In recent years, as public officials scrambled to dispel concerns that cops routinely lie to protect fellow officers in misconduct investigations, one policy idea quickly emerged as a would-be cure-all.
Body cameras attached to every police officer could almost guarantee individual accountability, supporters of the idea argued. Sure, there would be technical kinks to work out and privacy concerns to address. But cameras and microphones can’t lie, and putting a digital watchdog on every uniform would tear down the “blue wall of silence.”
There are several good reasons to be skeptical of the body camera advocates. But with a majority of major police departments already committed to the policy, those who feared a false sense of security from the cameras were always short on time to make their case.
Now, time’s up.
The company that manufactures Tasers wants to turn body cameras into a billion-dollar business. To deliver on that big promise to shareholders, they’re borrowing a ploy from fictional playground drug dealers: The first hit’s free, but the next 800 will cost ya.
TASER International — or “Axon,” as they would prefer to be called after an official Blackwater-style rebrand this week — is promising to give cities free body cameras, free service, and free data storage.
But only for the first year in which the cities sign on with the company’s service.
The lure of free equipment and service — even temporarily — is probably enough to seal the deal in the 25 major cities that have not yet implemented a body camera program, Major Cities Chiefs Police Association head Darrel Stephens told the Huffington Post.
The cameras themselves aren’t the pinch-point for cities and departments with thin budgets. It’s the prospect of storing all the video and audio data the cameras generate. A few small-town departments in Indiana and Connecticut made headlines last fall when they abandoned their existing body camera systems, citing data costs. A few other jurisdictions have seen proposals for camera systems bogged down legislatively for the same reason.
If Axon’s offer of a year’s free service greases the skids like the company hopes, the company and its investors will further consolidate long-term control of a market they already dominate. For every four body camera contracts in the country, the security firm formerly known as TASER controls three. But something like four in five police nationwide are not currently required to wear a body camera, creating a huge untapped revenue opportunity for the $1.3 billion company.
There’s nothing insidious about any of that, to hear company founder and CEO Rick Smith tell it. “If we can get cameras in the hands of police officers, they will immediately pay for themselves,” he told FastCompany.
It’s not clear if he meant that TASER/Axon will see more money coming in than what it costs to give away a year’s service, or that cities and police departments will save more than they spend thanks to reduced lawsuits and court settlements.
There is some evidence for the latter proposition. Body camera proponents frequently point to the small city of Rialto, CA, where both use of force and civilian complaints about abuses dropped dramatically the year after civic leaders forced cops to wear cameras, as evidence of how drastic a difference the accountability tools can make to real-life behavior.
In a city like Chicago, where police abuse cost taxpayers more than $210 million in settlements from 2012 to 2015 alone, even a fraction of the improvement Rialto reported could more than pay for the free-to-play, pay-to-win version of accountability that Axon is selling.
But the Rialto experience isn’t so neatly portable. The police tendency to shield abusive officers from criticism and accountability has adapted to changing circumstances just fine in the past. Cameras can be tinkered with, records suppressed.
In North Carolina, for example, lawmakers have taken away police chief’s authority to decide what footage the public can and cannot see. The new law had not yet gone into effect when Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department officers killed Keith Lamont Scott in September, but city leaders still invoked it to explain why they would not show body camera footage of Scott’s death to an angry city. They only released the video after civil unrest and protest marches shut down the city’s center for multiple nights — and after widowed Reykia Scott released the video she had captured on her phone.
The law is now active, and actively interfering with accountability efforts elsewhere in the state. A teenager in Greensboro who alleges he was beaten and choked by an officer for no reason last summer has been unable to show anyone else the video from his assailant’s body camera because of the law, and the Greensboro PD’s internal review process has already exonerated the officer.
Video footage is a key ingredient in accountability for abusive police. Without it, scores of black men, women, and children beaten and killed by police without justification in the past few years would have been officially recorded as guilty people who got what was coming to them. But video alone doesn’t solve the institutional rot in police-community relations, and videos controlled by the police departments they are meant to challenge are even more apt to let angry civilians down.
Real accountability is harder. It means changing police union contracts, overhauling the curriculum at police academies, and committing to the slow, hard work of reconciliation between long-suffering communities and officers who suddenly feel betrayed by their cities and the news media.
It’s far easier to lunge at the sweet capitalist synergy animating TASER/Axon’s first-hit-free strategy today. Shareholders get their profits and city fathers get their varnish of police reform. The boondoggle long predicted by body camera skeptics is here to stay.