A decade ago then president Barack Obama proposed spending $75 million over three years to help states buy police body cameras to expand their use. The move came in the wake of the killing of teenager Michael Brown, for which no body camera footage existed, and was designed to increase transparency and build trust between police and the people they served.
Since the first funds were allocated in 2015, tens of millions of traffic stops and accidents, street stops, arrests and the like have been recorded with these small digital devices, which police attach to their uniform or winter jacket. The footage was considered useful as evidence in disputed incidents such as the one that led to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. Use of the cameras may also deter bad behavior by police in their interactions with the public.
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Politics may dissuade police departments from sharing footage with academics. In some cases, departments may be reluctant to surface systematic problems. In the future, however, departments may be able to analyze the footage themselves. Some private firms—such as TRULEO and Polis Solutions—already offer software for that purpose.
“We are getting closer to departments being able to use these tools and not just having it be an academic exercise,” says Nicholas Camp, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan, who has worked on Eberhardt’s team. But commercial models tend not to be fully transparent—users cannot inspect their component modules—so some academics, including Camp and Dehghani, are wary of their output.
Read the full article on Scientific American.
