguson Protests Spread to Other U.S. Cities, Reuters (Nov. 25, 2014, 7:02 PM), https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-missouri-shooting/more-than-400-arrested-as-ferguson-protests-spread-to-other-u-s-cities-idUSKCN0J80PR20141126 [https://perma.cc/D4JF-3MRJ].

^[3] Carrie Dann & Andrew Rafferty, Obama Requests $263 Million for Police Body Cameras, Training, NBC News (Dec. 2, 2014), https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/first-read/obama-requests-263-million-police-body-cameras-training-n259161 [https://perma.cc/X7NP-CNC6].

^[4] See infra Part II, Part VI. A related feature of this coverage was the assertion—or sometimes the assumption—that it was necessary to capture each instance of violence on a video in order to determine objectively if that incident of violence were justified, and therefore, by an unstated causal chain, to stop police violence once and for all.

^[5] See infra note 158 and associated text (describing body camera proposals after police killed Freddie Gray); infra note 159 and associated text (describing body camera proposals after police killed Walter Scott); Marc Santora & Nikita Stewart, Police Cameras Could Come to New York Soon, N.Y. Times (Dec. 3, 2014), https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/nyregion/new-york-city-police-speeding-up-effort-to-give-officers-body-cameras.html [https://perma.cc/Q4A6-T9DB] (describing body camera proposals after police killed Eric Garner).

^[6] Justice in Policing Act of 2020, H.R. 7120, 116th Cong. (2020); Lindsey Van Ness, Body Cameras May Not Be the Easy Answer Everyone Was Looking For, Stateline (Jan. 14, 2020), https://stateline.org/2020/01/14/body-cameras-may-not-be-the-easy-answer-everyone-was-looking-for/ [https://perma.cc/RHP9-3D6L].

^[7] Joan E. Greve, What is the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and Is It Likely to Pass?, Guardian (Feb. 6, 2023, 6:00 AM), https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/06/george-floyd-justice-in-policing-act-explainer-tyre-nichols#:~:text=Democrats%20and%20civil%20rights%20activists,Act%20that%20passed%20the%20House [https://perma.cc/FC2K-YBEM].

^[8] See infra Part VI.

^[9] Fatal Force: 1,017 People Have Been Shot and Killed by Police in the Past 12 Months, Wash. Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/?itid=lk_inline_manual_19 [https://perma.cc/AZ4P-N8JD] (last updated July 31, 2023).

^[10] Alec Karakatsanis, How the Media Enables Violent Bureaucracy, Alec’s Copaganda Newsl. (Jan. 27, 2023), https://equalityalec.substack.com/p/how-the-media-enables-violent-bureaucracy [https://perma.cc/54TG-839B].