Lens & Power
Article by Laura Houlberg
Collages by Brandon Winters
I want to speak directly to my fellow filmmakers. Visual storytellers with cameras, who know the gravity of the right edit. No one knows better than we do the power of standing behind the lens, because the person in this position controls the narrative. Beyond the literal and technical definition, lens refers more poetically to something that facilitates and influences perception, comprehension, or evaluation.
Cameras have lately been in the center of political discourse. Specifically, police wearing body cameras, and whether or not this is deserving of more investment as reactive cities and counties vote on various reforms for their police departments. To many people, this seems like an obvious and reasonable response to the pandemic of police violence. Seeing as how this issue has only recently bubbled up to the mainstream psyche due largely to the proliferation of footage, both from police cameras, and, more significantly, witnesses’ phones, why wouldn’t the addition of more cameras be an easy solution for identifying and bringing accountability to instances of police brutality, so that police forces can weed out “bad apples” and continue the “right” type of policing?
This reform is alluring, but I want to launch an appeal to filmmakers. With our understanding of the lens’ ability to shape and create narrative, what might it actually mean to empower police with more cameras?
The first assumption of body camera reform is that the knowledge they are being recorded dissuades officers from abusing their positions of power. As of 2018, over half of all police departments have implemented cameras, so we can actually look at data from the past two years to see that in practice, this isn’t true. While there is some anecdotal information around officers changing their behavior when cameras are on, we still see officers turn cameras off or continue to brutalize and murder people while knowingly being recorded. Just to reference some of the most recent instances, George Floyd’s killer, Officer Derek Chauvin, was aware that he was being recorded for the almost nine minutes he knelt on Floyd’s neck. Both officers who killed Rayshard Brooks had their body cameras enabled as well. When he noticed that another officer’s body camera was pointed toward him, one of Elijah McClain’s killers said, “Move your camera, dude.” The list goes on.
Betsy Smith, a retired police sergeant with almost 30 years of policing experience, said in an interview with Wired, “It doesn’t change our behavior, because most cops are just going out there and doing their job. If people think, ‘Let’s get these cops body cameras to change their behavior,’ I think that’s really naive...” Even the National Police Foundation has pushed back against the assumption that police will act differently while wearing cameras. Cameras, they say, “rather than changing ingrained behaviors, they illuminate them for police and public scrutiny.”
The mere presence of body cameras isn’t enough to affect police behavior in part because of how the footage is (not) used. Footage is often reviewed by officers before they even write their report about an incident where they used force, allowing them to retroactively justify uses of force, illegal stops, and unwarranted searches. This practice is actually a recommendation from the Police Executive Research Forum, intended to help with the “accuracy” of their reporting.
And just because a department has footage of an incident of police abuse doesn’t necessarily mean they will share it. A spokesperson for the Minneapolis Park Police told NBC News in late May of 2020 that “body cam footage is not public data.” New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, tasked with overseeing allegations of police abuse, reported in 2019 that the NYPD refused to provide them with requested footage for hundreds of cases. The police aren’t stingy with footage in all cases, though. While body camera footage is only used to prosecute police 8.3% of the time, 93% of prosecutors’ offices use body camera footage to prosecute civilians.
What happens with this footage, beyond its use in court? Axon, the largest body camera manufacturer in the world, owns Evidence.com, where police departments store their body camera footage. In 2018, Evidence.com migrated 20 petabytes to Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Database. For scale, one petabyte is equal to 1000 terabytes, and just one petabyte can store about 500,000 hours of film. “Since the migration, we’ve added about 2 petabytes a month,” Hank Janssen, Axon’s Director of Engineering, shared, “and growth is accelerating significantly.” This footage is run through machine learning, which can recognize faces, identify license plates, and transcribe conversations.
In addition to using this footage against civilians in court cases, the broad scope of daily life captured by police cameras further solidifies the surveillance of already over-policed communities that are mostly Black, Latinx, and poor. Wolfcom, a competitor of Axon, has been recently pitching body cameras equipped with live facial recognition technology to police departments across the U.S. Anyone who walks in front of a police body camera would be subject to this surveillance.
This is not an indictment of cameras. In actuality, the past few years have dragged the issue of policing into the light because of video documentation. Witness video and CCTV have helped us launch what Eyal Weizman, Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, calls “counter forensics.” Civil society groups, equipped with their own evidence, are able to invert the forensic gaze — which normally allows authoritarian states to manipulate and distort facts about their crimes — to get us closer to the truth of the situation. Witness cell phone footage and CCTV is also much more accessible to the public than the police footage which lives under the control of the police and is obfuscated to protect them.
It’s been the people themselves — witnesses, family members, protestors — who have caught police in these moments. Mark Clennon, a Black New York photographer, recently said in an interview with PBS, “I just want to make sure that we have a first-person account. I want to make sure that the Black voice is not left out of this conversation, especially since we are the center of this conversation... That is the number one differentiator between now and the original civil rights movement, is our ability to tell our stories.”
It is true that until the advent of the consumer digital camera (which now lives in most of our phones), the average person didn’t have the ability to record an interaction with the police, but counter narratives have always existed. The music industry has been telling us these stories for years. Songs like Jay Z’s “99 Problems” and N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police” both detail racial profiling and police abuse, and are listed on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Music videos have been used to bring visuals to some of these songs. Stretching back decades, we can map a constellation of artists giving voice to this counter-narrative — from Marvin Gaye to Nina Simone, from the Fugees to Rage Against the Machine. However, thanks to anti-Black racism, stories about police brutality told orally by Black people have not engendered empathy and solidarity from White people. The filmed encounters of the last few years have finally broken through, but while this story may seem new to many White Americans, the music industry is full of evidence to prove otherwise.
As filmmakers, our goal is to tell stories. New stories. But the story we see time and time again in these now-documented murders by police is the same. Police routinely enter largely innocuous scenes of Black life, create or escalate a situation, and then use deadly force.
The camera is a filmmaker’s most crucial tool. Many of us believe cameras are a type of salvation; that there is something inherent in the camera as a teller of truth. Why would we put our trust in the police to tell stories that are ultimately ours?
We must go deeper than simply recording. It is of the utmost urgency. We have to dismantle this system, not simply advocate for surface-level reforms that only legitimize policing as a system that can be improved upon, when the function of police has always been to terrorize, and protect the property and status of the White and wealthy.
To borrow an excellent tweet I saw the other day, “if you haven’t now is a good time to expand your politics. do you want to keep reacting to individual police killings, or are you ready to dismantle the system that makes them possible?”
Here are just a few ways to take action…
EDUCATE
Help your friends, family, and community learn about the power of cameras, especially those who might have less visual literacy than today’s savvy Zoomers
Spread information about “camera perspective bias”: audiences will always empathize with the perspective of the storyteller
Have difficult conversations with people in your life who still don’t see a problem in policing
Speak up on film sets when you witness racism and ignorance
LEARN
Read books about the history of policing in the United States
Listen to your friends of color when they tell you about their experiences with the police and the criminal justice system
GET INVOLVED
Join your city’s police oversight committee
Listen in and provide testimony at your city’s budget reviews
VOTE
Vote for reductions in police budgets. Don’t vote for increases to police budgets.
Vote for reinvesting police budget funds into education, healthcare, restorative justice, and housing justice initiatives
Vote for candidates at a local, county, and state level who want to disinvest from the police, as they have the most influence over what policing looks like in your community
Image credits: Colin Tilley, director of “Alright” by Kendrick Lamar (cops holding up car, men standing on top of police car); Melina Matsoukas, director of “Formation” by Beyonce (young boy wearing sweatshirt with arms spread); Forensic Architecture: Counter forensic 3D models; Ariel Pomerantz: Backs of cops in crowd; Keith Getter: Two hands holding a tablet; Campaign Zero: Woman holding cell phone with one hand.