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Police Report: Behind the Body Camera
Behind the Body Camera is Part III of a IV Part series on the current state of policing in America. Read Parts I & II here.At the ripe age of five, a young Chris Reed decided that he wanted to be a police officer.
Like most young Americans who aspire from a young age to police the streets, he wanted to help people. This early drive, lost and forgotten by most who declare similar aspirations, propelled Chris into service after high school, serving in the Army as a paratrooper and military policeman. After a three-year stint in the military, Chris and his wife moved to League City, Texas, a mid-sized municipality southwest of Houston, and began training as a police officer.
Shortly after completing his Masters in criminal justice from Sam Houston State University, Reed was promoted to Assistant Police Chief in League City. After 15 years of service to the police department, Chris moved down the street to City Hall, serving as City Administrator for League City. In 2009, Reed was named City Manager for the smaller community of Nassau Bay, most famous for housing the Johnson Space Center.
Chris Reed has spent his entire adult life in service of his country and community. Having spent fifteen years as a police officer and an additional nine in municipal government, Chris reveals from a candid point-of-view the issues with individual policies that contribute heavily to the policing problems of the day. Lets dive right in.
Did you know that you could solve our prison over-crowding problem by decriminalizing marijuana?Citing another example of a feel-good law passed by out-of-sync legislators, Reed blasted the feds failed War on Drugs as one of the primary contributors to the breakdown in police community relations. While Ronald & Nancy Reagan touted their Just Say No propaganda program and built new prisons for non-violent offenders, many states adopted the Presidents mandatory sentencing laws to ensure those shiny new prisons would soon be at capacity.
Reagans tough on crime stance towards drugs sparked a new prison industrial complex of previously unseen proportions in America, with drug arrests tripling from 19801997, 88% of which were for simple possession. Today, over 2.6 million people live behind bars in these United States, composing nearly 22% of the global prison population and setting America in second place for worlds highest incarceration rate (number one is the Republic of Seychelles, home to nearly 92,000 people (roughly the same number that can fit in large college football stadiums)).
Making something illegal does not make it go away. It just makes it a crime. Though the use and sale of weed is federally prohibited (despite 23 states allowing either medical or recreational use), Americans still smoke 5,000,000 pounds of weed per year, 44% of adults have smoked at least once, and the United States is number one in the world in illicit drug consumption.
As 2 Chainz pointed out in the face of Nancy Graces think-of-the-children pleas, Everybody can get their hands on pot right now, whether its legal or not. Indeed, Deuces claim is backed by a Columbia University survey that found 40% of teens could obtain weed within a day and 25% within an hour. Teens between the ages of 1217 reported weed was easier to buy than beer or prescription drugs, shattering the trillion-dollar idea that a federal War on Drugs can feasibly eradicate drugs themselves, or even limit access.
Reed believes part of the problem is that our society has attempted to contruct our morality around laws and statutes:Were creating our morality around laws. If you go to jail, youre a bad person. Why?
Because what if thats not illegal next week; is he still bad? Laws dont dictate bad people. Considering over 1.
43 million pages were added to the Federal Register from 19932013 (an average of 286 pages per day), I would think basing ones morality upon laws an impossible task, if not a misguided one. Morality is subjective and determined by each individual; morality has no place in the law.You saw a trend about five or six years ago, Im guessing, where police changed their uniforms in most places and went to more a tactical uniform, so they went to the military-style BDUs [battle-dress uniform] I was worried at the time.
. about the perception of the public; because, lets face it, perception is everything especially in that business. And the perception would be that you look tactical.
The uniform switch Reed described has become most prevalent on American television sets as weve collectively watched violence unfold in cities shackled by drug laws, centrally planned segregation and heavy-handed officers. Images from Ferguson, New York, Baltimore and others have resulted in a few double takes, as the uniforms donned by officers in these situations appear more akin to an occupying force than policemen. Reeds concerns before the switch were not unfounded; the publics perception of policemen has certainly changed in light of the gear worn by officers.
But, there are very important psychological considerations at play here. Richard Johnson, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Toledo, has written that an officers uniform has a profound psychological impact on others, and even slight alterations to the style may change how citizens perceive them.When the first official police uniform was issued in London in 1829, they were colored dark blue for a specific reason: to sharply distinguish the policemen from the red-and-white colors sported by the army.
The distinction sent the message that police and military officers are two very separate people with two very separate duties, and the distinction was not to be blurred. This is the impact that Johnson speaks of; if an officer is dressed as if hes in Iraq, protesters are more likely to listen to his heavy-handed demands, regardless of the rights hes trampling.But its not just the uniforms that blur the distinction between law enforcement and the military; the weapons and vehicles do a fine job of that.
Reed went on to explain the Pentagons 1033 program, through which local law enforcement can acquire military vehicles and equipment. 1033 has distributed over $5 billion worth of equipment to local law enforcement agencies; over $1.4 billion of which was tactical gear, transferred to more than 7,500 agencies.
Launched into the national debate by the events in Ferguson last year, the program has rolled over 600 Mine Resistant, Ambush Protected vehicles (MRAP) onto American streets. The flip-side of this tactical coin is how that officer in tactical gear feels:Now weve got tactical uniforms; weve got ARs; and now weve got military vehicles What kind of mindset do you think that officer gets in when he puts that type of uniform on? He feels tactical.
He feels that safety is a problem.Maria Konnikova summed it up like this in an article for the New Yorker:Military gear may harm relations between police forces and citizens not only because they signal violence but because they may, in some sense, cause more violence. The same cues that signal army and conflict to civilians may affect police officers themselves.
When they dress up for serious engagements, for example when donning SWAT gear to respond to a riot, they no longer feel like local law enforcement anymore but like part of a broader military machine.After the American Revolution, one of the debates about governing this new republic was over the question of a standing army. Antifederalists thought a standing army too dangerous and that civilian militias would suffice.
Federalists believed the federal government needed the power to raise an army to dispel conflicts, a sentiment echoed by Shays Rebellion in Massachusetts. These debates that led to the Third Amendment, which prohibits the quartering of soldiers in peacetime, said quite a bit about the Founders notions on militarism in a free society. From Radley Balko:Ultimately, the founders decided that a standing army was a necessary evil, but that the role of soldiers would be only to dispel foreign threats, not to enforce laws against American citizens.
We are going down a road right now that theyre not gonna take at one point. Theres going to be a point when the public says, wait a minute, weve become a police state.Body cameras, recently propelled into the national conversation, are cited as a tool for increasing police accountability and ensuring the truth comes out.
. However, the jury is still out on how effective body cameras are in this capacity and what unintended consequences befall the adoption of the recording devices. Reed says theres something citizens dont realize about lapel cameras: theyre an invasion of your privacy.
While some citizens demand body cameras to hold police accountable, they also raise several privacy concerns as much of officers interaction with the public is not related to crime. If these cameras record continuously to prevent officers from editing footage on the fly, every conversation shared between a citizen and an officer wearing such a device would be captured. A September 2014 report from the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) pointed out that crime victims and those concerned about being seen cooperating with police have good reason to oppose police recording their interractions.
Reed also points out that if you invite a lapel camera-toting officer into your home, the department now has camera footage of your home without the use of a warrant. Despite the privacy concerns, Reed says he favors body cameras because of their unique ability to clear up civilian complaints against officers. Before the acquisition of lapel cameras, he says:When a guy would come in and complain or a girl would come in and complain, I automatically assumed, either this guys lying to me, or that policemans lying to me.
Somebodys lying to me. But when we got these cameras I realized, that, in almost every situation, neither one of them are lying; its the perception. Its the view of where they were standing.
Its the way that it was said. All these intangibles that you werent able to articulate in a report, were able to see firsthand.Reed went on to describe a complaint from an elderly Nassau Bay resident whod been pulled over on his way to church.
When he stopped on the side of the road, the elderly gentleman, who said hed been raised to get out of the car and present your ID to show you werent a threat, did just that. When he exited his car, however, the officer pulled his service pistol on the man, frightening the man and prompting the complaint. Reed said that when he pulled up the lapel camera footage to show the gentlemen, he was floored.
The footage showed the situation unfolding just as the man reported, but when exiting his car and reaching for his wallet in his back pocket, from the officers view, it appeared the man was reaching for a gun from his waistband.It looked like every training video of a cop getting shot in a traffic scenario that Ive ever seen.The anecdote Reed provided highlights one of the primary reasons that over 25% of the countrys law enforcement agencies have adopted the technology: perspective.
By showing the gentleman what his movements looked like to the officer, he understood why the officer perceived a threat. Also, added Reed, the officer realized how vital proper communication with civilians is to policing. Perhaps by taking a few extra moments at the scene to explain to the senior why he perceived a threat (or maybe apologized to the man), he probably wouldnt have filed a complaint.
Nevertheless, body cameras must be implemented carefully in order to protect the privacy rights to citizens while also providing the accountability they aim for.The depth of these individual subjects underlines the systemic and multi-faceted problem with law enforcement in America. Check back for Part IV in the coming days, where Chris tackles the core issues at hand for police and how we might go about fixing them.
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