Before body cameras, there was your word.
That sounds nostalgic. Coming from an old cop, maybe it even sounds a little self-serving. There was a time when an officer went into court and testified about what he saw, what he heard and what he did. There might be photographs, physical evidence and other witnesses, but there wasn't a little camera attached to his chest recording the encounter.
Your credibility mattered. Your reputation mattered. Your word mattered. Then came body cameras, and it became tempting to see the two eras as opposites. Before cameras, we had to trust police officers. Now we have video, so we don't have to. The camera became an independent witness capable of telling us what "really happened."
Except it isn't quite that simple. What body cameras proved wasn't that we were liars. They proved that we were human beings.
I spent my entire police career without a body camera. When something happened, I observed it, reacted to it and later wrote down what I remembered. I tried to be accurate and complete. If I testified months or sometimes years later, I refreshed my memory from the report I had written shortly after the incident. But no matter how honest I was, I was still working with the equipment nature gave me: two eyes, two ears and a human brain.
Human beings don't record events. We experience them.
Imagine an officer walking into a dark alley. A man suddenly turns toward him with something in his hand. The officer sees the shape, the movement and the way the object is being held, and he believes he is looking at a handgun. Later, the body-camera recording is enlarged. Someone freezes the image and advances it frame by frame. At precisely the right moment, with the benefit of a computer screen and unlimited time, it becomes apparent that the object wasn't a gun. It was a remote control.
Does that mean the officer lied when he said he saw a gun? No. It means the camera recorded a remote control while the officer perceived a gun. Those are not necessarily mutually exclusive facts.
The distinction matters because the officer in that alley doesn't get freeze-frame. He doesn't get rewind. He doesn't get to enlarge the image or watch the encounter repeatedly from the comfort of an office. Most importantly, he doesn't know what happens next. The person reviewing the video usually does, and that knowledge inevitably changes the way the event is viewed.
That doesn't make the camera wrong. In fact, that's precisely why body cameras are so valuable. They capture things an officer misses. They preserve words that people remember differently. They establish sequences that may become confused during a stressful event and record actions outside an officer's immediate focus. Sometimes they prove an officer's recollection was mistaken, and sometimes they prove an officer wasn't telling the truth. That matters, too.
But the existence of video shouldn't cause us to confuse inaccurate perception with dishonesty. Memory, perception and truthfulness are related, but they aren't identical.
Police work provides an unusually intense example of this problem because officers routinely make decisions under stress. Attention can narrow. One detail can dominate while something seemingly obvious goes unnoticed. Two officers standing only a few feet apart can experience the same event and later remember portions of it differently without either one lying.
Body cameras didn't create that problem. They exposed it.
For generations, police officers were trained to observe. We were supposed to notice clothing, faces, license plates, weapons, direction of travel and a hundred other things. Good observation was part of the craft, and so was good report writing. An officer's credibility could determine whether an arrest resulted in a conviction and whether a jury believed anything else he had to say. That made your word enormously important. It did not make your perception infallible.
Nor is a camera infallible in quite the way we sometimes imagine. A body camera records from its own position, not from behind the officer's eyes. It has a particular field of view. Its microphone may capture something the officer didn't consciously register. Its lens may record something at the edge of the frame while the officer's attention is fixed somewhere else. Conversely, an officer may see something that never appears clearly on the recording.
The camera has no fear, training or expectations. It doesn't know that a particular movement resembles something an officer has encountered before. It doesn't interpret what it records. The human being, on the other hand, is constantly interpreting what he sees and hears because he has to decide what it means and, sometimes, what to do about it.
That is why I don't think the history of body cameras should be reduced to a transition from "trust the cop" to "trust the video." What changed was that policing acquired another witness, one with remarkable strengths but also limitations. Body cameras have increased accountability, protected citizens from misconduct, protected officers from false accusations and given us a record of things that human beings simply didn't see or didn't remember correctly.
But when the camera and the officer disagree, dishonesty is only one possible explanation. The camera may establish that the object in a man's hand was a remote control, while the officer can truthfully say that in a dark alley, during the fraction of a second in which he had to make a decision, he believed it was a gun. One tells us what the object actually was. The other tells us what a human being perceived when he had to act. Those two things are not mutually exclusive.
Before body cameras, there was our word. The arrival of the camera didn't prove that our word was worthless, and it certainly didn't prove that every discrepancy was a lie. What it proved, perhaps more clearly than anything else, was something we should have understood all along: the police officer behind the badge was still a human being.
The camera didn't prove he was lying. It proved he was human.
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