7 Things You Should Know About Body Cameras For Your Protection
By: Les Bennett
There's no debate that body cameras, like dash cams and cell phones, can provide an essential perspective on police encounters and, in many cases, aid officers. But like any electronic device, a camera mounted on a human body has limitations. Failing to competently understand those limitations leads to severe consequences. The constraints of body-worn cameras ("BWCs") must be understood and considered when evaluating the images they record.
(1) Body Cameras Do Not Follow Your Eyes Nor See As They See
A Body camera is not an eye-tracker. It cannot and does not capture what an officer sees at any moment. For example, an officer who glances to the right or left of the camera position may see an off-camera object.
Nor does the camera operate like the eye. In a high-stress situation, like an officer-involved shooting, the human body's survival mechanism often suppresses incoming information that the body considers unimportant. A BWC has no way of screening out the information that an officer's brain may be screening out. Thus, there is a critical disconnect between the officer's view of vision and the officer's perception and the camera's lens.
(2) Important Officer-Safety Clues Can't Be Recorded
Tactile responses from a suspect help determine whether the use of force is necessary. But because a camera cannot feel, it cannot reliably tell the viewer whether a suspect was giving resistive tension. To de-escalate situations, officers often need to apply force to prevent a suspect from getting out of control. On camera, without the benefit of touch, this application of force may seek unprovoked when reviewed by a supervisor or civilian. But because BWC videos routinely fail to record the essential officer-safety clues--sensory perceptions--officers must make active efforts to explain what they were sensing at the moment they applied force and why those senses were important.
(3) Camera Speeds Differ From the Speed of Life
Outside of issues relating to whether a body-worn camera is capturing at a frame rate equal to the human eye, a substantial limitation of the BWCs is the reactionary curve. Officers are not robots; their actions may be a second or more behind the action as it unfolds on the screen. Many untrained people, even prosecutors, fail to appreciate this fact when viewing the footage. The failure to appreciate human reaction times leads prosecutors and civilians down a treacherous, causing them to misunderstand how an officer could fire shots into the back of a suspect after the threat arguably ended.
(4) A Camera May See Better Than You
Because of the high-tech nature of cameras and because people have different levels of vision, a BWC may capture an image in sharper detail or with better lighting than the wearer of the camera did when the event was recorded.
(5) A Camera Only Records in 2-D
Because cameras can't record depth of field--the third dimension that's perceived by the human eye--accurately judging distances on their footage can be difficult. Depending on the lens used, a camera may compress distances between objects, thus, making them appear closer than they were at the time. Officers and supervisors should be keenly aware of distance distortion, which can sometimes become deeply problematic. For example, it can cause an officer to appear to strike a suspect's head with a flashlight when, in fact, the blow landed on the suspect's hand.
(6) A Camera Encourages What the Supreme Court Said Not to Do
In the famous Graham v. Connor case, the U.S. Supreme Court noted that officers often must make split-second decisions based on incomplete or inaccurate information. The high court made clear that the decision to use force is never to be judged with the hindsight of 20/20. Instead, the decision is judged by a reasonable officer at the scene. In the scores of cases that followed, the Court has reaffirmed this principle. Sadly, in the wake of a shooting, camera footage provides investigators and prosecutors with the irresistible temptation to play the coulda-shoulda game as they break down the footage frame-by-frame, a luxury the officer at the scene never had. The BWC video is informational and can never supplant an officer's first-hand memory of the incident. Justification for shooting or use of force cannot mainly rely on camera footage. Doing so debases the principles explained by the Supreme Court, allowing a camera reviewer to inject their subjective perceptions of the incident (based solely on the video) separate from the officer's legitimate and reasonable perceptions of it.
(7) A Camera Can Never Replace a Through Investigation
Another common trap both investigators and prosecutors fall into is giving video evidence undue, if not exclusive, weight in a criminal case. In an officer-involved shooting, a proper investigation means investigators left no stone overturned: they spoke to every possible witness, they meticulously combed the scene for evidence, robust chain of custody procedures were used, reliable methods of forensic science were deployed, and investigators thoroughly documented their actions in reports. To be sure, video evidence can be potent, but video evidence should never be regarded as the "whole truth and nothing but the truth." A fair-minded factfinder should concede that the video evidence must be weighed and tested against witness testimony, forensics, and other factors.
The limitations of body cameras should be fully understood and appreciated to maximize their effectiveness and ensure that they are not regarded as infallible. Failing to understand body-worn cameras' limitations is dire: it places innocent people at risk of being accused of crimes they did not commit while creating the possibility that a guilty person may walk free.
Les Bennett is a founding partner at Bennett Vernier, an Oklahoma law firm dedicated to representing first responders.
