Re: <nettime> what exactly is breaking?

[Frédéric Neyrat <fneyrat@gmail.com>]

concerning filming the police, I just read:

"Why filming police violence has done nothing to stop it"
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/03/1002587/sousveillance-george-floyd-police-body-cams/

excerpts:

A large study in 2017 by the Washington, DC, mayor’s office assigned more
than a thousand police officers in the District to wear body cameras and
more than a thousand to go camera-free. The researchers hoped to find
evidence that wearing cameras correlated with better policing, less use of
force, and fewer civilian complaints. They found none: the difference in
behavior between the officers who knew they were being watched and the
officers who knew they were not was statistically insignificant. Another
study, which analyzed the results of 10 randomized controlled trials of
body camera use in different nations, was helpfully titled “Wearing body
cameras increases assaults against officers and does not reduce police use
of force.”Reacting to the DC study, some scholars have hoped that if
cameras don’t deter officers from violent behavior, at least the film can
hold them accountable afterwards. There, too, body cameras rarely work the
way we hope. While careful, frame-by-frame analysis of video often shows
that victims of police shootings were unarmed and that officers mistook
innocuous objects for weapons, attorneys for the defense screen the videos
at normal speed to show how tense, fast, and scary confrontations between
police and suspects can be. A 1989 Supreme Court decision means that if
police officers have an “objectively reasonable” fear that their lives or
safety are in danger, they are justified in using deadly force. Videos from
body cameras and bystander cell phones have worked to bolster “reasonable
fear” defense claims as much as they have demonstrated the culpability of
police officers.end of the text

The hope that pervasive cameras by themselves would counterbalance the
systemic racism that leads to the overpolicing of communities of color and
the disproportionate use of force against black men was simply a
techno-utopian fantasy. It was a hope that police violence could be an
information problem like Uber rides or Amazon recommendations, solvable by
increasing the flows of data. But after years of increasingly widespread
bodycam use and ever more pervasive social media, it’s clear that
information can work only when it’s harnessed to power. If there’s one
thing that Americans—particularly people of color in America—have learned
from George Floyd, Philando Castile, and Eric Garner, it’s that individuals
armed with images are largely powerless to make systemic change.
That’s the reason people have taken to the streets in Minneapolis, DC, New
York, and so many other cities. There’s one thing images of police
brutality seem to have the power to do: shock, outrage, and mobilize people
to demand systemic change. That alone is the reason to keep filming.

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On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 1:45 AM Siraj Izhar | publiclife <s-i@publiclife.org>
wrote:

>
> I watched the Cornell West interview at DemocracyNow
> https://www.democracynow.org/2020/6/1/cornel_west_us_moment_of_reckoning
> where he says the failed social experiment that is America is breaking
> apart.
> But more troubled than ever by the Americanising of this or, using Trump
> as a prop, when deaths in police custody over decades at least here in
> the UK are regular.
> The big difference is that everything here is off camera. So never ever
> the question of charges against the police unlike the US.
> The other thing is the conditions of production of the images we see now
> which depend on the law. For example if you look at this video here:
> https://www.instagram.com/tv/CAtVvp3nsFm/?igshid=1nvv3zg61rg8w


<...>



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