film criticism 101

April 1, 2016 11:33 AM

Police Body Cameras: What Do You See? An interactive simulated piece about the usefulness of bodycams in discerning the facts of a given situation. (SLNYT)
posted by likeatoaster (16 comments total)

“When video allows us to look through someone’s eyes, we tend to adopt an interpretation that favors that person,” Professor Stoughton said, explaining a psychological phenomenon known as “camera perspective bias.”

This is why I support body cameras for all criminals. Then we'll get the whole story in court.
Available at your local police station.
posted by crazylegs at 11:50 AM on April 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

The biggest take away I got from this is that police body camera's need better stabilization and shouldn't be loosely attached to a polo-shirt.
posted by mayonnaises at 11:54 AM on April 1, 2016 [9 favorites]

This article should be taught in every highschool civic class this year. This is a great example, about perception vs reality. Also the in real-time statistics driven journalism is great.
posted by Agent_X_ at 11:55 AM on April 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

It's one banana, Michael. How much could it cost? Ten dollars?
posted by beerperson at 12:14 PM on April 1, 2016 [10 favorites]

Thanks for sharing this, likeatoaster. I found it fascinating and a great exercise, especially as a member of a demographic that suffers disproportionately at the hands of poor policing.

I was astonished at the high number of people who claimed that they tend to trust the police, but I wasn't surprised that a different perspective on the scenarios often revealed info that affected my thoughts about what had happened.

Which is why I tend to agree with the conclusion that the professor who put the scenarios together reached: bodycams are just another tool at our disposal in our efforts to establish best practices for law enforcement, and regardless of where we fall on the scale of trusting police, we should never believe that bodycam footage solves every problem and answers every question.
posted by lord_wolf at 12:29 PM on April 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

Bodycams obviously aren't a panacea.

But for example consider the shooting of Walter Scott. I suspect Slager would have been much less likely to fire if he had been wearing an active body camera.
posted by justkevin at 12:50 PM on April 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

> But for example consider the shooting of Walter Scott. I suspect Slager would have been much less likely to fire if he had been wearing an active body camera

Yeah, the value of body cameras to me is that they make the officer aware he/she is being recorded, and are thus a check on routine shitty behavior. I expect that they'll end up either corroborating or refuting the officer's story maybe 20% of the time, but they will often be inconclusive.
posted by savetheclocktower at 12:54 PM on April 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

From the bodycams I have personally watched (so far only about a dozen; they just started wearing them here in KY), I have noticed two things:

1) Only some of them have the audio enabled, and this seems like it's up to the discretion of the particular officer; and they are often turned on at weird times (i.e. after the initial confrontation), even though they are theoretically supposed to wear them whenever they are out of their vehicles.
2) Officers tend to be (to me, surprisingly) well-behaved when they have them on, but I have yet to see an officer not comment on the fact that he is wearing a bodycam during an arrest, investigation, etc.
posted by likeatoaster at 12:57 PM on April 1, 2016

That was pretty interesting. It didn’t seem as hard to figure out what was going on as it did for some, but it’s still not a clear picture. In the first one I thought the guy was dancing, but thought "why would they have a guy dancing?"
posted by bongo_x at 2:17 PM on April 1, 2016

In the TV show Babylon 5, there was the concept of using 3rd-person hovering camera drones. Here's an idea; having a camera is less important that having the right perspectives.
posted by polymodus at 2:24 PM on April 1, 2016

The biggest take away I got from this is that police body camera's need better stabilization and shouldn't be loosely attached to a polo-shirt.

The thing is, fisheye lenses and image stabilization (as well as de-fisheye) software already exists. The quality wouldn't be worse than what we see on the news from other kinds of surveillance cameras. I wouldn't be surprised if the resolution for bodycams was under-spec'd. I mean, I just got a GoPro ripoff from China for $20 that does 1080p, so maybe they just couldn't afford them.

I think the greatest benefit from bodycams would come from the entire operation being run and footage owned by an oversight organization. Encrypted so cops can't tamper, and stored via 3rd party.
posted by rhizome at 6:52 PM on April 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

The alarming part to me is how few people realized in the foot pursuit simulation that that officer caused him to fall. You'd think that more people would recognize Tasers these days, at least by sound.
posted by fifthrider at 10:50 PM on April 1, 2016

Where body cams will be most useful is when multiple cops are on scene. It's already this way with dash cam where the different viewpoints end up telling a much better story when more than one car is on the scene.
posted by Mitheral at 1:23 AM on April 2, 2016

When someone is in genuine fear for their life, they focus every fiber of their being on avoiding death. They don't have the resources for anything non-essential to that task. A cop narrating what's going on in real time is a huge red flag to me; I strongly suspect that the amount of narration is inversely proportional to the actual threat, especially when there is no other cop there to communicate with.

When the cop in the second simulation repeatedly stated "he's reaching for a gun", " stop resisting", etc., it immediately makes me suspicious that he is trying to create "proof" that will later help defend his aggressive actions. These kinds of phrases ("he was reaching for a gun", "he failed to comply", "I feared for my life") are so common nowadays that I wonder if they are actually taught in police academies as cya.
posted by mysterious_stranger at 2:13 AM on April 2, 2016 [8 favorites]

Yeah, the value of body cameras to me is that they make the officer aware he/she is being recorded, and are thus a check on routine shitty behavior.

Or to alter their actions to make the footage useless. You can be sure ways of doing so will be passed around through esprit de corps and the locker room.
posted by rhizome at 4:19 AM on April 2, 2016

It seems to me that the POV of a single body-cam can't be used as a reliable witness any more than a single witness can be relied upon to be accurate. I believe a presiding judge should determine the minicam's value, and either refuse to admit, or admit with stipulations, it into evidence.

Maybe it's time for the drones. Let them buzz around like little bees, and converge on every site where a police officer has engaged someone. Some of them could carry miniguns, in case, you know, somebody needs to be shot. You could feed the armed drones with some sort of algorithm that computed the likelihood that a person would be violent. You know, develop a profile...um wait, never mind.

As a middle class w/m I've had few bad experiences with the police. Lately police officers seem to ignore me, except one time (a couple of years ago) when I broke down on the freeway, and an Oregon HP took me to the next off ramp so I could call a garage. I got a cheeseburger, and he hauled me back to my truck. But, back in my homeless days I used to get stopped a lot--several times a month--so that officers could fill out Field Interrogation cards on me. I was not always handled with courtesy. I once spent the night in a Canadian jail for being a hippie without much money.
posted by mule98J at 9:12 AM on April 3, 2016