The Failed Promise of Police Body Cameras

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2024

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode contains strong language and audio excerpts of violence. About a decade ago, police departments across the United States began equipping their officers with body cameras. The technology was meant to serve as a window into potential police misconduct, but that transparency has often remained elusive. Eric Umansky, an editor at large at ProPublica, explains why body cameras haven’t been the fix that many hoped they would be.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is the Daily.
0:07.0	A decade ago,
0:15.0	ago police departments across the country began requiring officers to wear body cameras.
0:21.0	It was the single biggest change to come out of the police reform movement, a piece of technology that promised accountability in policing.
0:30.0	Today, The Times magazine and the news organization ProPublica,
0:35.0	investigate what happened with that reform and why it has not lived up to its promise.
0:41.0	I spoke with ProPublica's Eric Kimenski.
0:44.0	It's Monday, January 29th. So Eric most of us have gotten pretty used to the idea that police officers
0:59.7	wear body cameras on the job right it's it's part of the uniform at this point, essentially.
1:04.5	And it was one of the big things
1:05.9	to come out of the police reform movement
1:08.2	over the last decade.
1:09.5	An activist had a lot of hope for these things.
1:12.4	You are an investigative reporter and you have been looking
1:16.0	into body cameras and the fate of body cameras as a reform. When did you start becoming curious about them?
1:23.0	So as in early 2023, January, actually, there was a particularly horrific police killing in Memphis.
1:32.0	It was a young man named Tyree Nichols and police had
1:37.1	beaten him to death and there was footage of it and the footage came out and I was reading about it and there was
1:45.3	this one sentence in the story and the sentence in the story said that the
1:50.3	officers were beating him with their body-worn cameras on,
1:56.4	and they knew that their cameras were on.
1:59.2	And it just stopped me.
	...

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