tag:theconversation.com,2011:/ca/topics/videotaping-police-14129/articlesvideotaping police – The Conversation2015-11-02T03:26:07Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/496772015-11-02T03:26:07Z2015-11-02T03:26:07ZAccountability and the viral video: there are still no guarantees<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/100257/original/image-20151030-20144-1odv8qy.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Modern video technology can make matters public, but accountability still depends on political processes to produce just outcomes.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKQqgVlk0NQ">YouTube/screenshot</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This article is part of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/democracy-futures">Democracy Futures</a> series, a <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/shortcodes/images-videos/articles-democracy-futures/">joint global initiative</a> with the <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/">Sydney Democracy Network</a>. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.</em></p>
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<p>The latest viral videos of police brutality – this time at a high school in South Carolina – illustrate the steady increase in public accountability over recent decades for actions that would otherwise have gone under the radar.</p>
<p>Last week, three quick-minded students in a small classroom at Spring Valley High had their phones out and recording in anticipation of violent behaviour by a police officer called in to deal with a recalcitrant student. It worked. Within two days of the videos going public, Richland County Sheriff’s Office deputy Ben Fields lost his job.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The scenes from a South Carolina classroom captured by students on their phones.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Video technology has created accountability where there had been none before. The seminal moment in the history of this trend was the 1992 beating of motorist Rodney King, which George Holliday videotaped from his apartment in Lake View Terrace, Los Angeles.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The recording of the 1992 police beating of Rodney King heralded the arrival of video-driven accountability.</span></figcaption>
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<p>As video became cheaper and more mobile, minorities came to see the camcorder as a slim hope of protection against police harassment. As rapper Ice Cube <a href="http://genius.com/299173">put it</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Tearin up my coupe lookin for the chronic</p>
<p>Goddamn nobody got a Panasonic?!</p>
</blockquote>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Ice Cube’s Who Got the Camera?, released soon after the LA riots triggered by the beating of Rodney King.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Well, today everyone has one in their pocket and the effects are profound.</p>
<p>There are now wholes genres of citizen-shot cell-phone videos, evidencing a range of bad actions that would otherwise have gone to ground. These include:</p>
<ul>
<li>the police shooting;</li>
</ul>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">A policeman in North Charleston, South Carolina, shoots an apparently unarmed man after a scuffle following a traffic stop.</span></figcaption>
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<ul>
<li>the racist rant on public transport; and</li>
</ul>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">A woman racially abuses another passenger on a train in New South Wales.</span></figcaption>
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<ul>
<li>the over-the-top road rage incident.</li>
</ul>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">A man pulls a gun in a road-rage incident in James City, North Carolina.</span></figcaption>
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<p>These videos expose people in ways that can be later used for anything from shaming the offenders to mounting legal action and instigating political movements.</p>
<p>These examples illustrate a key ingredient of accountability: access. If we are to have any chance of holding someone to account for their actions, we need access to knowledge of those actions in the first place. The videos are showing us what is actually happening.</p>
<h2>We have the knowledge, but what about outcomes?</h2>
<p>But if exposure through surveillance (or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance">“sousveillance”</a>) appears to promise accountability, that promise is not always delivered. Take the phenomenon of the hit-to-kill driver in China, <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2015/09/why_drivers_in_china_intentionally_kill_the_pedestrians_they_hit_china_s.html?wpsrc=rollingstone">described</a> recently by Geoffrey Sant:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In China, drivers who have injured pedestrians will sometimes then try to kill them. And yet not only is it true, it’s fairly common; security cameras have regularly captured drivers driving back and forth on top of victims to make sure that they are dead.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Why make sure that they are dead? These drivers’ rationale is that the payout for accidentally killing someone is a one-off, while supporting a seriously injured person could go on for life. </p>
<p>Video recordings may expose this but often it hasn’t made a difference. Many of the hit-to-kill cases in China do not result in convictions, but are declared accidents, or cases of negligence, despite suggestive if not compelling video evidence to the contrary.</p>
<p>Here is the second ingredient of accountability: the need for outcomes. There has to be a system of the kind that can create and enforce an appropriate outcome based on the evidence – whether that be punishment for a transgression, or revision of how things are done – to ensure that the problem doesn’t occur again. </p>
<p>Without a system that can pursue and effect outcomes, the mere exposure of outrageous actions is no guarantee that anyone will be held to account for them.</p>
<p>But what are the right outcomes in any given case? </p>
<h2>Proper accounting requires principled evaluation</h2>
<p>Here is a third ingredient of accountability. Outcomes cannot be determined without a method of evaluation. Actions cannot be judged out of context, nor can they be assessed without knowledge of the reasons behind them, and the rights and duties of those involved.</p>
<p>When a sniper uses a bullet to end a person’s life, this act will be evaluated in very different ways depending on the rights and duties of the shooter. If he is a soldier doing the job he is paid for, the evaluation will be positive. The outcome might be official praise. But if he is off duty and is settling a personal score, then this will be bad. The shooter may be jailed for life or even executed.</p>
<p>This all suggests that accountability lies on shifting sands. We may have access to others’ actions and yet we often lack the full story – as defenders Fields’ behaviour <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/glenn-beck-classroom-cop-video-anarchy_5630ca75e4b00aa54a4bf27c?section=australia&adsSiteOverride=au">might suggest</a>. </p>
<p>Also, who has the right to demand access and who has the duty to provide it? We may want to evaluate those actions, but what frame of reference are we to use? And we may want to pursue outcomes, but by what authority will they be effected?</p>
<p>Accountability is not just about our duty to reveal our actions (or our right to conceal them), but also about our right to defend those actions by giving reasons for, and background to, what we have done. This is the essence of the “accounting” that gives accountability its name. </p>
<p>To understand accountability, we need to acknowledge that it has distinct ingredients, none of which guarantees the others. Increased access to people’s actions is a start, but to achieve the right outcomes, there have to be principled means of evaluation. </p>
<p>They have to be at least principled because they cannot be objective. When can we demand that others’ actions be revealed and when can we refuse to reveal our own? How are our actions to be evaluated? What should be the outcomes?</p>
<p>These questions can only be answered relative to specific frames of reference. This is why accountability is always a political matter.</p>
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<p><em>Join the conversation about accountability at two events in Sydney on Thursday, November 5:</em></p>
<p><em>9am-5pm <a href="http://bit.ly/power-accountability">Power and Accountability</a> symposium;</em></p>
<p><em>6pm-8pm <a href="http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2015/accountability.shtml">Accountability: why do we need it and how do we get it?</a> panel discussion – Sydney Ideas.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/49677/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nick Enfield receives funding from The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at The University of Sydney. </span></em></p>Mobile video technology means outrageous behaviour and abuses can rapidly become public knowledge, but achieving just outcomes still depends on a political willingness to act on such knowledge.Nick Enfield, Professor and Chair of Linguistics, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/399712015-04-09T15:56:28Z2015-04-09T15:56:28ZWe must decry all police violence, not just what’s caught on video<p>The US has been rocked once again by another sickening incident of police violence. On April 4, Michael Slager, a police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina, pulled over Walter Scott, a black man, for <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/08/us/south-carolina-cop-shoots-black-man-timeline/index.html">what Slager described</a> as “a minor infraction on his vehicle, a brake light being out.”</p>
<p>According to the police’s official report of what happened, Scott resisted arrest, <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/07/us/south-carolina-officer-charged-murder/">stealing the officer’s</a> taser and leading Slager to <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3031802/Chilling-police-dispatch-audio-reveals-officer-Michael-Slager-told-colleagues-moments-shooting-unarmed-Walter-Scott-five-times.html">fear for his life</a>.</p>
<p>It was not until a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000003615939/video-shows-fatal-police-shooting.html">video</a> was sent to the New York Times that what really happened emerged. The footage clearly shows a brief altercation after which Scott flees and Slager takes aim and shoots him six times in the back. </p>
<p>Having seen the video, Slager’s police chief Eddie Driggers <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/08/us/south-carolina-cop-shoots-black-man-timeline/index.html">admitted</a> he was “sickened by what I saw, and I have not watched it since”.</p>
<p>This was not an isolated incident. Slager himself was <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/walter-scott-shooting/michael-slager-n337691">previously accused in 2013</a> of unlawfully using his taser against a suspect, though he was later exonerated. The North Charleston police department also has a <a href="http://www.salon.com/2015/04/08/it_wasnt_just_walter_scott_the_north_charleston_police_department_has_a_shocking_record_of_abuse_allegations/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow">long record of abuse allegations</a>.</p>
<p>The crucial point, though, is that it was not until the incident was caught on tape that the force was held accountable for its actions. </p>
<h2>Common practice</h2>
<p>This is just the latest of several high-profile cases over the past year that have captured the nation’s attention and highlighted problems of racism and the undue aggression seemingly <a href="https://theconversation.com/ferguson-is-not-a-special-case-34655">rife</a> within American law enforcement.</p>
<p>But the North Charleston case also reveals just how easily those in power are willing to use deception to cover up their use of force.</p>
<p>Despite this troubling history, the officer’s official account was quickly accepted by the local media. They <a href="http://fair.org/blog-entries/media-were-already-running-with-police-fantasy-when-video-exploded-it/">took as fact</a> that there was a physical altercation between Slager and Scott and that the officer was simply defending himself against a violent suspect resisting arrest. Until the video shot by a bystander emerged, Slager was <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/04/07/3644189/everything-police-said-walter-scotts-death-video-showed-really-happened/">well on his way</a> to avoiding any charges.</p>
<p>This conforms to several other <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/vegas-police-officer-wearing-body-camera-facing-battery-205644396.html">recent incidents</a> where video has been used to disprove official police accounts defending their use of force against citizens, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/12/pasco-washington-fatal-police-shooting-antonio-zambrano-montes">including a Washington man</a> who was similarly shot in the back by police while trying to run away.</p>
<h2>Stop believing</h2>
<p>In the past, such deceitful practices were considered common practice for many police officers. According <a href="http://www.salon.com/2015/04/08/fox_legal_analyst_planting_weapons_used_to_be_standard_operating_procedure_for_cops/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow">to one legal analysis</a>, planting weapons was once simply “standard operating procedure” for cops.</p>
<p>Cases such as the North Charleston incident prove this is still an urgent concern. Awareness is growing, and changes being made: the mayor of North Charleston has promised, for instance, to have all his police officers wear <a href="http://www.npr.org/2015/04/08/398341969/more-body-cameras-are-on-the-way-for-north-charleston-police">body cameras</a>. Nationally, a recent <a href="http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/eric-holder-racial-bias-ferguson-policing">Department of Justice report</a> has demanded a comprehensive response to the culture of racism and undue violence that prevails in so many police departments across the country.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Americans’ trust in the police has declined heavily over the past three decades – though the confidence gap between white and black Americans is <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/09/police-killing-videos-white-black-people-trust?CMP=fb_gu">as wide as ever</a>.</p>
<p>But what really needs to change is the commonplace assumption that the police are to be believed until proven otherwise. </p>
<p>The evidence that has been assembled since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson paints a picture of a full-blown national law enforcement crisis, and the implicit trust placed in the police hides the increasingly authoritarian reality of how law is enforced on America’s streets. </p>
<p>The role of American police is <a href="https://theconversation.com/ferguson-shooting-shows-need-for-lighter-policing-not-heavier-38750">rapidly changing</a>. They are now asked less to protect citizens and more to participate in a militarised War on Drugs; they are also de facto tax collectors, tasked with collecting fines to make up for chronic budget shortfalls after decades of cuts to public funding.</p>
<p>Ironically, it is often exactly the same right-wing figures who cry foul at the encroaching threat of domestic authoritarianism who <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/the-conservative-ambivalence-about-abuses-in-ferguson-department-of-justice-michael-brown/387196/">let the police off the hook</a> – or even defend them.</p>
<p>The ultimate lesson of the North Charleston case is that we have to stop blindly believing the “official stories” told by the police. As long as we trust their accounts as a matter of course, acts such as these will continue with impunity. We have to question official accounts of violence at all levels – and not just after they’ve been caught red-handed on tape.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/39971/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Bloom does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>We still blindly accept the police accounts of their behaviour. Why?Peter Bloom, Lecturer in Organisation Studies, Department of People and Organisation, The Open UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/356442014-12-23T10:44:49Z2014-12-23T10:44:49ZCameras on cops: the jury’s still out<p>The mere presence or absence of a camera does not deter violent behavior. We know this through decades of research on CCTV demonstrating that video monitoring has little to no effect on violent crime and modest effects on other <a href="http://www.campbellcollaboration.org/news_/CCTV_modest_impact_on_crime.php">types of crime</a>. We also know this from our own observations of city-centers at the weekend: innumerable cameras, plenty of violence.</p>
<p>So if cameras don’t deter violence by the public, why would we expect that passively monitoring police-citizen encounters will cause behavior change? CCTV tells us part of this story, but dashboard mounted cameras, already widely used by police forces, and smart-phone films of police by members of the public, are much more informative. </p>
<p>The most salient example is the Eric Garner homicide. A bystander filmed the whole episode but this did not stop the events that led to his untimely and tragic death. There is also the recent example of a South Carolina state trooper who opened fire on an unarmed man at a gas station following a seat-belt law violation. The whole encounter was filmed on a police dashboard camera, but did not prevent the <a href="http://www.wltx.com/story/news/local/2014/09/24/video-released-released-of-trooper-involved-shooting/16187305">shooting</a> (Thankfully for the man involved the officer was a terrible shot. One also has to wonder about the wisdom of opening fire in a gas station.) </p>
<p>Some have argued that Eric Garner’s death effectively sank any suggestion that police cameras should be used more widely. But other cases –- notably the death of Missouri teenager Michael Brown –- lead us to ask: could cameras ever reduce police violence? The truthful answer is: “maybe”. </p>
<h2>What we know so far</h2>
<p>In a recent <a href="http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10940-014-9236-3">study</a> in Rialto California my colleagues and I studied the effect of body-worn video (BWV) on police use-of-force and citizens’ complaints against the police. The study randomly assigned officer shifts to wearing cameras or not. We found that both police use-of-force and complaints were reduced during shifts where cameras were used and more widely across the police force during the experimental period. </p>
<p>That’s a “no brainer” as the saying goes. Experimental evidence has told us the answer: introduce cameras and, magically, use-of-force and complaints are reduced, right? Not quite. A point frequently overlooked in the commentary on the issue of BWV is that the “treatment” in our study was not just the camera: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“every crime type and virtually all encounters between the police and the public were assigned to recording as well as to a <em>verbal notification</em> by officers that the encounter is videotaped.” (emphasis added) </p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/67667/original/image-20141218-31028-4trtnv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/67667/original/image-20141218-31028-4trtnv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/67667/original/image-20141218-31028-4trtnv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/67667/original/image-20141218-31028-4trtnv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/67667/original/image-20141218-31028-4trtnv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/67667/original/image-20141218-31028-4trtnv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/67667/original/image-20141218-31028-4trtnv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">If cameras are mandatory will protests like this one be history.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>That is, each and every time police were wearing a camera they were supposed to inform the citizen that they were doing so and that their encounter was being recorded. We haven’t yet reviewed the thousands of hours of footage recorded as part of this experiment to assess compliance with this element. But if we assume that this was true most of the time, then excitable discussions about the effectiveness of cameras (or otherwise) are missing an important point. Namely, both officer and citizen are being reminded about the monitoring of their behavior prior to their interaction starting. </p>
<h2>A heads-up about videotaping could help</h2>
<p>This verbal warning could sensitize people leading them to modify their behavior. It could also serve to remind people of the rules that are in play –- politeness being the bare minimum –- but other rules such as laws. Similarly, the verbal prompt may jolt individuals into thinking a little more before they act, becoming more deliberative and reflecting on future consequences. In short, there could be lots of mechanisms that account for changes in behavior when camera and verbal warning are used together.</p>
<p>The other limitation of our study, and one that has thus far been universally overlooked, is that the results we found may have been a fluke. In statistical terms we have only a single study showing an effect. It might be that this was a chance or even a so-called false discovery (i.e. we would expect to find a statistically significant effect some of the time). This is why Dr. Barak Ariel is undertaking a multi-country replication study: before claims of effectiveness can be made, we need to reduce the chance that the Rialto finding was the statistical equivalent of “luck.”</p>
<p>But all that work might come too late. President Obama recently requested US$263 million from Congress to buy 50,000 police cameras, help train police officers, and (apparently) restore trust in police.</p>
<p>Leaving aside the fact that trust cannot be bought and sold (it has to be earned as everyone’s grandmother tells them) what should that money be spent on? We would argue that if US$50 million is going to be spent on cameras, there is an ethical imperative to ensure that each time cameras are put in use somewhere new they are rigorously evaluated, as was the case in Rialto. Once these trials are completed and the evidence is in, we can add together all the grains of sand and draw firmer conclusions about whether cameras can be effective in reducing police use-of-force, but without verbal warning, we would argue that this is unlikely.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/35644/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The mere presence or absence of a camera does not deter violent behavior. We know this through decades of research on CCTV demonstrating that video monitoring has little to no effect on violent crime and…Alex Sutherland, Research associate, University of CambridgeBarak Ariel, Jerry Lee Fellow in Experimental Criminology and Lecturer in Evidence Based Policing, University of CambridgeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.