September 3rd, 2013
Cops wearing cameras turn out to be more polite:
In her ruling in a recent civil suit challenging the New York City police department’s notorious stop-and-frisk rousting of residents, Judge Shira A. Scheindlin of the Federal District Court in Manhattan imposed an experiment in which the police in the city’s precincts with the highest reported rates of stop-and-frisk activity would be required to wear video cameras for one year. . . .
Earlier this year, a 12-month study by Cambridge University researchers revealed that when the city of Rialto, California, required its cops to wear cameras, the number of complaints filed against officers fell by 88 percentand the use of force by officers dropped by almost 60 percent. Watched cops are polite cops.
This is not surprising. Also not surprising would be if the citizens interacting with these cops turn out to be more polite, too.
To the extent I’ve thought about it, I’m nominally against the idea of a CCTV surveillance state, because it extends the eye of the state everywhere, at all times, essentially making the state a disembodied, virtual presence.
But having actual law-enforcement officers–who are in persona civitas–wear cameras is quite different. Because the purpose isn’t to extend the reach of the state, but rather to limit it, by curtailing the ability of officers to make things up. For bad cops, this is a good thing. For good cops, I can imagine how it might seem to be micromanagement. But the upside is that it also protects them from bad actors and, I would guess, improves their day-to-day interactions with the average citizen.
It should be win-win-win for everyone.
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I recently transferred to a precinct in my agency where some of the patrol cars are outfitted with cameras and microphones. I discussed it briefly with a supervisor. He told me that it is now common for him to call back a citizen who wishes to file a complaint about officer conduct (not use of force, since those are now investigated regardless) and tell the citizen that the entire incident was recorded. The citizen then drops the complaint.
I don’t doubt that cops being recorded are more polite (also more robotic and impersonal, but such is life under surveillance), but the reductions have at least as much to do with complainants realizing that their own behavior and their inability to make spurious allegations will make their complaint invalid. Although there are very prominent signs on the cars announcing the recording, you probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the state that most people are in when they have contentious encounters with the police is usually not one in which they’re thinking very clearly. If they were capable of moderating their behavior in response to something like a microphone, it probably wouldn’t end badly in the first place. I refer you to the past decade of COPS episodes.
Frankly, I’m a little shocked that you took at face value the interpretations of the media and university researchers. They routinely misreport, misanalyze and misunderstand every subject that I am familiar with, from my favorite hobbies to my professions through the years. I can no longer imagine giving them much more than highly-qualified credence.
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After reading the latest “BusinessWorld” column by Holman Jenkins at WSJ I am serenely confident any tech innovation will yield worse cops, worse private businesses, worse citizens, worse everything. Usually I like all these goo-goo accountability proposals whenever it’s Time That Something Be Done, but the sad likelihood is getting a situation like modern Britain: the cops’ adaptation to Panopticon is to become ineffectual and timid, while John Barleycorn is under constant surveillance anyway (which the authorities appreciate). Meanwhile the criminals just flout it–who’s going to stop them, the police? It will be techno-anarcho-tyranny as predicted by Elysium, Idiocracy, Minority Report, Demolition Man, THX 1147 (sp?), Sleeper, there won’t even be any subterranean rave orgies as prophesied in The Matrix. Give me rave orgies or give me death
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Anyway Last, surely you’ve seen enough Law & Order re-runs to know that decoy cameras/nonexistent CCTV footage can be just as effective at a fraction of the cost. Like them telling George Zim they had a recording of the whole fight–Sanford PD clearly were students of the great Lennie Briscoe
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In small towns, people who are only a few degrees of separation from everyone else in town are invariably more polite than the anonymous citizens of big cities. It’s the same theory, no?
Joe September 3, 2013 at 4:28 pm
To expand on my overheated annoyance towards the original post in the last paragraph of my comment, the problem with the media coverage of law enforcement is that it obsesses over relatively minor, historically enduring and (in some cases) unavoidable problems while ignoring much larger, and imminently addressable, ones.
Interestingly, the confusion cuts across the political spectrum. Insofar as police are the most visible representatives of the state, they are a force of liberalism. Insofar as they represent authority, they are usually most sympathized with by conservatives. Insofar as they are unionized, they are advocated for by the left. Insofar as they use violence as a tool, they are abhorrent to that same left. Reason.com, from which the quotation in the post was taken, is often hilariously histrionic in regards to law enforcement. Posts regarding the supposed militarization of police (laughable to anyone who has been a member of both) share about 95% of their language and ideology with Salon.com’s views on “military grade assault rifles”. They are entirely unable to distinguish between the substantive (the pursuit and issuance of stupid search warrants) and the cosmetic (the AR15s and black fatigues of the officers serving them).
Meanwhile, the more mainstream media takes its talking points from the Department of Justice, whose stake in the issue was very well explained by the NYPD’s Kelly in a recent article in the Wall Street Journal. (Encapsulation: the DOJ finds violations where it wants to find violations, then appoints monitors in whose interest it is to continue finding violations. All parties are highly impartial, thanks to their utter lack of experience in applied law enforcement.)
While this whole narrative may be okay for selling copy (the economic condition of “legacy media” would seem to preclude declaring anything “great for selling copy”), it serves to highlight the interests of the ignorant, which is to say reporters, researchers, politicians and lawyers, the most knowledgeable of whom are to law enforcement as an engineering professor is to a carpenter.
It’s certainly more interesting than the real problem with law enforcement: regular old, run-of-the-mill, garden variety incompetence and laziness. In my ten years of patrol experience in a metropolitan department I have never seen outright corruption (theft of property, lying on reports), very seldom seen excessive force (almost always applied by a late-arriving officer who hasn’t yet perceived that a fight is starting to calm down) and only occasionally seen unwarranted rudeness (because in this job, rudeness is sometimes warranted). But boy, oh boy, do I see some lazy cops.
A lot of those lazy cops are never, ever going to get a complaint, either. You know why? Because they’re not doing anything. When you report the theft of your bike they might be extremely polite and professional, but 30 minutes later if they saw a young black kid ride by on your bike, they’re deciding that the contact with the kid, relatively likely to produce a use of force and/or a complaint, isn’t worth it. After all, when your bike isn’t found you’re not going to file a complaint, right? On to the next complaint-free citizen contact!
This cop may never prevent a crime, he may never solve a crime, he may never help a victim in any substantive way, but no matter. With the help of a public that only cares about foul language and split-second force decisions made under the most chaotic of circumstances (and, of course, even more helped by a public sector union whose explicit function it is to prevent him from being disciplined), he will skate by in his job for 25 years and then retire.
He will always look and sound good on camera, in part because he will be the last one to arrive at a scene. He will probably never get in a questionable shooting, because when he “area checks” for the suspect car in a shooting it will be while wearing the proverbial blinders. Not caught on camera will be his deciding not to write a report on an ongoing, festering issue in your neighborhood. He’ll never get a reputation as a great cop, but he’ll almost invariably a super nice guy.
What an ironic result when, in a city as relatively white as mine, all the gang enforcement cops are white, even though 95% of the gangsters they contact are black (not because 95% of gang members are black, but because they are the ones who get in spectacular shootings). Who is actually working to get justice for the families of dead black kids? White guys who, for whatever reason, are willing to get complaints filed against them, use of force investigations, Department of Justice investigations, the ire of grievance merchants, etc, etc, etc. And for every cop willing to do that, there are ten who quietly ask each other at coffee, “Man, why put yourself out there like that?”
I can’t speak to statistics, but I can tell you this: when your elderly neighbor’s methamphetamine addicted grandson moves into the basement with his prostitute girlfriend, you won’t care a whole bunch if the cop who arrives has a camera on his sunglasses. The problem is going to get addressed (or not addressed) off-camera, not on-camera.
Here is real police culture laid bare. Ignore the ‘roid-raging, phone book aided confession soliciting lone wolf whose one man quest for his own kind of justice is only occasionally interrupted by a stern police captain’s warning that this time he’s gone too far. He’s a straw man that Hollywood invented from scraps left over from the last century. To the libertarian he’s the embodiment of the government’s corruption. To the aging hippie he’s the ghost of Ohio State coming back for another go at the peaceful kids. To the dedicated liberal he’s a useful instrument for explaining away inequality of results. And maybe to some in the know, he’s a useful way of deflecting attention away from the real problem in policing: bad cops.
There is a delightful gem of a book written by a guy named Paul Bacon who joined the NYPD in the aftermath of 9/11. The title is “Bad Cop”, a silly play on words which gets at the problems in policing better than any highly respected study by highly respected authors from highly respected institutions. Mr. Bacon finds that he is not bad *in* his job, rather that he is bad *at* his job. (Much to his credit, he quit after a few years.)
Effective reform will come to law enforcement when the public comes to realize, maybe with the help of journalists interested in studying the subject, that their chief grievance should not be Bad Cops, but rather bad cops.