The Myth of Neutral Technology.
Tools like body cameras for police officers can be only as effective at reducing inequalities in law enforcement as the humans using them.
Mayor Bill de Blasio speaks to the New York City Police
Academy graduating class, December 2014. (Carlo
Allegri/Reuters)
In the aftermath of the deaths of
Michael Brown and Eric Garner, the debate about police violence and
safety has gained new national attention. Some politicians, including
President Obama, have proposed a technological solution: body cameras for police officers.
The White House hopes to allocate $75 million to local law enforcement agencies, which would equip about 50,000 more police officers with the cams. Most
federal aid programs have distributed heavy weapons, armored cars, and
cutting-edge riot gear to small-town sheriff’s departments. This program
would provide a tool for transparency.
Some of the implications of police reliance on body cameras are already well-known—from their effectiveness as evidence to challenges for their adoption. But other effects are less commonly discussed. For example, the adoption of body cameras would mean a big payday for the companies who make them. The current market leader is the private Seattle firm Vievu, whose "Straight Shooter" package contains a camera, VeriPatrol software, and three-year warranty at $25 per month. But Taser International
is hot on Vievu's heels. Taser’s stock price has hovered around $5 for
most of the last five years; on the Friday after Obama’s call for body
cameras, it closed at $24.16 and has continued to climb. Federal
and local governments are looking to spend $150 million all up. Taser’s
total sales for body cameras and subscriptions to Evidence.com, its cloud storage service, were only $15.3 million last quarter.
Taser looks to parlay existing relationships
with law enforcement agencies into a bigger share of the body-cam
market. The company has built these ties by providing all kinds of
“solutions” to lethal policing—they make stun guns, and, like Band-Aid,
their brand name has become synonymous with the product. The fact that police have recently killed young black men with stun guns, and that the UN Commissions on Torture has found that they can be as lethal as firearms in the context of policing (especially when they are so frequently misused), has not negatively affected Taser’s finances.
Taser’s business model for body cameras goes
beyond hardware. The company wants to keep police departments on the
hook with subscriptions for a cloud-based storage service. Evidence.com
is pitched as a companion to the use of body and surveillance cameras, a
way for departments to cope with the massive amounts of data they
generate. Taser offers to solve the headache of storing and managing all
the video content their cameras hoover up. For taking this burden away
from overtaxed police departments they charge a monthly fee of $39 per user
for a “Pro” package. A monthly fee of $55 qualifies for a service that
includes free camera upgrades. Of course, Taser won’t pocket proceeds
from all the sales that arise from the forthcoming body-cam spending
spree, nor will it enjoy universal buy-in on its cloud service. But the
possibility of even a sizable fraction of 50,000 new body-camera users
paying $40 a month must make for some nice daydreams in the board room.
The Evidence.com
front page features a video plugging the service. Mostly it amounts to
an endorsement from Salt Lake City Police Department Chief Chris
Burbank, intercut with footage of the product in action. He extols the
virtues of the platform, expressing particular gratitude about handing
over responsibility for storing all manner of evidence to a private
company.
The success of body cameras requires several
assumptions. Advocates take it for granted that body cameras will
positively affect police and citizen behavior, making the use of force
less likely. They often cite
a small number of real world trials involving police forces in
California, Arizona, and Scotland. Proponents treat these examples as
natural experiments proving that body cameras have a “civilizing
effect.” In particular, the Rialto experiment has been deployed in
recent debates as proof that cameras reduce the use of force (which
dropped 60 percent there) and complaints against police (which were
reduced by 88 percent).
But in a report
this year for the U.S. Department of Justice, the criminologist Michael
D. White cast serious doubt on what these examples prove. The only
certainty across the studies were fewer citizen complaints about police
misbehavior. Even if police find this outcome compelling, we don’t
really know the cause. Was it because of changes in police behavior,
public behavior, or some combination of the two? It’s even possible that
behavior has nothing to do with it. White asks whether “changes in
citizen complaint reporting patterns” might simply amount to a reduction
in frivolous complaints. We might speculate that it’s also possible
that citizens with a grievance are intimidated by the fact that police
possess a record of their encounter to which the complaining citizen has
no access.
To be confident about cameras’ effects on
behavior, we’d need much more research, without which White thinks we
can’t be confident about the upside of cameras. Meanwhile, we still have
to worry about their downsides, including the knowledge that the trauma
suffered by all parties as a result of a crime has been recorded. For
police, there are a range of hidden costs associated with training,
administration, and compliance in the roll-out of new technology. And
manufacturers like Taser are banking on ongoing expenses long after the
cameras have been bought.
Given that there are so many unanswered
questions, where does the faith in these devices come from? As mobile,
wearable technologies streaming data into the cloud, body cameras
conform to what has become a preferred model of accountability and
transparency in today’s culture. We entrust our personal exercise regime
to Fitbits—and our working hours to productivity trackers—because we
believe these devices are neutral observers, their output unimpeachable
fact.
We have more faith in the devices that augment our work and leisure than we do in other people, or even ourselves. Humans
are understood to be unreliable witnesses compared with connected
digital devices. Contemporary wisdom says that while people create
anecdotes, devices create data. We take it for granted that
sensor metrics are capable of mitigating unruly human behavior—sloth,
procrastination, discrimination, and violence.
But no technological fix can remedy the
inequalities that underly police violence against young black men. A
camera might be able to record interactions, but it can’t arrest the
ingrained prejudices that lead to racial profiling to begin with— the
same prejudices that find their way into Taser’s advertising material.
The video featured on Evidence.com shows a black suspect being chased.
Ultimately, police body cameras may produce fewer
complaints, but perhaps fewer complaints are not really the problem in
need of solving. Cameras won’t change the disproportionate presence of
young black men in the criminal justice system, from arrest rates to
incarceration. If anything, they create yet another avenue for corporate
profiteering from that state of affairs. And, as we saw in the case of
Eric Garner, there’s no guarantee that recorded evidence will bring
about justice for the victims of police brutality anyway.
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