Sunday marked the first anniversary of the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager killed during a confrontation with a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The incident put a spotlight on the deaths of African-Americans at the hands of law enforcement. A series of comparable tragedies surfaced in the ensuing year, raising public consciousness and sparking a national debate about race and policing.
These incidents are not new. Rather, they reflect the current manifestation of a longstanding illness in our country that can be traced back to slavery all the way through the Jim Crow era and late twentieth century abuses involving Rodney King, Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima, and others. What is new is our ability to capture these interactions through digital technology and to disseminate those recordings rapidly on social media. Like the impact of television for protestors during the civil rights movement, body cameras worn on the lapels of police officers and cellphone video devices used by people on the streets are crucial to prompting reform. Emerging video technologies offer a window into the harrowing, day-to-day experience of far too many black Americans. This exposure can produce awareness across the racial spectrum and, with it, the impetus for change.
This is why the reluctance of the Boston Police Department to embrace the use of body cameras is worrisome. Last week the City Council debated the merits of body cameras in the face of ambivalence, some might say opposition, from the BPD and the Mayor. To be sure, there are downsides to body cameras. These include privacy concerns; the expense of acquisition and storage; the possibility of stifling full and frank conversations with witnesses to crimes; the inevitability of malfunction; the reality that cameras only depict interactions from a particular angle; and the possibility that officers will become self-conscious and endanger their own lives.
Although these are legitimate objections, think about the costs of continued secrecy. Most police activity is shrouded in mystery. Our state public records laws are antiquated; our capacity to compel production of information from law enforcement limited. When academic researchers completed a study in June 2015 finding “racially disparate treatment” by the Boston Police Department against African-Americans and Latinos, they had to rely on data from 2007 to 2010. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a public records request for more recent statistics last September, but is still awaiting disclosure. In essence, we know only what law enforcement wants us to know.
Body cameras help lift the veil surrounding many citizen-police encounters, offering both transparency and accountability. Specifically, they document these encounters and provide a direct accounting of what happened after an interaction goes awry. Body cameras have front end benefits, too. People behave differently when they know they are being monitored. There is reason to think that body cameras may spur some police officers to react with greater calm as a situation escalates—and this could save lives.
Simply put, Boston should install a pilot project to see whether the benefits of body cameras outweigh the costs. Cameras worn by the police in Boston might not prevent the occurrence of an event similar to the shooting of Michael Brown, but they would make it less likely. That alone makes body cameras an experiment worth trying in our state capital.
Professor of Law at Northeastern University and Legal Analyst for WGBH News
