 Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the fifth event from moment to movement, a speaker series organized by Howard University and Numerica that is designed to probe pressing issues of civil rights and racial justice. My name is Sita Penya Gangadharan. I'm a senior research fellow with Numerica's Open Technology Institute where I focus on data-driven discrimination and I am your host and moderator for tonight's discussion, who's watching who, police cameras, civil rights and public safety. Our aim tonight is to take stock of this particular police technology from multiple perspectives of people on the front lines and we do so in the context of numerous conversations happening locally and nationally. Here in D.C. just last week, the D.C. City Council's Committee on the Judiciary convened an oversight hearing on body-worn cameras calling for a slowdown in camera deployment. D.C. sits alongside 34 states that have seen legislation introduced and some stall or die. Meanwhile, today, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing asking, can technology increase protection for law enforcement officers and the public? And yesterday, the White House released its final report of the president's task force on the 21st century policing, while the Bureau of Justice Assistance released a body cams toolkit for law enforcement. Last Friday, a national coalition of 34 groups, including Numerica's Open Technology Institute, released a set of principles to guide policies on police cameras. With each of these developments and as local and national conversation unfolds, myriad concerns are coming to light about the technology and the conditions for its deployment that will best serve public safety and safeguard our rights. These concerns focus on fairness, trust, privacy, security, and more. And they raise questions like, how do body-worn cameras shape how we see and how we witness? How do and should body-worn cameras contribute to efforts in police accountability? What institutional and regulatory choices do we need to make now, before police cameras become the status quo? Our panelists will address these concerns and questions with brief talks of about six to seven minutes, and we'll follow this with Q&A. We'll begin with Nicole Austin-Hillary, a Howard Law alum, and director and counsel of the Brennan Center's DC office. We'll next move to Brian Jordan, chief of police at Howard University and former assistant chief of police of the Metropolitan Police Department. We'll be joined by two researchers, Justin Reedy, assistant professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University, who's done formative research on body-worn cameras, and Sarah Brain, author of Stratified Surveillance, Policing in the Age of Big Data and Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research, New England. Finally, our panel will close out with Melchia Cyril, executive director of the Center for Media Justice, who will leave us with and on the ground perspective. Nicole? Thank you for having me here. All right, I have to give you all some ground rules, first of all, as we just discussed back in the green room. This is Washington DC, and it's May. I've got allergies. I normally do not cough and sneeze in the middle of giving a public presentation, but tonight I might. Two things you need to keep in mind. I'm not contagious, and two, we're going to roll with my sneezes and my coughs. All right? So we'll go from there. I'd like to thank Cita and New America for inviting me here today. This is such an important issue and we are at such an important moment in terms of where we are in the United States. This is not just about body-worn cameras. This is really about our criminal justice system in this country and what our citizenry expects from it, what we expect it to deliver, and what we expect to give to it and how we expect it all to work together for the betterment of the community. We like to say at the Brennan Center that we think there are twin goals that we should expect from our criminal justice system. One, we should expect that all Americans are kept safe and that we reduce crime, but also in keeping our country safe and in reducing crime, we want to make sure that we give people the opportunity to be respected and to fully engage in their country and all the activities that our democracy offers to them. So we want to reduce mass incarceration, but we also want to make sure that we keep our community safe. So those are the goals that we like to focus on. So that's the context from which I'll be speaking to you today. And for those of you who are not as familiar with the Brennan Center for Justice, we are a national think tank legal advocacy organization. We were founded in honor of former Supreme Court Justice William Brennan as a living legacy to him when he stepped down from the court. And one thing that Justice Brennan said to us at that time is it's fine, you can start an institution named after me, but if you follow everything that I did while I was on the court, I'll be mad. I want you all to challenge me, challenge my jurisprudence. And that's what we do. We like to say at the Brennan Center that we try to fix those broken parts of our democracy and justice systems. So all the work that we do from our litigation to our research to our advocacy is with that in mind to try to fix those broken parts of our systems of government. The criminal justice system is one of those and that's why we are very engaged on this issue. But I want to start out telling you about a personal story of mine. When I was a third year law student, I was a finalist for something called the Karpatkin Fellowship at the ACLU. And this was one of the in-house fellowships at the ACLU and lots of people in the civil rights community whom I respected, whose past I wanted to follow had been Karpatkin Fellows. So it was a big deal to me and I was very proud to be one of the finalists. When I had my last fellowship interview, it was not only with some of the muckity mucks at the ACLU, but it was also with members of the Karpatkin family. And the first question that they asked me during my fellowship interview was, if you were someone who lived in public housing and there was an effort afoot to put cameras in your public housing development that would record all activity within that public housing community, what would you do? Now, I immediately knew that I was interviewing for the ACLU and I knew what the ACLU response was. But what they didn't know is that I was actually someone who grew up in public housing. And my response was, as someone who grew up in public housing, if the citizens in public housing communities want cameras, if they think that's going to make them safer, keep them safer and help them to feel like they have better control over their communities, then by all means, they should have cameras. Well, I remember I met my husband for lunch after that interview and he said, oh, you know you blew that fellowship, right? And I did. I ended up getting another fellowship, but I knew. But what I take away from that story and why it always stays with me is that cameras and the issue of cameras in communities is at its core about the citizenry feeling like it is a mechanism to keep them safe and to protect them, whether that means activity is being recorded that can produce the real facts of a situation, whether that means it produces information to show who's guilty of something who's not guilty of something who did what whatever it is at its core. That's what body worn cameras are supposed to do for us. They are supposed to provide accountability, transparency, and let's get down to it. Truthfulness. We think that what we see in front of us is something that cannot be manipulated. What you have on that camera is what is. So that's what we're dealing with as we talk about that issue. We are dealing with what communities want, what they feel like they need, and people feeling like they need to have the truth. But even in having the truth, there are some issues that we have to contend with. I want people to remember that body worn cameras are not a panacea. I know that there have been things happening across the United States, things that many of us are upset about, that we're concerned about from Ferguson to New York to Cleveland. But the thing we have to understand is that body worn cameras are a part of a larger conversation and are really just going to be a part of the larger solution. So when we talk about body worn cameras, we have to keep it in that context. We also have to understand that everything about body worn cameras is not perfect. Yes, we recognize that there are some situations that had we not seen those things on film, we may not ever know about them. The gentleman in South Carolina, but for that camera, perhaps we would have never seen that he was engaged in an altercation with an officer. But even with that being said, we have to be smart about the policies and about how we put body worn camera policies in place. We have to remember that there are civil liberties issues, privacy issues that have to be taken into into account. For instance, the president's reports that Cida mentioned yesterday that came out, particularly the one about law enforcement equipment. For us at the Brennan Center, when we first looked at that report, first thing we said was this does not talk about civil liberties. It does not talk about privacy. It does not talk about who's collecting data, how that data is used, how it is kept private. None of those things. So we have to make sure that this conversation includes all of that. And lastly, I want to say this. We have to remember that right now we're talking about a lot of recommendations. We have to remember that it is the people that we put in office, the policymakers, the lawmakers, members of Congress, our local state legislators, our local city council people. These are the people that we've also got to engage in these issues. I think we're at a point where, and it's understandable, where America is expecting the White House to give us all the answers. And yes, the president and the White House has to be held accountable. But it is the lawmakers, the policymakers on the ground. I'm sure that some of my panelists will talk about this, whom we also have to hold accountable, whom we have to engage in these conversations. Because as I remind people, all politics is local. Yes, it's glamorous to talk about the president. Everybody wants to see the president and be seen with the president. But it's that city council member and your local community who is making decisions that affect your lives on a daily basis. So as we talk about this issue, let's remember to look at it within this full context. It is not a panacea. Yes, we want justice. But remember that we cannot get justice alone just through the use of body-worn cameras and that our ultimate goal has to be figuring out how we make our criminal justice system better for all of us, for the citizens, for the officers, for everyone engaged. Right. Thank you. Chief Jordan. There are some rules where you never follow lawyers and preachers. So it's kind of hard to now take on some of those same issues. But I think from a police standpoint, I've been in law enforcement for more than 30 years and I've seen a lot of things developed and, you know, the constant is the goal for police accountability, that we talk about the concept of community policing. And the reality with the body-worn camera issue is that depending on the community you come from, you see the issue differently. That again, if you go back as far as the Rodney King situation, caught on video, Oscar Grant caught on video to bear rice, caught on video, Eric Garner caught on video, Walter Scott caught on video. And we're not body-worn cameras. That the issue is, is that for those situations, different communities have seen those issues differently and has caused a debate to go in a lot of different directions. And so it leads to the situation of, okay, let's put cameras on police officers. Well, I don't, on his face, again, from a community policing standpoint, if that's the, like you said, if the community neighborhood wanted that, and as a police who responsible for providing safety in a particular community, I don't think we would have an issue with that. But I think some of the points you made are real is that in this community, they would love it. And this community, they would hate it. So as a police officer, you're trying to make sure you're providing what's needed for the community in which you're working for that. So as a law enforcement officer on his face, I don't have a problem with everybody wearing cameras. I think, as we go through it, that we have to work out the yin and yang of what that means. That, and I just won't repeat some of the things that my colleague said, but the issue of credibility and things like that. But I want to go back to the things we've seen on video. I think that we have to understand that once that video is there, it's still not going to be seen in the same way by everybody. That you take law enforcement, you take lawyers, that the worst case scenario was we saw Walter Scott. I can go out on the limb and say, when that case goes to trial, you're going to hear a solid defense for why that officer did what he did. And you're going to have some people saying, hmm, okay, now that you talk about Tennessee versus Garner and the fleeing felon rule, and now you talk about the fact that there was an assault that occurred, maybe that wasn't as bad as the video first saw. But then there are other people on the other side of the fence who say, there's no question that was worst case in policing. All I'm saying is, is that the reason we have to have this debate is because there is not one position on it, that there's not accepted understanding of what is going to mean, where it's going to go and how it's going to do. But I think that from a law enforcement standpoint, in order to continue to trust and to continue moving forward with the ability to police the community, the debate is necessary. We have to work it down to the point where not only the police who are wearing the cameras buy into it, but the community that's being monitored buy into it. And I think this panel discussion will be a first step as we continue to move forward in that debate. Thank you. Justin. I want to thank the New America Foundation for having me here. Just to piggyback on what the chief was saying, there are unintended consequences behind any new technology. I just spent the last couple of years studying people who had been exposed to tasers to see if there are short term cognitive deficits that occur after people are exposed to tasers, which have this has tremendous implications for when subjects should be merandized and interrogated. So we think about camera technology as this kind of benevolent technology that was adopted and manufactured for the right reason. So how could how could cameras do harm? How could cameras possibly do more harm than good? They're not tasers. They're not weapons. But are they? We have to remember that anytime there's a crisis, anytime is a triggering event, whether it's riots or civil unrest or some type of social upheaval, we do look to innovations, whether it's policy innovations or technological innovations is a solution. And we do a cost benefit analysis. Sometimes our cost benefit analyses are deeply flawed, such was such as the case in the Rockefeller drug laws. We tend to pay attention to the immediate benefits and not as much attention to the long term costs. We have a crisis and we are looking to on officer video as a solution to the crisis in policing legitimacy right now. And that does not exonerate us from having to do a reasonable and rational cost benefit analysis behind this technology. I've been in the field for a couple years working in Mesa, and we do have some preliminary findings behind the technology that's very promising. However, it is just one agency and every agency is different and the people who live in those communities are different. But we're finding a few things. We followed 100 officers over a year and we found that we looked at 4,000 police citizens contacts over that year period. We found that officers who were wearing body worn cameras conducted significantly fewer stop and frisks. Terry stops by about 10%. It appeared that officers compared to officers not wearing cameras appeared that officers wearing cameras were more risk averse thinking much more carefully about what they said and did much more carefully about what constitutes reasonable suspicion. So it appears that officers were much more cautious. We also found by the way that officers wearing cameras wrote more tickets. It seemed that we found that about a 14% difference in ticket writing among camera officers compared to non-camera officers. Many officers I think may be concerned that they may come under scrutiny for not issuing tickets in situations with this video evidence that a citizen might have violated. So be careful what we hope for. We found another kind of promising finding and then I'll stop talking about data because no one likes data. We all like it. We just don't want to talk about it. We found another point that I think goes back to the earlier points made here. We actually found something interesting. One of the concerns was the technology would make officers more reactive and initiate fewer contacts. We actually found that camera officers initiated significantly more contacts with citizens compared to non-camera officers by about 15%. We believe that what's happening as officers are able to record suspicious activity on the street before they initiate contact and this may provide some legal justification and confidence for them to initiate contact. This has implications. The implication is that officers are going to use this as an investigative tool and they're going to be able to use it in public places and so we just have to remember that we are adopting this for the right reasons right now. Like we adopt other types of legislation or other types of technologies and we want to adopt it to solve problems that happen disproportionately in minority communities. But we have to remember that over the long run there are costs and the costs to this technology may disproportionately affect those very same communities. Great. Thank you so much for organizing and thank you guys all for coming. Today I'm just going to speak briefly on two issues. The first has to do with implementation and the second has to do with interpretation. So I'm going to highlight both some of the intended consequences of these body-worn cameras and some of the unintended consequences like Justin was pointing to. So starting with implementation, there's a number of important considerations when thinking about how these body-worn cameras are going to be rolled out or deployed. So once a technology, a new technology is rolled out in an institutional setting such as the police department, it's really difficult to scale back. So in other words, once these body-cams are disseminated, there aren't really take-backs or opportunities for take-backs don't exist that much. So it's critical to be thoughtful on the front end about implementation. In that sense, technology can be sort of performative. It's very present, it might generate part of the desired effect. So there's this issue of the Hawthorne effect, the idea being that people whose behavior is being surveilled, then they will usually improve their behavior as a result of it. So this is one of the intended consequences of body-worn cameras, that the mere presence of the camera is going to deter police officers from engaging in undue use of force. Another intended consequence is that in the face of unfounded civilian complaints, it can be exculpatory for the officers. But when thinking about this, let's also consider some of the unintended or unanticipated consequences. One of them has to do with police-civilian relations, and this has come up with some of the other panelists today. So in my research on ride-alongs, for example, with the Los Angeles Police Department, I witnessed these incidences of the police cutting people some slack sometimes, exercising the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law, if you will. So they would sometimes forego an opportunity to arrest an individual with an outstanding warrant in exchange for a warning and promise of cooperation. If an officer's actions are being recorded on these body-worn cameras and subject to scrutiny by their supervisors, so if these body-worn cameras are essentially an entrenchment of managerial control, officers might be disinclined to stray from protocol and cut individuals some slack. Another anticipated consequence of these body-worn cameras is that they may serve to expand what we think of as the criminal justice drag net. So for example, when officers enter a private residence on, say, a domestic violence call, all the individuals in that home might be caught on tape. This raises a host of immediate privacy concerns, but also these unanticipated downstream consequences, facial recognition software could be applied to the footage, for example, in order to identify individuals with outstanding warrants, and this might deter individuals in precarious legal standing or with loved ones in precarious legal standing from calling the cops when they need help. Similarly, we need to think about this information asymmetry. Who has access to the body cam footage? If civilians on tape do not know which of their behaviors or statements are caught on tape, they might agree to unfavorable plea bargains, for example. So a central issue that we're talking here is that of function creep. So function creep is this idea that data that's originally collected for one purpose can be used for another in a different context. By extension, thinking about body worn cameras, now once that footage exists, regardless of the reason it was created in the first place, without the conscientious regulation of its usage, it can be repurposed in various ways, some that might be more or less desirable than others. So in short, body worn cameras are going to result in a net increase in surveillance, and we need to think about the implications both for the police but also for the communities that they're policing. So I'll just quickly touch on interpretation and then give a couple of concrete recommendations. So raw data, such as body cam footage, does not always speak for itself. Rather, it requires interpretation, and we've alluded to this on this panel previously. Body worn camera footage can be really shaky, it's often recording chaotic situations, and it only shows the officer's point of view. Even then, the cameras field of vision doesn't really approximate humans, for example, it doesn't convey depth of field. Therefore, footage often requires interpretation in which people speak for it. It's through that interpretive process that power dynamics come into play. So the interpretation of body cam footage takes place in a social system. I'm a sociologist, so of course, I think it takes place in a social system. And this involves various stakeholders, such as police departments, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, juries, and civil rights organizations. In many instances, these groups and organizations are already at logger heads with one another about the interpretation of police actions. Body cam footage needs to be considered in conjunction with witness testimony, for example, forensics, officer's statements, and triangulated with other footage that may be captured by individual or civilian surveillance cameras. So in that sense, we can't assume that the data alone will bring accountability, but rather, individuals' interpretation of that data in pre-existing institutional, legal, and social structures, that is how accountability may be achieved. So oftentimes, we leave these really important conversations with sort of the takeaway of, it's complicated. And that's true, of course, but I want to try and help move a little bit beyond that. So I'm going to make three points, one about law and regulation, another about practical implementation, and the other about research. So first, law and regulation, and this mostly has to do with the function creep issue. A lot of privacy law today stems from the 1974 Privacy Act, which really has to do with the point of data collection. And there's huge state level variation in retention guidelines for body cam data, for example, and other sources of police collected data. So in this sense, this is sort of part of this regulatory Wild West that we really need to think about what does it mean to thoughtfully regulate this footage that can be used and repurposed in other settings. Second in terms of practical implementation, one of the things that comes up in my field work with the police is this issue of automation fatigue, right? So the cops will respond to the scene of a crime and they throw the car in park or code six on the mobile digital command center, turn on the digital in car video. Now they need to activate their body cameras. Some of them have their own audio recordings and now we're moving towards mobile contact cards or FIs in the LA context. This is a lot of technologies in this particular setting and we need to think about how to coordinate and to what extent do they actually conflict with one another. So finally research. I'm a researcher and I think that we need to develop partnerships between researchers and police departments to conduct systematic assessments about the efficacy of body worn cameras on a number of outcomes. So research design really needs to be at the forefront of decision making around where and how to deploy these cameras. We want things like randomized control trials in order to try and establish causal inference between the presence or absence of body cams and relevant outcomes such as civilian complaints use of force hit rates. And this research should be conducted with police departments but in conjunction with external researchers and agencies. A lot of the time the people that are conducting this research are specifically the companies that are selling these new technologies to law enforcement agencies. So yeah, body cameras are receiving a lot of attention but they are not infallible. We've touched on this of it not being a panacea it's not a silver bullet. As a sociologist I guess I really want to emphasize the importance of thinking about the social context into which this technology is being introduced and create evidence-based legal and regulatory parameters around the deployment admission and interpretation of video evidence. Thanks. Great. Okay. Thank you. What's up? I work at the Center for Media Justice and we're in Oakland, California. I'm from Brooklyn, New York. I grew up in Bestyre which is a very different place today than it was when I grew up. 41. So there it is. When I grew up in Bestyre was, you know, I lived on the corner. Anybody, anybody grew up on the corner? Anybody know about that? So if you live on the corner you know that's where everything happens, right? And that's where I lived. I lived on the corners, crack house over here and a lot, empty lot over here and a crack house over here. And the reason that we lived in Bestyre on the corner was because my mother chose to do that. She brought a home there. It was affordable. She sent us to public school. She was a professor at CUNY in the CUNY system, LaGuardia Community College and she was also a Black Panther as was my father. And the reason I tell you all of this is to say I enter into the conversation about surveillance and I call this a conversation. It's not a conversation about cameras. It's a conversation about surveillance to me through that lens, right? Through the lens of someone who grew up terrified of everything, of everybody I lived around, all the police, everything. I was scared of everything, right? Because everybody was shooting, using drugs and then also the police were dangerous, right? Everybody was dangerous. That's what it felt like. And I was scared and so was everybody else. All the people I thought were dangerous, they were scared too. Everybody was scared. And so what was true then for me is true today for everybody I know, many of people I know. And the cops were scared too, to be honest, you know, but they had a lot of technology, they had the technology of their day, you know, of that day and they'll have the technology of this day. More than that, what they had was the legitimacy, the legal authority to do the things they were doing. Whereas sometimes, especially, I'm dealing with NYPD, I don't know anybody know about NYPD, but they was doing the same things that the other side was doing. So it was just a lot going on. The point I'm making here is that what's that issue here is that we're talking about inserting an unproven piece of technology into Jim Crow policing. And I think that we have to think about the consequences of that. And I don't say unintended consequences because I don't believe they're unintended. I believe that there's a difference between intention and impact. And it doesn't matter to me, actually, if they're intended or unintended. What matters to me is what actually happened as a result of the introduction of that piece of technology. Because I don't know what the intention was behind the way the public school system is, but I know that it's segregated. I know that. I know what the impact is. So I think that the first thing we have to think about is about the likely impacts. So I want to talk from that perspective. You know, I've been, I went to Baltimore. I mean, everybody, we in D.C. So I went to Baltimore when the stuff broke out, went to Ferguson when the stuff broke down there. I've gone to most of the places. I went to South Carolina all very briefly to touch down and help out a friend who's doing communications, work on behalf of the community. And what I kept hearing is she had people last year. They do it tight. Right? They want to stop seeing people get killed. But the solution that has been offered to them is to body-worn cameras. Now, that doesn't mean that's what they want. What they want is to stop having this happen. That's what everybody wants. They want to be safe. But the only solution offered so far has been body-worn cameras. Now, I think it's a talking point to pan to see a thing. I was told to say that. I don't know about anybody else. I was giving that in the talking point sheet a couple of weeks ago but I'm just not going to use the word because what I think is that what's happening is somebody trying to market body-worn cameras to me. Right? By telling me that we're going to do some other things. We're going to do other things too. But first, we're going to give $200 million to the police to roll out some cameras that they can put on their clothes. That's the first thing we're going to do. Then after that, then we'll do some other things. Maybe we'll do some of the things that the Sentencing Project has been suggesting for decades. Or maybe we'll take some of the Brennan Center's recommendations that they've made for decades. But first, before we do any of that, we're going to give you $200 million to roll out this technology that is unproven and that we don't know works. So I think that that's something to think about. Right? The question of priorities. Why this? Why now? So I'm going to say that. The next thing I'm going to say is this, video. What I do at the Center for Media Justice, what we do is we organize around media and technology issues, communication rights and representation issues affecting communities of color and low income people. Now, the fact is video is powerful, right? I mean, we wouldn't have known any of what happened. All of the incidents that the brother mentioned before, right? That have been caught on video. We wouldn't have known about that. But those were not body-worn cameras. That was bystander video. That was video taken by civilians. That was a video that is in fact at risk of being made illegal in many states. The right to record. So how can it be that at the same time, as states across this country are fighting to eliminate the right to record, body-worn cameras on police officers is the number one recommendation for police accountability? How could that be? There's something that ain't right about that. That don't make sense to me. So I say this. I don't believe that body-worn cameras are the answer. I believe they are inevitable. Both things at the same time. They're going to happen. They're coming. So everyone's positioning themselves around it because it's going to happen. I think that's the right thing to do to position yourself effectively if you know something's going to happen. That's good. Smart. My position? Let's put some civil rights protections on those cameras if they're going to roll out. My position? Also, slow the rollout. Stop rolling out cameras quickly when you don't know how they work. You don't have the evidence to back it up. One or two studies do not make that a driven response. Three, put conditions on 1033 grants across the board, not just on body-worn cameras, but on all militarized technologies that are being put in communities. Because that's what this is. In response to crisis, the police departments are being hyper-militarized. Cameras are a form of militarization. Even if you think of it as a non-lethal technology, like tasers, right? There's a million things like drones. All of this is non-lethal technology that adds to the tool kit that cops are using. And the last thing I'm going to say in closing is this. Somebody in the meeting was talking about the heavy tool belt that the cops got to wear, that the tool belt is heavy. They carrying a lot of equipment on their body already. And to be honest, all of this equipment, I don't know, has it made them feel safer? Has it reduced? And what has happened as a result? I don't know. I don't have the information. I don't have the data. But I would like some data on what each of these pieces of technology added has done for policing. Has it reduced crime? Has it improved conditions? Has the introduction of tasers reduced police brutality? I have no idea, because you know what? As much as law enforcement would like to collect data on me, they certainly are not prone to giving any data to me. And so I think that we need to look at it from both sides of the coin. And I'm going to close with this. My brother, Devonte from the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, said this a few days ago. He said, you know, as black people, we don't really need cameras to tell us that we're experiencing police brutality. That's not me who needs it. That's you. So what I want to say is this. Cameras are important. Video is important. So let's encourage and ensure that our communities have video in our hands so that they can record our perspective. And that is something I would give behind 100%. Great. Thank you. So I want to actually open it up to the audience and while we're getting that set up, let me just ask. So in some senses, we have a little bit more agreement. We have quite a bit of agreement, though it's coming out in different ways. And one of the questions or one of the issues that has come up with almost all of you is the relationship between surveillance technology, police technology, and community policing. And so one thing that I want to know, in the absence of police cameras, in the absence of this new technology that's being touted as a solution, what community policing initiative has worked successfully in your mind, whether that's a tech related one or otherwise? Well, I'll gladly start. I think sometimes we are quick to define an issue as an overall failure, that there are more than 18,000 police departments in the country, that I named five incidents that were on video, that when you take the constant looping of videos over and over and over and over again, the impression is that this happens. And again, when I say this, I'm talking about the situation where individuals are killed by police officers. Police brutality occurs, that if you simply take the 18,000 police department and have one per agency, that's a lot. But does that make the overall field of policing bad? Community policing, for the most part, has worked. That with regard to our failures, we have a long way to go, especially in some communities, to overcome those failures. I wanted, or I started to show a video, and there's a viral video going around, it was put on the web a couple of days ago, and it basically takes two people in Oregon that is an open carry state, and there's a white individual and a black individual, both with AK-47s on their back. The video shows that when the white individual is standing on a corner, the police officer does what he does legally, gets out the car and says, hey, sir, how you doing? Is there a reason you're out here with an AK-47? And he says, it's none of your business. Do you have ID? No, I'm not going to give it to you. And there was no confrontation. Not that that was the necessarily white response, but that was the response that was given in that community. And this was a test case. Black individual walked down the street, open carry. Law says you can carry it. The police pull over, pull out their gun, makes him lay on the ground. His wife is behind him. She says, I'm video, you get on the ground too. She's put on the ground, six scout cars, pull up later, canine officer, everybody comes out, he's searched, he's padded down, and then he's pulled to the side. Of course, some people will say, oh, you know, it's not necessarily apples and apples because it wasn't the same officer to the community that is often treated like that. They see this is what we get every day. So again, the video will show, and in both situations, I would not say in either situation, the officers were wrong. It looks wrong to one community versus the other. And that's the part we have to work on because I don't want officers walking up on a guy with an AK-47 and getting shot. But at the same time, why is it that you were comfortable in this situation and not comfortable in this situation if the difference was color and all the other things were equal? Okay, Justin. I'd like to piggyback on what the Chief just talked about. A few years ago, I conducted an analysis of news reports in New York Times and Lexis Nexus. I looked at all the news reports of police use of tasers. Any report that described police using a taser. And we found something kind of interesting, which was that of all of the news reports that described police using a taser, more than 30% of those reports were situations in which the citizen died. But yet, we know from official data that a very small fraction of 1% of all taser deployments result in death. It wasn't that the reporters were reporting very accurate information about individual cases, but what happened was very atypical police-citizen interactions were being replicated again and again and again. And that echo effect can have a profound impact on the trust that we have in the police. And so I think we need to think about how the technology affects accountability on the street for the individual line officer, but also the perceived accountability, the public perceptions of police accountability, because the reality is any technology can be doing harm and good at the same time. And with this echo effect, and trust me, much of the video footage we're going to see as this technology gets rolled out is not going to be technology that improves perceptions of police legitimacy. One last point, too, by the way, so much of what we're going to capture with this data is going to have to do with the types of policies and the technology that police departments adopt in MESA, what we found was that actually, during half of our evaluation period, they had a mandatory activation policy. And under that mandatory activation policy, about 80% of police-citizen contacts were recorded. The officer turned it on. When their policy changed halfway through the experiment to a discretionary activation policy, activations went down to about 50%. But among the vol-voluntals, those who were required to wear the cameras, activations went down to 41%, with an average activation rate of 39%. So it's much more than just the technology itself. Hanging a camera on a- on an officer is not really what's going to affect the quality of the data. It's really the policies and the technology we use to shape the use of the technology itself. I mean, I think my colleagues on the panel know more about the quality of community policing than I do. So I can't really speak that well to that. What I can say is this, community policing, from both my study and my conversations with both officers and academics and community members, is about relationships. Cameras are about automation. And so I think that those are opposing things. You feel me? Like, you can't both automate decision-making and build relationships at the same. Like, there's a contradiction there. And I don't think there's a contradiction that can be resolved. Like, you have to do one or the other. You either automate decision-making or you personalize decision-making. You give a distraction. I think the other piece here is that community policing, you know, when communities get to define because I like what the sister said about if communities want the cameras, well, then the community should have the cameras, right? If, in fact, that's one of many options and solutions that are being offered. In fact, right now, I feel like it's the only solution that's being put on the table. So that's what I don't like about it. But I think community policing needs to be community-defined policing, right? Not law, not policing that's defined by law enforcement agencies as to what what constitutes effective community policing, but that communities get to define the standard for what's effective about it, right? And if it works or if it doesn't work. So I think relationships are effective. I think communities defining the standards for policing are effective. And I think also, you know, there's a lot of emphasis on training. And I think to be real, you know, and people keep bringing up this question of the media. And I just want to say that from black police officers union, who I've spoken to many times, to all the black people that I was incarcerated with, like black people experience the same things all over this country. It has nothing to do with anything being on loop. That's my experience, right? We experience the same things, no matter if we in Florida or we in Louisiana, we in Brooklyn or we in Nevada. It don't matter where you at. The same experience is happening. And it don't matter if you rich, you live in a nice neighborhood, you're driving a Porsche or you poor, you're living in the hood. Everybody including off-duty police officers have been stopped, have been first, have been attacked by other police officers. So I guess my point is this is a systemic problem that's not going to be fixed by a program here or a program there. It requires deep solutions that engage officers and community members who are community, officers are community members. You know what I'm saying? I have many family members who are police officers. So I think that we have to really start thinking about this very differently and not really engaging in pie-in-the-sky solutions. I just want to piggyback on one thing my colleague just said. When your original question was what is, besides the cameras, what is it from community policing that we think has been effective, I'm concerned that the relationships that have been a huge part of community policing may be compromised as a result of using these cameras. Having officers actually on the streets, in the communities, walking the beat, knowing people in the neighborhoods makes a huge, huge difference. You know, I remember this last summer when I saw the film Jersey Boys and there was a scene when the Frankie Valley character had broken into a church. He and some of his friends, because of the acoustics and they wanted to play the church organ in order to really bring out his voice. And a police officer came in and they all immediately thought we're in trouble. But the first thing that police officer said was, hey, Frankie, in 11 o'clock curfew, he knew Frankie. He was able to say to him, I know you, I know your parents, I know where you live, I'm not going to arrest you, Frankie. Go home because it's past curfew. That's the stuff that was so important about community policing at its heart. And certainly the American population has doubled, tripled since the 1950s, 1960s. But again, at its core, people knowing their officers, the officers knowing you, knowing where you live, knowing your parents, those things make a difference. That's when the human aspect of policing can become an important part of policing. When people can use common sense and people can use their good knowledge about just how you treat people and how you want people to treat you, when those are what drives the decision making, we see a difference in the outcomes. And that's one of the things that I'm concerned may be lost when we have a mechanism like cameras put in place that can possibly be a barrier between the human contact and how that mechanism is going to be used. Great. Shall we open it up to questions? Hello. My name is Darby Hickey. I used to work here at the Open Technology Institute and I now work for DC Council Member David Grosso as Cita just alluded to. We've been discussing these very issues in the council this past couple months. And we were supportive of the slowdown of the rollout of the body-worn cameras program in part because we felt a little bit frustrated that the pilot that our police department had done really seemed to focus only on which hardware to use rather on exploring basically any of these issues that you all have brought up. And so it certainly is my hope that with this slowdown we will have the opportunity for the government and for the council, for the mayor, for the police chief and the officers to explore some of these issues. And I wonder if you all could give maybe just one thought on if there is one thing that we could ask them to... One question we could say to the Metropolitan Police Department, you need to study this in the next six, twelve months of this rollout to get at some of the different issues that you all have brought up. What would that be? Because we are, as was probably pointed out, we are in the position to ask these questions. And I feel like so much of this amazing conversation has just really not been part of the process, unfortunately, although we did have an amazing hearing where some of these issues were brought up. So what would you put to the MPD that we need, or ask the council to ask, that we need to figure out as we have a slower rollout of body-worn cameras? Okay, I can go ahead. Okay, I'm not saying this to circumvent the question, but I think you've got to go to the community. I think you need to ask the community members how they feel about the rollout of body-worn cameras, because I think that public safety is this kind of apolitical concept in a beautiful way. Obviously, everybody wants to be safe in their community, but that means something very different to different people. For some people, the police protect them, and for some people, they feel like the police hurt them. And so I need to think about the exact question that that would be, but I think that community members need to be at the table in thinking about the rollout of the body-worn cameras. I think that one of the things that was... Here are some of the things that came up for me. One is, like, who's going to pay for all the data? Where's that going? Who's going to pay for the storage? Yeah, and what are some of the rules of evidence going to be? Like, how are we going to treat the video in terms of evidence? And some of the stuff is stuff that can be answered at that level, some of it can't be. But I think these are all things to consider before you take on such a program. I think cost is a big one. I think some of the other things to consider are... I don't like talking about it in terms of civil liberties and privacy protections, because people think about civil liberties as civil luxuries. Only people with privilege get to have them. But I do think, will the body cameras increase agency in communities, or will it decrease agency in communities? I think that's a question. Because when we focus on safety as the only issue, what we lose is, first of all, safety is fear, right? And what we know from communications research is that anytime you tap into that amygdala, anytime you tap into that fear, you know, part of that brain, you can't make reasonable decisions, right? So if you're trying to make policy decisions based on a sense of fear, you can't make a good one. You have to make it with other parts of the brain intact, right? And so I think, you know, coming up, thinking about this question of agency is a good one, a good way to deal with it. I think that's all. Well, one of the questions I would have, and I don't know if you know one of my colleagues from the Brennan Center actually testified that day, my colleague Rachel Levinson-Waldman from our Liberty and National Security program. Well, one of the big concerns that we have is that of reciprocity. If the information that is collected by body-worn cameras is information collected by body-worn cameras owned by the police department, whom else has access to that data? You know, as we talked about, you know, some people feel like it's there to protect the community, others feel like that data is going to be used against the community. So finding out and talking about who has dominion over that data I think is an important question. Will community members get to FOIA that information? Will they get to access it themselves? To say, we want to look at it, we want to evaluate it, and we want to determine how it is used, or will it be something that is simply under the dominion and control of the police department? That's a hugely important question. I'll add one more that came up. It's about, you know, auditing the data. This question about, you know, right now, we're talking, we don't have, we don't deal with the level of data that body-worn cameras will generate. We don't have any experience with that as a society. But putting cameras on public servants will in fact generate, like, I don't even, I can't even, can we even estimate, like millions, billions of gigabytes of data. You know, I don't know, right? But how do we, not so the question is not just about storage, it's not just about money, but also how do you manage that much data? You know what I mean? Like, how do you audit it? How do you know what you have? You know, and if you don't do it properly, what liability does that leave for you as a police department? You know, so I think there's so many questions. I don't even think we know all the questions. That's part of the problem. We in beta mode right now. You know what I mean? I just think that we need to treat it like we in beta mode. We in pilot mode. Everything is in pilot mode. We can't be rolling stuff out like it's not in pilot. You know what I mean? Because it's not. Justin? Yeah. I agree that this back end of video evidence and the flood of video evidence that we're going to be experiencing, I don't know in terms of gigabytes because I'm not a technology guy, but I know in terms of videos in Mesa, the 50 officers who wore this device over a year evaluation period accumulated 30,000 videos. And if it was all 700 officers in Mesa, that translates to 420,000 videos. And if you translate that to 40 million officers in New York, it's about 24 million videos. So it's a massive amount of data that we're talking about. Prosecutors' offices need to be able to deal with that data. In that data immediately. Right now Mesa is very efficient. They have evidence.com is integrated in with their RMS system and they upload the video on the street and tag it right there. It's available, but not all large city agencies have old technology and it's going to take a long time for them to catch up and to create that communication with prosecutors and the courts. And so this is not going to be an overnight thing. Hanging a camera on an officer is part of it. It's the overall system. And then also the interpretation of video evidence. This is something that I'm interested in right now. We're in the process of looking at micro cues. And specific nuances of behavior. And how people from different racial, class, organizational backgrounds view video evidence. And also minor kind of nuanced behaviors. What are the situations? What are the types of police citizen transactions where juries are going to disagree about what's going on? I think it's not enough to say people interpret the video differently. Because we can take from cognitive frames and we can take attribution theory and we can kind of build a foundation to get a systematic analysis. So, okay, where do people interpret social cues differently? What specific types of social interactions are people going to disagree about? What types of video are going to polarize communities? Can I add one last thing? Just to, I think you got to also- Very quickly. Yeah, very quickly. You just got to also enter in with what kind of civil rights protections you're going to have at the, on the outset. You feel me? You got to do that on the outset. Chief Jordan. I didn't want to leave you out, of course. Well, and here's the thing, and I want to take, because I think everything that was said is very true. But I want to take a different approach because somebody talked earlier, I think with Malik, about the belts that police officers wear. And, you know, the general premise of policing is to first be safe, and second is to make people safe. That's the general premise. Now, again, you talked about we have videos in the car. We have now videos on the body. We got videos on buildings. That we got citizens videos. We're catching a lot of stuff on video. So the problem that I have, and again, the one thing I just disagree on, because earlier was said that the community needs to define the policing. Well, this is where we are because the community takes a profession that's been in place for hundreds of years. And I mean, I clearly couldn't tomorrow just turn around and tell a lawyer everything about her profession. But that's one of the general premises of community policing, that someone who has very little interaction with the police, very little knowledge with the police, and are only responding as a result of the last situation to say, this is the answer. And now we have to move on it. And, you know, so I started earlier, and I think my colleague said, if that's what the citizens want, that's what they get. And as a police, what we say is, as long as you're willing to pay for it, fine, we'll take it. Video in the car, video on our belt, video on our chest, fine. Does it change how we operate that because when you talk about the 420 million bits of video that you got to pay for, can't pay for more training, can't pay for more simulation, can't pay for more tactics, there's no new pot of money. The 200 million dollars that's rolled out for video cameras came out of a pot that was previously going somewhere else. So I just get concerned that we've spent the last 30 years of community policing trying to say, hey, what do you want? What do you want? What do you want? And every time something new comes up, because again, I'll end with this, because every time something new comes up, it makes somebody a fortune. So now that we're talking about video cameras, that there are a lot of companies out there, and they'll sell you a camera for whatever amount of money. But just like your cell phone, it ain't the cell phone, it's the data. So this is going to cost a lot of money. As a community, you've got to determine what are you willing to pay for. From a law enforcement professional, if it's going to help me do my job better, if it's going to help me manage my troops better, easily I'll support it. But again, every time you give me something, you're taking something off my plate. So when you say what else we're talking about, right now, this is the dominant conversation. It's a very expensive conversation. So as a community, the question is, what are you willing to pay for? I saw a hand for another question here in the front. I had a couple of questions, actually. One, I was curious on how many places, how many places have done these controlled trials where researchers are looking at police that are wearing cameras and not wearing cameras? And if so, are there places that have looked at that research and then opted not to implement the body-worn cameras? And then just quickly, if they're, you know, from different cities that have implemented these programs, are there cities that have better practices than others? And how do you sort of separate those? Yeah, there's, as of now, there's a very small number of controlled trials. But there are a number of agencies that are starting to pilot the technology with a small number of officers. One of the first agencies to do work in this area was Rialto, California, under the leadership of Anthony Ferrar. And they collect a lot of data on use of force, citizen complaints, a number of different things. They did a good job considering that they were kind of blazing the trail, so to speak, but it was a small agency and what you find with the data for one agency might not be applicable to another agency because the community might be different, the technology they adopt might be different, and the policies they implement might be different. So all of these things will impact quality of the data as well as outcome measures. Phoenix currently is being, their camera program is being evaluated with a controlled trial through a smart policing initiative. Mesa, Cincinnati is doing some work with cameras. So we're really talking about a small number of agencies right now, but that's going to change soon. But again, I agree with you. One or two or three studies does not make evidence-based policy. Evidence-based policy is based on a lot of research where we can kind of try to connect the dots and then to answer your second question. You know, there's tremendous variability in the technology that is being adopted and how they're using it on the street. So it's hard to say right now. There's inconsistency. We had a question in the front. Man with an orange tie. Hi there. I have a two-part question. So first of all, you made a statement before where you were talking about the difference between like advocacy video, someone like a private citizen taking a video and capturing an event that occurs and body cams. But isn't body cams more of a preventative measure as opposed to the advocacy of someone actually capturing that? The wouldn't, I don't remember the exact name of the example, but isn't this dialogue about preventative measures at the cost of surveillance and opening up that dialogue, but also helping prevent violence like that? Wouldn't the very fact that the police has the body cam probably stop that behavior? What's the difference that you see there? If you need me to clarify. And then also, I guess I can ask the question, the other one after. Oh cool. And then the other one would be just in terms of opening body cameras up to or body camera video and the data up to the judicial system. There's not that much precedent to individual body cameras as it's a pilot project and it's quite a new technology. How big and how big of a scope do you think that it could have on our overall judicial system? Is there going to be a whole other type of law attached to body cam surveillance? How many huge landmark cases do you think we're going to start to see because of this? Could this, on CSI watching TV in 20 years, is it going to be, did you check the body camera? And then it's like preliminary body camera court. Have you guys thought about that? Great, sorry. To the first question, I think somebody else could probably answer the second question better. To the first question, I think the point is this. If the underlying assumption is that by being watched, you think that police officers will behave better, I have not experienced that. My experience is that, I mean, just the other day, a video came out where a police officer in New York was illegally detaining two teenage girls and a woman came along and said, no, you can't detain them. Like, have they done something illegal? And no, one girl had been fresh. She had said something rude. And so the police officer decided to detain her and her friend. And the woman said, you know what, take his badge number, something like that, get his name. So she tried to get his name and he started to grab her and put her up against a car and basically tried to begin arresting her, even though she had not committed any particular crime. The community basically got him. But now this is all on video, right? And he knew he was being video. His partner, you can see in the video is like, like, chill, you know? But you can, everyone knew that a video camera was running, but it didn't change his behavior at the time. And so I can't speak to the dynamics that are at work. What I can say is that I don't, I think that there have been one to two studies that have demonstrated a drop in stop and frisk. I think, did you talk about that? Or did, yeah, right? But you also said that it increased officer initiated contact. So we just don't know. And that's the point. I think we just don't know, you know? And I think that the point that was just made about, you know, this is a very expensive leap of faith. I'm not willing to do that. Well, let me say some of the things we do know. And again, I think that's a good example that was just given. That for the most part, we have to ask ourselves, do we want a society where the public gets to make the decision on the street what's a good arrest and a bad arrest? That you hear African American mothers primarily talk about how they have to train their sons of how to respond to the police. Don't do this. Don't, because I offered earlier the cases I talked about to include the Walter Scott situation that I would offer that, again, all those cases, the officer thought, felt, and believed that they were operating within the law. And again, in most cases, grand juries agree. And like I said, it's yet to be seen. You may even see a jury trial agree that Walter Scott's was consistent with Tennessee versus Garner and the fleeing felon rule. The point that conversation we're having at the executive level now is not whether it's legal, but whether it's necessary. Because the thing is, the law is very broad. As my colleague talked about in the New York situation, the public is saying they didn't commit a crime. Well, I would, again, offer that if you look at the law on resisting arrest or interfering with a police investigation, that there was a crime committed, a crime that would be prosecuted, not that it necessarily should be, because that's a new question. And the public is, what do you want from your police? There used to be a time where we used to talk about zero tolerance. But what happened in zero tolerance was people who didn't intend to get arrested was also getting arrested. The one of the things that's around the country is speed cameras and red light cameras. There are cities going away from red light cameras and speed cameras because people who didn't intend for the law to impact them is impacting them. So the councils and tribunals are saying, hey, let's change this law. I didn't mean it for me. I meant it for them. So we really have to be careful, because there are communities that need the police. Their communities are crime-ridden, homicides, robberies, rapes are occurring every day. And they welcome police presence. Even the heavy-handed presence. What they don't welcome is misconduct. That's the part we got to focus on. And can body cameras do something about that? It can hold you accountable if the video supports the complaint or things like that. Is it going to make somebody not do something if they think their life is in jeopardy? No. Because a police saying, I'd rather be judged by 12, than carry by six. I just wanted to address a second question. I guess as the lawyer up here, roles goes to me. I do think that we will see an outgrowth of new jurisprudence around this issue. But we also have to remember, this is not completely new. There are foundational issues that are already covered within our legal doctrines. We already have laws that govern use of recordings, dash cam recordings, how we use photos. So all of those laws that govern that kind of evidence is really going to serve as the foundation for how we deal with data that is collected through body cams. So no one has to start from scratch. It will just be an expansion of those laws. So I think we will see new laws on the books and new jurisprudential findings. But we do have a basis for dealing with that kind of evidence already. We've always, within our legal system, have dealt with some kinds of recordings of some kind, whether they be photos, dash cams, or things of that nature, or tape recordings, which sounds really antiquated now as I talk about it. But we've always had those things. So we do have a basis in the law for how to handle that kind of evidence. So unfortunately, we're out of time. I think it's a good place to end thinking about the past and how that informs the future. Please join me in thanking our panelists.