This explains too much, since there have been other depts that did see a likely effect (like Rialto). I found this part more compelling:
> Finally, cameras may have had less impact in Washington, D.C., because the police department there has already had to confront excessive-force problems. After a devastating 1998 Washington Post series revealed that the city’s police department had shot and killed more people per resident in the 1990s than any other police force in a large American city, the Department of Justice entered into a memorandum of agreement with D.C. to reform its policing.
I do think people overstate the extent to which police violence in the US is a problem of evil cops committing wanton abuse as opposed to deeper systemic issues, but I think it's possible that bodycams end up being a useful piece of that puzzle.
It's blindingly obvious (to me) that the cops are just disabling the cameras before doing controversial things. I find it extremely surprising that nobody else seems to believe this theory.
As another commented pointed out downthread, you can hear them on accidentally-recorded video saying things like "We're still red here! Be careful!" when planting evidence/stealing stuff/whatever.
Disclaimer: I think both street protesters/identity politics activists and the police are basically run by assholes.
It'd be trivial to find evidence of that in the data. They said that the number of use of force incidents was the same in the camera and non-camera groups. If the cops were disabling their cameras in anticipation of these events, these events would not show up in their camera recordings.
It's not trivial to find that in the data. The cops are not required to keep the camera on all the time, or at least there is no consequence not doing so. They got the number from "administrative data", basically just police reports and civilian complaints, etc. Nothing related to the camera data at all.
Yes, but that'd show up in the data. If there were complaints against them, and those happened to coincide with the cameras being off, that's a very easy thing to detect in the data.
As far as I can tell, there is no analysis of the video data mentioned in this article. They're only comparing numbers of complaints with and without cameras.
I personally know of two cops that blatantly admit that they do this as well. Now, I'm just a single-data point, but I wonder if there is any data as to how many times videos are "redacted" or "lost".
> Finally, cameras may have had less impact in Washington, D.C., because the police department there has already had to confront excessive-force problems. After a devastating 1998 Washington Post series revealed that the city’s police department had shot and killed more people per resident in the 1990s than any other police force in a large American city, the Department of Justice entered into a memorandum of agreement with D.C. to reform its policing.
I do think people overstate the extent to which police violence in the US is a problem of evil cops committing wanton abuse as opposed to deeper systemic issues, but I think it's possible that bodycams end up being a useful piece of that puzzle.