Ex Cop: Everyone Behaves Better When They’re on Video

Darren Wilson, the police officer who fatally shot teenager
Michael Brown, announced his
resignation following threats against him and the Ferguson
police department.  

Conflicting accounts and lack of evidence makes night of August
9, 2014 difficult to understand. 

Bringing clarity to police incidents like theses has
become former Seattle officer Steve Ward’s life work, creating
cost effective wearable body cameras for officers.

“Ex Cop: Everyone Behaves Better When They’re on Video,”
produced by Paul Detrick and Will Neff. About 5:45
minutes. 

Original release date was March 25, 2014, original text
below. 

Civilians shoot and upload police encounters to the Internet
everyday using tiny cameras on their cell phones and other mobile
devices. In fact it may be easier than ever to keep the police
accountable with the technology we all carry around in our pockets.
But police are looking to keep civilians accountable too by wearing
cameras of their own. Reason TV sat down with former Seattle Police
officer Steve Ward, who left the force to start Vievu, a company
that makes body cameras for police officers.

“Everyone behaves better when they’re on video,” says Ward. “I
realized that dash cams only capture about five percent of what a
cop does. And I wanted to catch 100 percent of what a cop
does.”

The cameras are small, light, and clip to the clothing of a
police officer’s uniform. They turn on with a large switch on the
front of the camera and have a green circle that surrounds the lens
so that civilians know that the camera is recording.

But once the data is recorded, what stops an officer from
editing or manipulating the video? Ward says his cameras contain
software that stops officers from doing anything nefarious with it,
“Our software platform stops officers from altering, deleting,
copying, editing, uploading to YouTube, any of the videos that the
cops take.”

While body cameras present the strong benefit of keeping police
accountable, they also present a risk of invading civilians’
privacy. But in a
policy brief from October 2013, the American Civil Liberties
Union argued that depending on how the body cameras were
implemented, the privacy concerns could be dealt with.

Although we generally take a dim view of the proliferation of
surveillance cameras in American life, police on-body cameras are
different because of their potential to serve as a check against
the abuse of power by police officers. Historically, there was no
documentary evidence of most encounters between police officers and
the public, and due to the volatile nature of those encounters,
this often resulted in radically divergent accounts of incidents.
Cameras have the potential to be a win-win, helping protect the
public against police misconduct, and at the same time helping
protect police against false accusations of abuse.

In 2013, The
New York Times reported that the city of Rialto, Calif.,
was able to cut down on complaints against officers by 88 percent
over the previous year when it gave its officers body cameras.
 Use of force by officers fell by almost 60 percent.

Approximately 5:42.

Produced by Paul Detrick. Edited by Detrick and William Neff.
Shot by Alex Manning.

View this article.