Show Us the Videotape

Police have no excuse not to record interactions with civilians, and courts have no excuse not to demand that they do. 

By Catherine Crump and Matthew Segal

As Americans learn more about instances of police abuses, police cameras are having an increasingly profound influence on how the public views encounters between officers and civilians. In recent months, these cameras have exposed both needless violence—like the killing of Laquan McDonald in Chicago—and stunning examples of officers misstating the truth. In Chicago, many officers reportedly engaged in a sort of perverse tribute to the power of video by allegedly tampering with their dashboard cameras. They apparently recognized what is now perfectly clear: officers seeking to explain why a civilian was injured or killed in an encounter with police are now confronted with a single demand: Where’s the video?

The only place where this isn’t true, amazingly, is in court.

Court rules generally do not demand, or even prefer, that police officers prove the facts of their encounters with civilians using police video—such as bodycam or dashcam footage—instead of memory-based testimony. To be sure, officers and civilians use videos in court all the time. But courts rarely call upon the police to come to court with video, even though officers are increasingly well-positioned to record their encounters with civilians.

If an officer fails to activate his or her body camera before arresting someone for disorderly conduct or before allegedly beating someone, the civilian’s lawyer can certainly ask the jury to disbelieve the officer’s testimony about what happened. But the court won’t prohibit the officer from testifying or even instruct the jury to think twice about that testimony due to the failure to record. This leaves civilians stuck in a “he said, she said” box.

This situation cannot stand. In cases when officers had the opportunity to record encounters with civilians, courts should discourage them from resorting to trial by memory.

First, memory is not a recording. It is a complex process that can be impaired by stress or later-acquired information. In fact, the Innocence Project has pegged eyewitness misidentification as the leading cause of wrongful convictions of people later exonerated with DNA evidence. There is no reason to suppose that eyewitness descriptions—especially concerning brief and stressful encounters between officers and civilians—are more accurate.

Second, when violence occurs between a police officer and a civilian, a battle of their memories is not a fair fight. One distressing aspect of the recent police videos is that, even when civilians lived to tell their tales, the officers’ accounts were more readily believed.

Read more
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/03/police_should_be_required_to_dashcam_everything.html