Category: Digital Culture

Releasing police body cam video undermines their purpose.

Last week, The Los Angeles Times reported that the 7,000 officers of the LAPD will soon be wearing body cameras to record their interactions while on duty.  Communities that have employed these cameras have reported significant decreases in the number of claims of police misconduct (reductions as impressive as 90%), and it is fair to assume those statistics represent both actual changes in officer behavior as well as a reduction in false claims of misconduct.  The fact that the presence of body cameras can provide evidence that can protect both civilians and officers is a very attractive proposition; but the extent to which the videos captured should be made automatically available to the public via the Internet is a subject of debate in Los Angeles and other communities. While some citizens will argue a right to know in this regard, I generally agree with LA Police Chief Charlie Beck, who is quoted in the Times article thus:

“I think people misunderstand transparency as having everybody and all the public have access to everything. And it isn’t so much that as having the ability to have oversight by multiple entities outside of the Police Department. I think that’s the meaning of transparency.  I don’t think that transparency means we post every interaction on YouTube.”

Indeed, in viewing both the social trends and the economics associated with social media, I believe the potential harm of broad distribution of police body camera video outweighs the benefits of doing so and could undermine the value of deploying the technology in the first place.

Privacy & Decency

As cited in the Times article, Chief Beck emphasizes that officers respond to a wide range of calls, like entering the homes of victims who have experienced horrible violations by all manner of perpetrators.  So, I hope we can all agree that perhaps a woman who just called the cops because her husband beat her up should not become not free reality TV for us to ogle via social media.  And domestic battery is relatively tame compared to the anthology of horrors that humans visit upon one another and to which police officers are often witness.  More to the point, the volume of police encounters involving events that we have no business watching (let alone allowing some website to monetize) is far greater than the volume of encounters in which may see a need to scrutinize the conduct of the officers.  And in cases in which such scrutiny is necessary, justice is likely to be best served if the related video remains sequestered during investigations and trials.  By distributing all police body cam video to the public, we risk turning various forms of human suffering into a Circus Maximus that is more likely to serve our crass taste for ugly spectacle than it is to serve justice.

Due Process

There are several good reasons why evidence in a case remains sealed and juries are meant to be comprised of citizens who have seen or heard as little evidence as possible at the start of a trial.  Imperfect as our criminal justice system may be, I really don’t think we want to substitute the fundamental components of due process and jury trials for digitally deputized lynch mobs, no matter how incontrovertible video evidence might appear to be.  In the immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, a self-appointed posse formed on Reddit that zeroed in on a suspect, who drew attention partly because he had gone missing.  It turned out that the poor guy the Redditors had identified was “missing” because he had taken himself to a secluded location to commit suicide. And the only result the online posse managed to achieve was to spawn harassment of the young man’s family in advance of the grief that would come when they  learned of his death.

Online vigilantism frequently turns into actual harm; and it doesn’t matter if many of us think the victim “deserves” it because we saw a video of him doing something bad.  Evidence has already shown, and logic certainly suggests, that the mere presence of the body cameras already brings about desired effects without dumping all the video onto YouTube for the world to chat about.  It is sufficient, and probably even more effective, for an officer to be aware that a constant record is being stored, which can be entered into evidence in a case against him for abusing his authority.  If that same video is made public, the officer’s attorney has an opening to strike it from the record, the prosecutor has a harder time empaneling a jury of peers who haven’t drawn early conclusions; and these factors alone are more likely to further entrench the standard practice of not indicting officers for apparent wrongdoing than to move the trend in the other direction.

It Probably Wont Help the Larger Cause

I personally believe the case of Michael Brown is pretty fuzzy because the only evidence available corroborates Officer Wilson’s testimony. But the Eric Garner case in NYC is another matter; we have citizen-filmed video that shows an officer using excessive force and killing Mr. Garner with an illegal choke hold.*  While it’s true that even video footage requires context and other evidence to properly weigh any case, the fact that there was no indictment in the circumstances involving Mr. Garner is a travesty; but the reasons for this failure are cultural, political, and yes, racial.

The flaws of law enforcement policy and any underlying racism that may affect procedure in various communities require real social change that is just as likely to be stymied by constant distribution of body cam footage as it is to be aided by whatever illusion of transparency that distribution would create.  I say illusion because, as I have argued in several contexts, there is an assumption by well-meaning citizens that raw, decontextualized information must inevitably foster a majority and morally-aligned public who will pressure authorities for change.  Interestingly, though this assumption is contradicted by the fact that for all the increase in leaks and smart-phone videos and raw data dispersion, we see even greater schisms and social discord on a range of issues  than in years prior to this media saturation. Unfortunately, an unexpurgated video has the same potential to ignite a racially-motivated defense of police brutality as it is to ignite racially-motivated retaliation against police in general.  Reason based on evidence does not necessarily prevail in the larger public forum; in fact, it rarely does. And video can be a highly emotional medium.

We have a lot of video now that has sparked plenty of outrage but has done very little to move us toward greater balance or away from policies that, for instance, disproportionally place black citizens in conflict with police officers.  There is no denying that there are millions of Americans who will support those policies by saying “Yeah, but there are more black criminals,” and then we’re off to the races in every sense of the word. How are the cultural complexities of that or any other shouting match going to be calmed by the mass distribution of these videos? I suspect tempers would not be mollified, that these raw images would throw more fuel on an already smoldering fire.  If that’s true, the resulting increase in tensions will only make communities less politically capable of adopting law enforcement policies that might forge better relations among citizens and officers. Or am I missing something?  Have internet comment threads generally decreased the level of vitriol in society?

As stated, I like the idea of these cameras as a hedge against officers who might abuse their authority and as a tool to protect officers who may be wrongly accused of such abuse.  But turning the footage itself into an ongoing spectacle, calling it oversight, and then allowing YouTube and others to monetize the show, does not sound to me like social progress.

*The proximate cause of death may not have been the choke hold.  I don’t mean to write  anything careless about the case itself and thank commenter Angry Villager for making a valid criticism.  The larger point, of course, is that even with a video viewed by millions, the conditions preventing further investigation or indictment may prevail.

Don’t ask if artists deserve to be paid.

I frequently encounter comments on this blog and around the web reiterating the thematic question as to whether or not “artists should be paid as much as they are.” The inquiry is typically posed by contrasting the arts to other professions we likely consider more critical, like emergency medicine or teaching or epidemiology.  This attitude is a bit of a shift in for artists, who are historically used to the idea that not even friends and family will take them seriously until they make a living; but regardless of the chimerical mood in the peanut gallery, everyone should rest assured that in general artists still don’t make very much money.  Be happy or unhappy about that as you will.

Often, when I encounter this question asking what “artists deserve to get paid,” it is in regard to wealthy, creative and/or performing artists.   And this is something of a variation on the recurring theme “Why should pro sports stars get paid millions to play a game, when people like nurses struggle to pay their bills?”  This rhetorical and apparently rational question is based on the fallacy that financial value is somehow tied to social value, which it simply will never be in a free-market economy. (Please resist the urge to stump for communism here.)  NFL players are paid millions because football is worth billions, and this has nothing to do with the relative “importance” of the game.

But we should clarify something about semantics right away:  in general, artists are not “paid” in the sense that most people are paid based on a contract with an employer.  Most artists are entrepreneurs, and if the product(s) their business produces sells million of units, they’re going to earn revenue in the millions of dollars. We are not “paying” them a million-dollar salary, and yet comments I read often ask literally, “Should we pay them so much.”  One might think the artists they’re talking about are on the public payroll, and we’re checking a line item in the federal budget.  “Dammit!  We’re paying Kid Rock how much???”  So, the semantics are either carelessly or purposely misleading when employing the words we and pay.

In fact, the question being asked isn’t even comparable to the ongoing debate over the salaries and bonuses that are paid to c-class executives in major companies.  While the government should not impose a maximum compensation package that a business may pay its leadership, we have seen examples of a corporate culture that can aggravate wealth consolidation and even reward failure.  When executives make four-hundred times the salary of a company’s average worker and may also receive an multi-million-dollar golden parachute, even for screwing up a corporation, these occurrences certainly beg the question as to whether or not these people should be paid so much?  And while the thesis inquiry about artists’ pay seems to echo this line of inquiry about top executives, the two subjects have nothing to do with one another.

As stated, most artists function as small businesses and produce works on spec with a wide range of investment from pure sweat to millions of dollars.  They earn revenues through sales of their works ranging from supplemental income, to full-time professional salaries, to cha-ching for a fortunate few.  It doesn’t matter if an independent business sells widgets or cheese boards or record albums; it is simply preposterous to ask whether or not the seller “deserves” the revenue from the units she is able to sell. But of course, that’s not really what the people who pose this question are asking, is it?  What they’re really asking is why they should pay for works produced by artists at all, and they are rationalizing a desire to not pay with a smokescreen of faux-humanist gibberish about creative work being less socially important than work in medicine or education.  But aside from the fact that the teacher and the doctor probably can’t perform a song anyone wants on his iPod, the real folly in this entire line of reasoning is that the doctor, the teacher, the plumber, and the fool asking the question are all economically co-dependent on that artist we’re arbitrarily presuming to remove from the ecosystem.

I know I’ve used the ecosystem analogy before, but it seems to me that it is economic suicide to eradicate a vital business engine just as it can be ecological suicide to eradicate a vital species.  We don’t necessarily know the exact cost of losing a particular beetle to deforestation, but we do know all species are interdependent and, therefore, view diversity as salubrious and extinction as hazardous.  How is an economy any different?  You would likely never be able to follow a path from a new creative venture in Singapore affecting trading that afternoon in Hong Kong, triggering a flurry of international trades, leading to a windfall in Seattle that seeds a company that offers you your next job.  But we do know that this matrix of chaos is what we call the economy, and we, therefore, accept the general principle that a rising tide raises all boats and vice versa.  Thus, most things with intrinsic economic value (i.e. things people want or need) that can be part of the grand game of trade are universally beneficial.  Put it another way, one benefits economically from the financial success of rock bands one hates. So, it is self-destructive to argue in favor of diminishing any legal, fair, and prosperous trade, especially if that trade is as economically diverse as the arts.  Diversity equals stability.

Some have argued that there is no economic harm in under-paying or not paying for entertainment media that is consumed.  Without so much as a wink, lobbyist Matt Schruers in July of 2013 wrote an article on behalf of the CCIA (Computer & Communications Industry Association) that rather astonishingly stated that “money not spent on pirated content is, in many cases, still spent.”  Hard to argue with that, but the implication that no harm is done as long as the money goes into the economy somehow is a shell game. Let’s make an evening of it…

You can save about twelve bucks by pirating three movies instead of renting them.  And with that twelve dollars, you can order a pizza to eat while watching one of your pirated films.  So, like Schruers said, that money still goes into the economy, right?  Yes, but at this point, you should probably skip the movies and the pizza and go back to economics class because what you’ve actually done is consume about $24 worth of goods and put $12 into the economy. Multiply that activity by millions of consumers and watch what happens, not just to one industry, but quite possibly to your job.  Because further exacerbating the folly of this false logic, you’ve just fed one sector of the economy that is considerably less robust than the sector you chose to starve. The core motion picture industry employs nearly two million Americans making over $100 billion in wages, and that contributes substantially to support jobs all over the country in completely unrelated industries. Like pizzerias.  Still, in some minds, that kind of wealth in the movie business translates into “they’re so rich, they don’t need my four dollar rental fee,” and this is the perfect attitude to adopt if you hope to go from being the guy ordering that pizza to one day applying for the job of delivering it.  It is far better for your overall economic health to rent one movie, buy one pizza, and tip the delivery guy for a grand total of about $18 and thus feed three tiers of the economy in a single night’s use of your disposable income.  It’s the same thing prudent investors do when they spread their bets.  Diversity equals stability.

It is a conundrum.  The technology that makes paying for creative works functionally optional fosters the notion that it is morally optional and, therefore, rationally objectionable. This leads to earnest discussion as to whether or not producers even “deserve” revenue for the things we consume; and once again, we see an example in which the technology that is supposed to connect us all actually blinds some of us to the ways in which we really are connected.

Is accountability losing value?

“I don’t know how that bong got in my sock drawer! And what’s a bong anyway?”

When was the last time you used the I Didn’t Know defense; or if you’re a parent, when was the last time you were confronted with the I Didn’t Know defense? Did it work? Not so much, right? But it often feels lately as though the soul of the IDK defense is gaining social clout as some of the darker realities of Web 2.0 collide with some perfectly good laws written in the era of Web 1.0. As such, does the technology we expect to provide transparency simultaneously diminish the value of accountability?

Provisions in U.S. laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 and the Communications Decency Act of 1996, provide important safe harbors that protect site owners against civil litigation* for actions performed by third parties while using their sites. But when a site is a large enterprise with millions of pages and tens of millions of users around the world, and if it is ad-supported so that all traffic has a profit motive, the safe harbor thing becomes a rather complicated point of contention between site owners and any party harmed by activity on a site.  The scale of the site, the number of users, the volume of UGC (user generated content), and the safe harbor provisions all give a site owner considerable leverage when applying the IDK defense, even in instances where we might reasonably intuit that the owner knows precisely what’s happening on his site and more or less what certain activity is worth to him financially.  While safe harbors are vital protections — I wouldn’t want to publish without them — the practical reality is that an owner can theoretically have it both ways;  he can profit from illicit traffic by doing nothing to stop it even if he knows it’s there, and also claim to be “shocked gambling is going on in his establishment” if he is named in a suit or indictment.

The fundamental argument of ignorance is consistently the basis of defense for site owners ranging from piracy sites to Google to salacious gossip sites to the now-busted dark web drug-trafficking site Silk Road, whose alleged operator is on trial in New York. Prosecutors are charging founder Ross Ulbricht with being both mastermind and manager of a $1.2 billion criminal enterprise, and Ulbricht’s primary defenses appear to rest on I didn’t know and It wasn’t me, meaning that he denies being the man behind the avatar Dread Pirate Roberts, known to be the operator of the site. I won’t presume to comment on the particulars of the case other than to guess that with an alleged $80 million in Ulbricht’s account at the time of his arrest, if he’s not the guy, he’s probably got some ‘splainin to do.

But it was actually the comments I read below one story about the Silk Road trial that spawned this post. Unconcerned with the gravity of unchecked criminal activity occurring on that anonymous marketplace — activity that reportedly included murder-for-hire schemes — the comment that got my attention was one which stated that the only reason Silk Road was shut down and Ulbricht indicted is that the government didn’t like that it was a market over which it had no control. Maybe this is the rant of one naive kid who represents a tiny population of naive kids, but I have to wonder because the spirit of that comment is just a slight variation on the themes of the Web as Wild West or the entrepreneurial zeitgeist of the industry with its imperative disrupt everything. It all smacks just a bit of embracing anarchy, which is often confused with freedom, though is in fact the fertile ground of feudalism or totalitarianism.

“The mob is the mother of tyrants.” – Diogenes

Again, I strongly believe safe harbors are essential, and I am not qualified to suggest any workable revisions, but I do think the larger notion of accountability may be losing value the more we live in a hybrid society between the real and the digital. As we connect to one another, we also diffuse responsibility for certain actions, which has the opposite intended effect of building those connections because that diffusion actually places greater distance between our actions and those who may be harmed by them. Because the Web spreads responsibility for actions across thousands or millions of people, this often feeds the exact opposite types of behaviors that are presumed will manifest in a self-governed environment.

We saw this with Reddit’s initial refusal and then reluctant agreement to shut down threads devoted to exploiting leaked nude photos of celebrities. The apparent logic among Reddit’s management and users was that because they did not steal the photos and the photos are now “out there,” nobody is really responsible for their distribution or exploitation; and since the images are tied to a news story, the photos are kinda like freedom of the press, right? In a non-web context, like TV news, we’d probably say that showing the photos would be a non-journalistic exploitation of these individuals in order to drive ratings. I’m not saying TV never does this, only that we seem to recognize it for what it is via that medium. Yet, when the medium is a web platform like the boards of Reddit, and the editorial decision to “broadcast” certain material is crowdsourced, somehow the moral assessment of that exploitative decision is skewed because the mob is now responsible, which means nobody is responsible.

And one question we should ask is what happens when illegal or harmful activities become more automated, when accountability is even further removed from individuals to whom laws and judgments may apply? Think about it. Illegal or tortious actions can be committed by bots the same way junk email is delivered. Or maybe you go on vacation for a few days only to find out that your “smart devices” ordered up a few bottles of oxycontin, some assault rifles, and a fake ID. Sound absurd? Maybe, but . . .

Check out this story about a pair of Swiss programmers who created an art installation called The Darknet: From Memes to Onionland, which offered a display of items that were purchased by a bot shopping autonomously on a dark web marketplace akin to Silk Road. The concept was to give the bot a weekly allowance, see what it purchased of its own accord, and then display the items in a gallery setting. Interpret the statement as you will. I would personally defend the actions of these programmers as an artistic expression, although the article cited does raise interesting questions as to who might be responsible for the illegal items such as ecstasy and a counterfeit passport that were purchased by the bot. In fact, the artist/programmers stated that they take full responsibility for this contraband, which is refreshing, and I certainly don’t think they should face any criminal penalties for possession. But their experiment suggests to me that even before we answer some of the tricky challenges posed by safe harbor provisions, the IDK defense is about to gain a new phrase: “Wasn’t me. The bot did it!”

*Changed from original publication, which erroneously referred to liability and criminal activity.  Thanks to a friend for correcting the mistake.