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.
But unless something tragic happens, body camera footage generally goes unseen. “We spend so much money collecting and storing this data, but it’s almost never used for anything,” says Benjamin Graham, a political scientist at the University of Southern California.
Graham is among a small number of scientists who are reimagining this footage as data rather than just evidence. Their work leverages advances in natural language processing, which relies on artificial intelligence, to automate the analysis of video transcripts of citizen-police interactions. The findings have enabled police departments to spot policing problems, find ways to fix them and determine whether the fixes improve behavior.
Read the full article on Scientific American.
