Police Body Cameras: The Accountability Revolution That Wasn't

Brigid Bergin: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Brigid Bergin, senior reporter in the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom, filling in for Brian Lehrer today. Now, a conversation about police body cameras and the hope for increased transparency and accountability. Footage from those cameras was, in theory, supposed to help departments crack down on problem officers and improve training. It was going to make the job of oversight a lot easier. The reality has been much more complicated.

ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine spent six months diving into the failed promise of police-worn body cameras. Despite the millions of tax dollars invested in body-worn cameras, policymakers across the country allowed police departments to decide for themselves what and when they recorded with those cameras and, crucially, who gets to see that footage. This includes the police department here in New York City. We'll dive into it all with Eric Umansky, ProPublica editor-at-large. Hey, Eric, welcome to WNYC.

Eric Umansky: Thanks for having me.

Brigid Bergin: Listeners, we can take your calls. You can help Eric Umansky, ProPublica editor-at-large, report this story about police-worn body cameras. Do you have a story about body-worn cameras? Did you ever try to access footage? Were you involved with an encounter where police footage played a role? For any police officers out there who are listening, we want to hear from you too. Have there been times when you wish that body camera footage was more accessible because it shows your perspective?

Has it changed how you do your job? Why do you think the footage should or should not be so tightly controlled? We're especially interested in hearing from folks who work or have experience in the criminal justice system. You can call us at 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. Eric, this story has just a tremendous amount of reporting. I'm wondering what first got you interested in pursuing an investigation into body-worn cameras.

Eric Umansky: I had been reporting on police accountability and police misconduct, how it's investigated, how it's really handled in this country, and particularly in New York City. I had been looking into that stuff for a few years. One theme that just kept coming up was how body-worn cameras, the footage from them often wasn't being shared with civilian investigators, often wasn't being disclosed publicly. I'd written a little bit about it here and there. Then, honestly, at the beginning of the year, Tyre Nichols was killed in Memphis. I was reading the coverage about that.

There was a line in The New York Times story that when they had looked at the-- there was actually surveillance footage from overhead. They noted that officers had turned on their body-worn cameras. They had acknowledged that the cameras were on and then they beat Tyre Nichols to death anyway. That made me think. What kind of system must it be that you can have this tool for accountability and technology, you turn it on, and then you proceed to kill somebody anyway? You must not fear the consequences. That's what launched me on it.

Brigid Bergin: Wow. Eric, your piece includes the story of Miguel Richards. He was 31 when police officers killed him. You identify his death as the first time a fatal police encounter had been recorded by a body camera in New York City. Who was Miguel Richards and how did he come into contact with police?

Eric Umansky: Miguel Richards was a Jamaican college exchange student. He was finishing college a little bit later. He had come to the US and had a few jobs. He was living in the Bronx. He had never had any problems with police, never been arrested. He seemed to be becoming more withdrawn, is what his family and friends were saying. His landlord hadn't seen him in a few weeks.

His landlord called for what's known as a wellness check. "Can you make sure he's okay?" "I haven't seen him." "I just want to know if things are okay." The way it works in New York is the police show up. The police showed up. Actually, the landlord opens the door to Miguel Richards' bedroom. Richards is standing in the far corner of his bedroom completely still with sunglasses on and holding a small folding knife down by his side.

When the officers see that knife, they're two officers, they both take out their guns and point them at Miguel. What ensues is 15 minutes of the officers, at first, actually quite calmly encouraging him to put down the knife and then much more tersely and ultimately yelling at him to put down the knife. At this point, tasers weren't as commonly deployed as they are now. They called for another officer with a taser.

Again, this whole time, Miguel is in the far corner of his room, not moving at all. The officer with a taser comes up, asks his two colleagues. What he literally says is, "Do you want me to hit him?" They say, "Yes." As that officer moves to tase him, Miguel moves a bit. At which point, the two other officers, they had actually began to be worried that he had a gun in his other hand, and so they fired. They fired 16 times. They hit him seven times. The autopsy says his aorta was severed.

Brigid Bergin: Wow. Eric, in that incredibly tragic story, what does Miguel Richards' story reveal about the failures of this policy with respect to body-worn cameras in New York and elsewhere, because this isn't just a New York story, right?

Eric Umansky: No, it's not just a New York story at all. It's a national trend. I think that there are three hopes for body-worn cameras. One is the question of deterrence. This, by the way, can also apply to civilians. If having a camera on an officer's chest is going to improve conduct, you're not going to engage in misconduct. You're going to be more thoughtful. That's one hope.

A second one is disclosure, which is that when something happens, there'll be a full record of it so people can judge for themselves. The third thing is accountability. If indeed there was something wrong, well, there will now be consequences because there's a record that you'll be unable to turn your eyes away. Deterrence, disclosure, accountability. On each of those things, the Richards case is telling.

The officers engaged in what the NYPD's own investigators later concluded was misconduct. For example, the protocol calls for them to wait for a supervisor's approval before taking action against somebody in crisis like Miguel Richards. They didn't do so. I got the internal investigation records. There are quite striking exchanges between investigators and the officers where the investigators say, "Why did you do what you did?" They said, "Well, we wanted to end it," one of the officers said, so there's that.

On the disclosure front, the NYPD did release footage of the killing. It was the first time they ever did so. The police commissioner at the time, James O'Neill, said that it showed how sometimes the use of deadly force is unavoidable. He talked about, this was in a message to all officers, all officers show extraordinary restraint in their jobs. The New York Police Department had not released the full footage.

When a public interest law firm, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, try to get the full footage through a public records request, they were rejected. It was a whole series of rejections until, ultimately, the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest sued for the footage and won, which is how I got the footage. I'll just put a pin in that for a second and then there's the question of accountability.

The way that discipline and accountability works in New York and really across the country is police commissioners and police chiefs have near total discretion to impose or not impose punishment as they see fit. In this case, even though the investigators themselves had concluded that the officers had violated protocol and should face some consequences, the police commissioner overruled them and decided the officer should not be punished for killing Richards. Instead, what he did was dock them each three days vacation pay for stopping for pizza before the call.

Brigid Bergin: Wow. Listeners, if you're just joining us, I'm Brigid Bergin filling in for Brian on The Brian Lahrer Show today. My guest is Eric Umansky, ProPublica editor-at-large, and we are talking about his sweeping investigation into the use of body cameras by police officers and what kind of accountability it has or has not brought. Let's go to Betsy at Hofstra University. Betsy, thanks so much for calling.

Betsy: Thanks so much for having me. I run a criminal defense clinic at Hofstra Law School on Long Island. I just want to say not a systemic point on the public access but on the individual case access. The fact that there is now body cam footage has to be tied to the rules in New York, in discovery that changed in 2020, so that now in individual cases, clients are supposed to get access to the body and cop car footage in individual cases. It can be incredibly revealing like the case that you've talked about, where what's put in the police reports is completely contradicted by what's in the video.

On the other hand, it can sometimes show exactly what was in the police reports, but it's just incredibly important that we now have access to this information in individual cases. It doesn't necessarily change things writ large, although I think there should be a move towards that. Sometimes you can understand like, what are different officers doing? It can be used to impeach officers later down the line who have misrepresented what they've done. I think that these two things have to-- that they've changed in concert in New York is so important that it's not just the footage, but at least in individual cases, we should be getting access to it.

Sometimes it's broken up over time, but it's really important and crucial that people get it in the individual cases, even though it's limited. It's not a cure, all right. It depends when it gets turned on. It depends what the point of view of the officer is. It depends if you get all the officer's perspective. It's not everything, but it's incredibly important that it's tied to the discovery disclosure rules.

Brigid Bergin: Betsy, thank you for that call. Eric, any reaction to Betsy's comments?

Eric Umansky: No, I would simply say, that sounds like it's for criminal cases, which is indeed really important. Many times, you're dealing with issues in which a criminal case hasn't been filed.

Brigid Bergin: Let's go to Chris in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Chris, thanks for calling. Oops, Chris, thanks for calling WNYC.

Chris: Hey, how's it going? A lot of this has been going on before the body cams, this was dash cam footage as well. Years ago, I was involved with a case with a state trooper. What he had written in the police report just wasn't how the events went down. My lawyer went to pull the footage to show that what he was saying wasn't true. It somehow disappeared. They couldn't find the footage. There's lots of tricks that these guys do. They're probably doing it with the body cameras and places too.

Brigid Bergin: Chris, thank you for your call. Sorry about your experience. Any reaction, Eric?

Eric Umansky: No, but it should not disappear. That's certainly the case.

Brigid Bergin: From your story, you write about how, when body cameras were introduced, they were "a fix bound to fall far short of hopes" for accountability and transparency. Let's go back to that beginning. How did this technology emerge as a tool for police oversight?

Eric Umansky: When body cameras really took off was in the wake of George Floyd-- I'm sorry, not the George Floyd protest. The protest that followed Michael Brown's death in Ferguson. It was Ferguson, Missouri. It was the first big sweeping Black Lives Matters protest. You had a search for, "How can we do policing better?" Obama was very focused on it. There was a lot of focus across the aisle too.

Body-worn cameras became what somebody in the story refers to as a hope for silver bullet. The hope for silver bullet is we don't have to deal with deeper systemic issues. Let's just get this new technology. The new technology is going to show what happens. All the things that we just talked about would happen to officers would be dissuaded and punishment would come if there's misconduct.

The Obama administration funded cameras. You also had Republican governors embrace cameras. The reason that I say that it was bound to fall far short of expectations is that effectively-- and this is something I really only came to appreciate as I was reporting more on the story, but the way that civilian oversight works in the United States of police is in the context of what one expert described to me as extreme deference.

We basically give the police extreme deference to run themselves and to police themselves. What that means in practice, for example, is that there are these civilian oversight agencies around the country. They tend to be very weak, very underpowered, often rely on the local police department for cooperation. If you just plop a new technology in the midst of a system that is governed by extreme deference to the police, that's a very difficult thing to succeed.

Brigid Bergin: If you're just joining us, I'm Brigid Bergin, in for Brian Lehrer today. My guest is Eric Umansky, ProPublica editor-at-large, and we're talking about his six-month investigation into the ongoing issues of transparency and accountability in the era of body-worn cameras. Eric, we've talked about how this tool was introduced without a lot of necessary thought or policymaking around how the footage would be accessed and the cultural changes that were necessary. Just so that folks really understand how much has been invested in this, as one of the professors in your piece called it "silver bullet solution," how much money did cities and states start putting into this technology?

Eric Umansky: It's a little bit hard to get a national complete count. What we can give you is at least because there's no one place that tracks all of it. The short version is it's hundreds of millions of dollars. In New York City, it's more than $50 million. In Los Angeles, it's more than $60 million and on and on. It is definitely the biggest new investment in policing in a generation.

Brigid Bergin: Those investments also took a substantial amount of time. I remember that this was a sticking point in the de Blasio administration. Can you talk about how that process dragged on a bit?

Eric Umansky: Yes, so New York actually is a particularly interesting example for body-worn cameras because a federal judge ordered the police to begin piloting them. It was actually Judge Shira Scheindlin who ruled in the stop-and-frisk case if folks remember. She ruled that the New York Police Department's stop-and-frisk tactics were unconstitutional. It was a huge case in 2013, I believe.

She said, "As one of the remedies for this, you must begin using body-worn cameras." It then took a number of years before the NYPD did start using the cameras. One of the interesting things that happened between those times is that the NYPD actually commissioned to survey community members. "What kind of policies do you want?" Overwhelmingly, community members said, "Well, we want disclosure of footage," or "If I'm being videoed, I should be able to get that footage," and on and on.

Then, in turn, the NYPD did a survey of its own officers who had almost exactly the opposite take that public should not have access to footage. Then in about 2017, the NYPD finally began to roll out the cameras across the city. What it did was effectively adopt their officer's point of view. The footage would not be easily disclosable. Actually, though officers, if they were charged with misconduct, they were allowed to see their footage, but the public wasn't.

Brigid Bergin: I want to go to Fred in Maplewood, New Jersey, who has a question, I think, for you, Eric, about how this story was reported. Fred, thanks for calling WNYC.

Fred: Hi. I came in in the middle of this, so I may have missed some of the beginning. From the discussion that I've heard thus far, it seems to me that there's a lot of discussion of individual incidents and extrapolating them to police misbehavior nationwide. Clearly, cameras were not useful in the New York case that your guest discussed, but they were, were they not, in the case where the police beat the young man to death in-- was it in Memphis? They did disclose the misbehavior there. On a broader note, your guest said that one of the prime purposes of these cameras is deterrence. How do we know how much misbehavior simply did not happen so there's no reason to record it because they were wearing the cameras? Is there any way to measure that and has that been done?

Brigid Bergin: Fred, thanks for your call.

Eric Umansky: Those are a bunch of good questions. Let me run through them. One, in terms of the behavior that doesn't happen as a result of cameras, it's an excellent point. We can't see it. Maybe social scientists would have some way of measuring it, but I think it's a challenge of measuring something that doesn't happen. In terms of Memphis, as I mentioned earlier, the Tyre Nichols case, which you were referring to, is a complicated example. What the country and the world saw was police footage. As I mentioned, the officers knew they were being recorded and beat him anyway.

Then I looked then at Memphis into the question of, well, I would assume, how does the system there work if they felt this sense of brazenness and impunity? What I found was, indeed, footage is almost never released by the Memphis Police. I looked at shootings a few months before Tyre Nichols was killed. A few months after, none had been released, not a single one. That's actually the context in which the Tyre Nichols case happened. The disclosure there seems to have been an exception based on public pressure and outrage over his death.

Brigid Bergin: Eric, you write about some politicians who have quietly enabled the culture of secrecy at the center of this failed promise of body-worn cameras. Nikki Haley comes up in your story when she was governor of South Carolina. It was the first state to require the use of these cameras, and yet you write about how she undermined the hopes for transparency. Can you explain that?

Eric Umansky: Yes. In 2015, Nikki Haley signed legislation as the governor to, as you say, mandate body-worn cameras. She actually had the family of Michael Scott-- oh, sorry, of Walter Scott by her side. Walter Scott had been shot in the back a few months before while running away from an officer. There had been cell phone footage of it. I don't have her words exactly in front of me. She said something to the effect of, "We're signing this legislation so that Walter Scott will have not lost his life in vain."

What the footage simultaneously did while mandating cameras was exempting footage from public records laws that is exempting footage from ever having to be disclosed. In turn, it hasn't been. We actually did a count in terms of South Carolina this year. We found that, I think, of 16 different police killings, just three-- sorry, of 19 different killings, just three have been disclosed. That is the real legacy of that. We, by the way, did that kind of count nationally. We did it also in New York so that we know we're not just picking out individual cases. We're looking at trends.

Brigid Bergin: Eric, at the heart of your story, so much is this inherent inadequacy of technological advances without policy and changes in the culture of policing. I'm wondering, before we let you go, did you hear about any potential solutions from any of your sources? How should body-worn cameras be used to fulfill the promise that we saw them potentially as a solution for?

Eric Umansky: One of the easiest, and this is actually a bill that is currently pending in the New York City Council, that would give civilian oversight investigators their own access to footage, so they don't have to depend on the police department for it. That's actually how it works in Chicago and a few other cities. Chicago, in turn, actually posts some of that footage publicly. It's made a difference. You can draw a line from that to the firing of some officers for misconduct.

Brigid Bergin: We will have to leave it there for now. Eric Umansky is ProPublica editor-at-large. His story about body-worn cameras is in The New York Times Magazine. Tremendous reporting. Eric, thanks so much for joining us and for all your hard work.

Eric Umansky: Thank you for having me.

 

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