Thread by @equalityAlec

THREAD. I didn't fully know what to expect when I started digging into over a decade of records, statements, financial data, and other information about police body cameras. I suspected it to be troubling, but what I found shocked even me.

I also examined hundreds of news articles about police body cameras. The result? The public campaign to sell police body cameras as a liberal "reform" is one of the great frauds of modern domestic U.S. propaganda. It carries profound lessons for anyone who cares about democracy.

First, a fact more people should know is that police leaders and prosecutors desperately *wanted* body cameras for years. They had a problem though: cops couldn't get hundreds of millions of $$$ in funding for them. So how did police finally get them?

After the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson ten years ago generated massive public outrage over police violence, police and multi-billion dollar surveillance companies realized they had an opportunity.

They realized that while they'd been unable to get local governments to pay billions for the surveillance bonanza before, now they could partner with "reformers" to pitch body cameras as a *solution* to police violence. Liberal "reformers" were a perfect target/accomplice.

The money started flowing. President Obama called for hundreds of millions in cash from the feds to supplement local and state spending, which liberal leaders and cops championed. The market value of the main companies grew by billions, with exploding yearly sales.

Almost every news article published for the following decade omitted something crucial: police and prosecutors wanted the cameras not because it would make them "accountable" and "transparent" but for *exactly the opposite reasons.*

Police and their industry allies used the news media to focus the public on the supposed need to capture police violence on video. They said police lacked funding for tech that could provide the public with “accountability" and "transparency."

In reality, according to their own statements, they sought the greatest expansion of surveillance infrastructure in modern policing history, and dreamed of lucrative contracts to link the new video with AI facial and voice recognition software and predictive policing algorithms.

For example, they wanted an easy tool that cops could deploy at protests to scan the crowd and know who is there and who is associating with who based on facial recognition. They wanted to be able to share this intelligence about protestors in massive profitable databases.

Cops/prosecutors also wanted them because it's the most powerful new form of evidence: outward looking videos that bureaucrats could create, direct, curate, edit, and control both in terms of what's captured, what's left out, and at which political moment it's publicly released.

Body camera videos are now routinely used in almost every prosecutor office in the U.S. as evidence to get mostly poor people to quickly plead guilty to things like drug possession and trespassing. They are almost never used against police officers.

To the contrary, the videos are often given privately to cops prior to their internal statements about controversial incidents in which they used violence to create and standardize initial police narratives with the goal of reducing potential civil and criminal liability.

The benefits of body cameras to the punishment bureaucracy and big corporations unfolded exactly as police chiefs and corporate sales representatives from the companies discussed the devices over a decade ago when formulating their goals *before* Michael Brown’s killing.

Most profoundly, though, body cameras served a propaganda function. They steer public away from *systemic* questions about the role of armed government agents, why they only enforce some crimes against some people, why they are in certain neighborhoods in the first place, etc

With the explosion of cameras, police killed more and more people each year. Exactly as everyone on the inside knew, cameras didn't make police less violent. A little known fact: the federal government's own review of studies shows body cameras *do not make police less violent*!

For example, each year since George Floyd was killed --captured in a useful angle horrifically on video by a bystander not the police body camera--police have killed more people than they did the year before despite huge new sums spent on body cameras.

Still, after each new killing for years, body cameras are the liberal answer. Outraged over continuing police violence? Give the cops and DAs more money for surveillance technology! In this way, cops use their own violence to get even more cash to increase their own repression.

There are so many fascinating details in this story. You can read my full article here explaining this entire process in detail in the Yale Journal of Law & Liberation: campuspress.yale.edu/yjll/files/202…

UPDATE: I've been tracking hundreds of coordinated far-right replies and quote-tweets. It's interesting for a few reasons. First, many of them assert ludicrous falsities about basic facts. Second, many fundamentally misunderstand the arguments. But most important:

The scope and silliness of the right-wing replies all helps make one of the core points: liberals who supported body cameras as "reform" should pay attention to who is defending this lucrative, authoritarian tech and the hateful nonsense they are spewing.