On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR discusses the results of mandating bodycams for police officers, suggesting that bodycams on ICE agents won’t drive the changes activists are hoping for:
This is a followup on my earlier post about the expected effects of requiring bodycams on ICE agents.
I used Grok to do some digging into the literature examining the effects of bodycams on measurable statistics of unlawful police violence.
I did not have any strong expectations about what I was going to find.
Do the query yourself if you like, but I can tell you that the answer is going to reduce to two sentences:
1. Bodycams do not have any statistically significant effect on measures of unlawful police violence.
2. Body cams do have a statistically significant effect, reducing allegations of unlawful police violence.
This means that the only statistically significant effect of bodycams is to deter false claims of police brutality and bigotry.
Note: do not read this as me claiming that cops are untarnished angels. I know people who have been brutally abused by police. I know this does occasionally happen, and I condemn the police culture of silence about such abuses.
What I am saying is that what you see on bodycam footage, which is almost always police exercising commendable restraint in dealing with extremely violent and stupid people, reflects reality. If it didn’t, reality would leak around the edges of the camera non-coverage as an observable effect on incident statistics.
I don’t expect the effect on ICE to be any different. I expect mandatory body cams to backfire rather badly on people who pushed them in the hopes of exposing ICE as some sort of out-of-control Gestapo.
If anything, I expect the consequence to be an increase in already high levels of public support for mass deportations of illegals. Because I know what the results of lots of bodycam and security camera footage has been about public perception of underclass criminality. It gets more difficult to sell the narrative of these people as innocent victims of a repressive society after you’ve seen your 47th video of a screaming semi-psychotic trying to knife a cop during a traffic stop.
Some of the activist orgs that wanted the body cams made mandatory for street cops now want them turned off. I think it’s pretty likely the same thing is going to happen with immigration enforcement sooner or later. Most likely sooner.
