Cops Still Don't Realize That YouTube Has Changed Their World Forever
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001105.html
Sometimes the world changes around us so rapidly that there's a sense
of chaos, until understanding and what passes for equilibrium have
been reestablished.
Such is the case with videos of law enforcement's interactions with
the public, especially videos captured by members of the public and
then subsequently made available publicly on YouTube and via other
Internet platforms.
One thing is abundantly obvious -- many police departments and
individual police officers still do not understand that the rules of
the "game" under which they operate have been irrevocably altered.
Police videos generally fall into two broad categories -- videos shot
by police themselves, and videos shot by members of the public.
The former include dashcams and increasingly body cameras. The latter
is potentially the domain of pretty much everyone with a smartphone
these days.
Generally speaking, police officers have been warming up to video that
they themselves photograph -- especially when they can control when
the cameras are running -- which opens up a rather significant can of
worms indeed.
And while police departments would love to hold onto body camera
footage (often taken inside people's homes at times of their greatest
distress) for future investigative purposes, they must also face the
complexities and expense of redacting videos for public record
requests, to quite appropriately protect innocent parties from public
abuse and exploitation.
Overall though, police are typically pretty eager to trot out the
videos when they appear to support officers' accounts of events --
just today a video was released that appears to show that a police
shooting of a terrorism-related suspect was seemingly much more
aligned with officer statements than with some completely
contradictory "witness" statements being promulgated by cable news.
The situation tends to be very different with videos of police
confrontations photographed by the public, often rapidly posted to
YouTube.
We seem to be bombarded with an almost daily menu of "cops behaving
badly" videos that cover the entire range from somewhat comical,
through utterly bizarre, to downright horrifying.
To be sure, these videos are self-selected by their uploaders, and
there isn't much attention paid to the majority of cops who are well
behaved -- and so aren't the subject of many videos overall. Naturally
enough, it's the bad eggs and nasty confrontations that are going to
get the attention when it comes to videos.
But much of what we see in these negative cases is indeed utterly
chilling. Cops shooting down unarmed persons, groups of officers
beating already compliant suspects to a pulp -- all manner of
situations that previously would have had no visual or audio record
for review.
A new example currently receiving a lot of attention over this last
weekend is of a Texas cop running around like a crazed dog, pointing
his gun at half-naked teenagers from a pool party, and even tackling
an obviously unarmed girl in a bikini to the ground. He appeared to be
utterly out of control and his fellow officers seemed to just stand
there watching in amusement. The racial aspects of the situation --
the cop was white, most of his targets black -- are difficult to
ignore.
While apparently nobody was seriously hurt in this case, it's all the
more upsetting for what could easily have happened if that gun had
fired or that girl's neck had been broken.
None of these videos, whether photographed by police or the public,
ever tell the whole story. Many police departments allow officers to
control when their cameras are running. Videos photographed by the
public typically don't show events leading up to a confrontation that
attracted attention. Individual cameras only show one point of view.
And so on. Such videos are clearly not definitive.
It's also clear that many cops still haven't gotten the message made
explicit by numerous courts, that the public has the right to capture
such videos. We're still seeing officers snatching phones and cameras
from people's hands, sometimes smashing the devices, sometimes
smashing the face of the photographer, arresting them, pepper spraying
them and the like, even though no interference with the police action
was occurring. (In an attempt to keep the public's cameras away, some
police departments are trying to establish likely illegal
"exclusionary zones" around their officers, to discourage public
photography of those officers in action).
We're also seeing attempts to remove many of these videos from public
view -- though tracing who was responsible for such actions can be
very difficult. For example, I shared a copy of the _pool party cop_
YouTube video link yesterday on Google+. By this morning the video was
gone, marked as spam, most likely through a malicious false takedown
submission.
Of course, this was a failed attempt at information control -- many
other copies of that video are now widely available on YouTube and
other venues.
Perhaps what might seem most odd of all is how we see cops behave so
badly even when they're aware that they're being photographed.
This makes sense though when you consider that officers are used to
having their accounts of events being rarely questioned and almost
always accepted.
It just hasn't fully penetrated yet that there are now recording eyes
on the scene, and that an officer's own rendition of events is but one
of the variables of the equation, and often by no means the most
reliable of these.
Ubiquitous video cameras, smartphones, and YouTube have together
fundamentally changed key aspects of law enforcement operations, and
the ways in which both courts and the public will view them going
forward.
There is no turning back. There is no possible return to the previous
era of officer reports being accepted with nary a question or concern.
Police departments will ultimately learn to live with this.
And for the public at large, this is very good news indeed.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein ([email protected]): http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Founder:
- Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org
- PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info
Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Google+: http://google.com/+LaurenWeinstein
Twitter: http://twitter.com/laurenweinstein
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com
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