Do Police Body Cameras Back the Badge?

Thanks to body cameras, the small, typically collar-mounted recorders the department rolled out as standard issue in late 2016, the normal back-and-forth of the judicial process will be pre-empted, in a way. The whole incident was captured on grainy video that could take the jury to the decisive moment. What would an aggressive Scott look like to jurors? Defense attorneys are more accustomed to considering this type of question in the present tense as their clients sit by their side in a courtroom.

For good reason, body cameras have been touted as a means for increasing police accountability, but recent cases and research have shown that their net effect may be to empower cops by providing a record more believable than their own word. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it just changes the playing field. For example, the death of veteran MPD Officer Michael Michalski was captured on his own body cam and others in July when he and a group of officers followed a wanted suspect to a house on the North Side.

Afterward, officers arrested the alleged shooter, Jonathan Copeland Jr., and drove him to a hospital to be checked out, with their cameras still running. He tells one of them, referring to his gun, “I will take it off your waist and put one in the back of your head, too” – a self-incriminating statement that makes it that much harder for Copeland’s defense to provoke reasonable doubt. While a homicide trial is scheduled for February, the recording builds a stronger case that could make a plea deal more attractive.

“Body cameras are just a tool,” Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm said during the trial of MPD Officer Dominique Heaggan-Brown, accused of murdering 23-year-old Sylville Smith. It’s a tool that’s easily slanted, in certain cases, to back up an officer’s version of what happened. In cases of blurry or inconclusive camera footage, a law enforcement expert is sometimes called to parse out what the precious frames mean.

In Heaggan-Brown’s case, the assessment by force instructor Robert Willis, an active officer himself, cleared Heaggan-Brown of wrongdoing. At one point in the video, after the first of two shots, Smith is seen lying on the ground and moving his arms. As the left hand moves down to his waist, Willis became concerned. “This is bad,” he said.

As much as anything, that stray left hand captured on video was used to justify the killing of Smith. The alternative was Heaggan-Brown or his partner testifying, “His left hand moved,” but given how high-profile the case had become – and given the sex crimes charged against the former – a video was much harder to impeach. To the untrained eye, it was a shaky jumble, but with the right expert, it could be made to tell a story.

A study by the Urban Institute of MPD’s body camera program during its initial rollout found that it appeared to have had no significant effect on officers’ use of force, arrests or traffic stops. Subject stops – essentially a traffic stop without a vehicle – went down, however, along with citizen complaints, but it’s not clear if that’s from better behavior. According to Daniel Lawrence, one of the study’s authors, officers said the existence of body camera footage may discourage some people from filing complaints who might have otherwise done so. Typically, the person would enter a police station, learn of the video’s existence from an officer, and also learn, among other things, that filing a false complaint is a crime.

This isn’t the only study to find that body cameras have a negligible effect on police behavior, including a major study in Washington, D.C., released in 2017. Many cities are now evaluating their programs in the wake of a federal grant that hastened rollout in Milwaukee and elsewhere after the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri.

With incidents involving police captured on grainy video, a jury can be taken right to the decisive moment, in some ways pre-empting the normal back-and-forth of the judicial process.