On Wednesday, officials in Hamilton County, Ohio released body-camera footage showing the shooting death of a 43-year-old unarmed black man, Samuel Dubose. Dubose had been pulled over by a white University of Cincinnati police officer, Ray Tensing, on July 19, for driving without a front license plate.
The video was released at a news conference during which Hamilton County prosecutor Joseph Deters announced that a grand jury had returned an indictment against Tensing, on charges of murder and voluntary manslaughter. "This is without question a murder," Deters said. "He didn’t do anything violent towards the officer... And [Tensing] pulled out his gun and intentionally shot him in the head." Deters also called it: "a senseless, asinine shooting."
There were 10 days between the killing and the announcement of the indictment and the release of the video. In that time, Dubose’s family and supporters disputed the police account and demanded to see Tensing’s body-camera video, and protesters and the media joined in on the calls. City officials said they planned to release the video once the investigation was complete. In that time, the city’s police chief only said of the unreleased footage: “The video is not good.”
Tensing previously said he had been “dragged” by Dubose’s vehicle, the same description another university officer, Eric Weibel, who arrived shortly after the shooting, wrote in an incident report. A third officer, Weibel wrote, also said he saw Tensing being dragged. But after its release, analysis of the 28-minute-or-so video showed the officer was not dragged during the encounter. Tensing falls back after the shot, and the vehicle rolls forward.
Over the past several months, civil rights leaders and activists have called for the adoption of body cameras for law enforcement officers to promote transparency and increase public trust. After the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown last year in Ferguson, Missouri, President Obama proposed a $75 million program to help equip agencies with 50,000 police body cameras. In May, the Department of Justice pledged $20 million and announced its plans to launch a pilot program that would expand the use of body cameras worn by police officers. And some body camera pilot programs already undertaken have actually shown a decrease in complaints against police officers and in police use of force. But the wide implementation of body cameras is complex, fraught with privacy concerns and questions over whether or not the content is a matter of public record, not to mention laws that vary in their details from state to state.
Still, the existence of video here---as in the cases of footage of Eric Garner and Walter Scott and Sandra Bland---has proven crucial in assessing what events actually transpired. The other vital piece, arguably, is the fact that the public had access to these videos at all, and could loudly protest the injustices committed against these individuals.
Incriminating footage doesn't always come from police body cameras. But in Dubose's case, it was body-cam video that was instrumental in the indictment of his shooter. This was the first time a murder charge had been leveled against an officer in the county, according to local officials, and it may not have happened without the disclosure of the video and the public’s calls for justice for the victim. So when can body-cam footage be disclosed, as it was this time, to the public?
The shortest and simplest answer is that freedom of information laws, which differ from state to state, apply to public records—including body-camera videos. But these laws include exemptions. Lawmakers in at least 15 states, including Arizona, Kansas, and California, have introduced bills to exempt body-cam recordings of police officers interacting with citizens from state public records laws, or to limit what the public can access. And other states may follow this trend.
One big concern is that such videos could potentially infringe on personal privacy, and activists say there is a need to draw a distinction between video that has public value, and video with no public value. “We think that 99 percent of body-cam videos will either be of no importance at all---for instance, a person asking a cop for directions---or will be of only prurient interest, if for example, a drunk person runs down the street naked," says Chad Marlow, advocacy and policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, and principal author of the ACLU’s model bill for police body cameras. "In these situations, there is no public benefit to be secured by making a video publicly available that would trump privacy interests."
Marlow does acknowledge that even these more benign clips could potentially feed research into subjects like whether discriminatory treatment or racial profiling is going in police forces. But, he says, “there are other mechanisms to track discriminatory treatment and providing that do not require the privacy of citizens be violated by releasing video.”
John Hamasaki, a California-based criminal defense lawyer, further points out that there could be a real concern about an increase in surveillance, especially since the proliferation of body cameras would likely impact more vulnerable communities like low-income neighborhoods and minority communities. “There’s still some definite opposition to the use of body cams in that sense,” he says, and adds that even advocates for open government and civil rights agree there should be limitations on technology that can be applied to the footage---like facial recognition algorithms.
Not to mention the issue of the cost of maintaining video archives. “There could be questions around retention policy, since there could be complaints about cost, which is a legitimate complaint up to a point,” Hamasaki says.
And of course, there is the question of whether or not the release of body-camera footage would compromise an ongoing criminal investigation. “There are the laws, and there are the individual policies of the police departments regarding release. I think where the challenge comes in is each police department is crafting their own policies for when these are released publicly,” says Hamasaki. “What you see a lot of the time is the standard response: ‘There’s an ongoing investigation, we can’t release video.’”
At least in the case of Dubose, Hamasaki says, this seemed to be a legitimate justification, since a grand jury had been convened and hadn’t presented their findings before Wednesday’s indictment. “But it’s problematic when that reason is used to avoid a discussion, or for a police department to give it out as a boilerplate excuse in the hope that public pressure will go away,” he says.
Because public pressure is very real---and can actually make a difference. Under many state freedom of information laws, voluntary release is allowed, and especially in highly charged situations, proactive disclosure may actually be the better path forward for local law enforcement officers.
According to Hamasaki, today’s climate of social justice activism is very different from even just a few years ago. Social media, for better or worse, has made it much easier to disseminate information and have communities affected by these incidents describe developments on the ground. It's made it easier for people to have open discussions about injustices, and to organize gatherings and rallies. And sometimes---not always, but certainly many times---it can push a situation to the point where a call to make information public becomes too loud to ignore.
"There’s been plenty of critique of internet activism and social media activism, but it’s still changed the landscape," Hamasaki says. "It didn’t use to be like that, and that’s certainly a positive outcome of the growth of people’s engagement and activism."
UPDATE 12:30 PM ET 07/31/2015: Tensing was released Thursday evening on bail and placed on suicide watch.
