body cams don’t help because white cops don’t care and still have impunity

A new report confirming what we could have guessed found that wearing body cams has absolutely no effect on police officer’s conduct. “We found essentially that we could not detect any statistically significant effect of the body-worn cameras,”
says Anita Ravishankar, a researcher with the Metropolitan Police Department and a group in the city government called the Lab @ DC.

For many, the idea of your job performance being monitored 24/7 would be a super stressful situation—regardless of how good they are at their job. For fear of messing up, appearing unskilled, and generally looking bad in front of the boss. But cops don’t seem to carry that same fear even when—as we’re so often reminded—their jobs involve potential danger and delicate situations that require finesse. Even when there’s a global eye watching the conduct of police officers who historically and systematically violate the human rights of citizens, the study revealed that officers make little attempt to improve their performance when they’re being recorded.

Maybe this is because “were doing the right thing in the first place,”
said Chief of Police Peter Newsham.

That’s only possible if you consider ongoing institutional brutality to be the “right” thing, I suppose.