Why police officer charged with George Floyd’s murder wasn’t concerned about being filmed: MIT Technology Review

Derek Chauvin, then a Minneapolis police officer, looked right at the camera as he pressed a knee into George Floyd’s neck. He understood he was being filmed.

Why didn’t that stop him?

Ethan Zuckerman, the director of the Center for Civic Media at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writes that for some time the convention wisdom has been that “[i]f police officers know they’re being watched both by their body cameras and by civilians with cell phones, they will discipline themselves and refrain from engaging in unnecessary violence.”

By now, though, it should be clear this isn’t the way it works, he writes.

Zuckerman, in MIT Technology Review, points to a large-scale 2017 study that compared the behavior of Washington, D.C., police officers sporting body-worn cameras with those who worked without cameras. The result, the study’s authors wrote:

“Across each of the four outcome categories” -- police use of force, civilian complaints, policing activity and judicial outcomes -- “our analyses consistently point to a null result: the average treatment effect on all of the measured outcomes was very small, and no estimate rose to statistical significance at conventional levels.”

The researchers posited that officers may not have been “actually aware” they were being filmed or that they were aware but “other factors in the heat of the moment may override any deterrent effect the cameras may have had.”

But Zuckerman believes there’s another key factor at play. In 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “if police officers have an ‘objectively reasonable’ fear that their lives or safety are in danger, they are justified in using deadly force,” he writes. “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.”

In short, “images matter, but so does power.”

Zuckerman concludes that, when Chauvin spotted a witness filming him on May 25 as he pressed a knee into the neck of a man who was handcuffed and face down on the ground, the cop surely knew it was rare for police officers to be charged with murder or manslaughter and rarer still for them to be convicted.

On Monday, a judge set unconditional bail for Chauvin at $1.25 million. Chauvin has been charged with second-degree murder in the death of George Floyd.

Read Ethan Zuckerman’s essay.

-- Douglas Perry

@douglasmperry

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