probablyasocialecologist:

The unsatisfying fact is that even when the police are at your doorstep, they are not always able to protect you. That, despite their good intentions, their presence does not equal safety.

[…]

Increasingly, the police know they are being filmed, but can use the cameras to establish a false narrative. An officer in Baltimore was found to be using his camera to “re-create” the discovery of drugs he claimed to have found earlier. In this case, even though they had Nichols restrained, officers continued to yell out “give me your hands” to justify for the cameras the beating they were giving him.

In the end, the presence of body cameras did nothing to reduce the police use of violence. They did not save his life. It turns out that the hoped for value of deterrence just isn’t there in the ways we imagined. A systematic study of the introduction of body cameras in some neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., showed they made no measurable difference in any aspect of policing. But the city decided to give cameras to all officers anyway because police officers were using them for evidence collection.

Body cameras are not going to save Americans or give us a deeper truth about the world of violence that police inhabit and produce. The truth is already out there in the long history of policing. We merely refuse to look at it. We hide behind empty hopes that a little training, oversight and accountability will somehow transform an institution rooted in the use of violence to maintain systems of inequality. From Ferguson to Minneapolis to Memphis, the demand on the streets is not for more technology for police; it is to dismantle policing and replace it with less harmful alternatives in as many ways as we possibly can.