Paul
Detrick & Will Neff|
"Ex
Cop: Everyone Behaves Better When They're on Video," produced by Paul
Detrick and Will Neff. About 5:45 minutes.
Original
release date was March 25, 2014. and the original text is below.
Civilians
shoot and upload police encounters to the Internet everyday using tiny cameras
on their cell phones and other mobile devices. In fact it may be easier than
ever to keep the police accountable with the technology we all carry around in
our pockets. But police are looking to keep civilians accountable too by
wearing cameras of their own. Reason TV sat down with former Seattle Police
officer Steve Ward, who left the force to start Vievu, a company that makes
body cameras for police officers.
“Everyone
behaves better when they’re on video,” says Ward. “I realized that dash cams
only capture about five percent of what a cop does. And I wanted to catch 100
percent of what a cop does.”
The
cameras are small, light, and clip to the clothing of a police officer’s
uniform. They turn on with a large switch on the front of the camera and have a
green circle that surrounds the lens so that civilians know that the camera is
recording.
But
once the data is recorded, what stops an officer from editing or manipulating
the video? Ward says his cameras contain software that stops officers from
doing anything nefarious with it, “Our software platform stops officers from
altering, deleting, copying, editing, uploading to YouTube, any of the videos
that the cops take.”
While
body cameras present the strong benefit of keeping police accountable, they
also present a risk of invading civilians’ privacy. But in a policy brief from
October 2013, the American Civil Liberties Union argued that depending on how
the body cameras were implemented, the privacy concerns could be dealt with.
Although
we generally take a dim view of the proliferation of surveillance cameras in
American life, police on-body cameras are different because of their potential
to serve as a check against the abuse of power by police officers.
Historically, there was no documentary evidence of most encounters between
police officers and the public, and due to the volatile nature of those encounters,
this often resulted in radically divergent accounts of incidents. Cameras have
the potential to be a win-win, helping protect the public against police
misconduct, and at the same time helping protect police against false
accusations of abuse.
In
2013, The New York Times reported that the city of Rialto, Calif., was able to
cut down on complaints against officers by 88 percent over the previous year
when it gave its officers body cameras.
Use of force by officers fell by almost 60 percent.
