![]() The giant missed opportunity is failing to use this valuable data for continuing education for the officers who generate all this content. But these pain-in-the backside shutterbugs could be an asset. The watcher “leaned out the window of his truck and shouted: ‘Do the department a favor and eat one of your service rounds!’), the right of these folks not to have their speech, texts, and images suppressed or abridged by the government is enshrined in the First Amendment. Sullivan.Įven if today’s DIY documentarians can be hard to take (The Post reported on one Arizona watcher encountering at a stoplight an officer with whom the man had had an earlier beef. Indeed, most of today’s officers would neither recognize nor work for the Boston Police Department captured in an early iteration of cop watching, the 1961 CBS News expose of corruption in the department, entitled “Biography of a Bookie Joint.” Some of the first anti-corruption reforms in the department came in response to this documentary, including the eventual ouster of see-no-evil Police Commissioner Leo J. Accountability has improved systems across the board. ![]() The policing reforms of the past 65 years, driven by Supreme Court rulings and social upheaval, have in almost all cases resulted in more secure individual rights, greater police effectiveness and greater officer safety. The public has a right to demand, and police have the obligation to embrace, accountability.Īccountability and transparency are also key ingredients in the formula for continuous improvement in individual judgment and institutional policy making. So, when police are recorded abusing the terms of that authority it is, as it should be, hot stuff. We authorize the police and only the police, in lawful circumstances, to take away our liberty and use force, indeed deadly force, against us. ![]() The police role in society is by its nature controversial and consequential. The market for all this video recording of the police profession seems to be formed from a combination of our fascination with police action and the public demand for greater transparency and accountability. So, officers may as well smile they will be perpetually on not-so-candid cameras. Some became watchers from mistrust of the police, some for the money, and some because they were bored.Įarlier this year, the Washington Post reported on cop watchers, including Sean Paul Reyes, “arguably YouTube’s most popular auditor.” Reyes, the paper said, “turned on his camera at Suffolk County, N.Y., police headquarters for the first time in 2021, bored and frustrated, he said, after being furloughed from his job as a logistics director for a warehouse company.” However watchers got there, they are staying. Many have their own channels on YouTube and other platforms and make a living from ads and subscribers. They listen to scanners and head out to record police performance on the street. While everyone, it seems, will capture a police incident at some point, a dedicated group of “cop watchers” (who prefer the more grandiose handle of “first amendment auditors”) has grown up around the country. Of course, some citizens recording police behavior have performed an invaluable service, with perhaps no clearer example of this than the young Minneapolis woman whose phone captured the brutal killing of George Floyd in 2020. At the moment, the only uses of these records of policing seem to be as evidence in disciplinary proceedings, evidence in civil and criminal cases, and as profitable images for news media of all descriptions, amateur and professional. People making digital recordings of everything is a characteristic of American culture, across ethnic, racial and gender lines. With 310 million Americans estimated to use phones with cameras, this blizzard of bits and pixels will only grow. Being recorded has become a regular aspect of the daily and nightly tour of duty images of police encounters with the public are as ubiquitous across the web as images of kittens and last night’s restaurant meal. With the prevalence of security cameras, drones, body and dash cameras and individual smart phones, our police officers probably should qualify for the NIL (Name, Image and Likeness) compensation that college athletes receive. ![]() The images and words captured from these encounters could, as part of a larger reform, help to improve police practice. CAN POLICE TURN a perceived nuisance into an opportunity? Can they benefit from the efforts of smartphone-wielding “cop watchers” who dog them at crime and emergency scenes? The answer is yes.
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