Police Body Cameras Only Keep the Police Safe

By Angelica Poversky

July 29, 2020

The Toronto city council voted against defunding the police on June 29. On the same day, the Toronto city council voted in favour of body cameras for police officers. To be clear, there is no victory here.

Across Canada right now, there are talks going on about increasing the presence of body cameras on RCMP officers. Canada has been waking up to its own issue of police brutality—which is not so distinct from that of the US—specifically after the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet, a Black woman, who died after her mother called the Toronto police to help her get to a mental health centre.

But in Canada, unlike the US, there is no official record of the number of people killed by the police. When reports are released about police brutality in Canada, the information does not detail data about race and ethnicity of victims. This could be a significant systemic reason as to why police brutality is continually treated like a 'one-off' in Canada.

When we view police violence in Canada as one-off problems, we can somewhat understand why people advocate for the one-off solutions. There is a rising public sentiment that cameras will improve both transparency and accountability in police interactions of individual police officers. 

However, body cams are not a new suggestion; the Calgary Police Service implemented the technology for all of the major police force’s front-line officers in 2019. The Fredericton police force did so back in 2018, where it was trialed to a sole group of six officers. And in 2017, the province of Quebec acquired 169 body cameras and 33 dashboard cameras for policing units. 

As I write now in Montreal, there is rising pressure to implement policing technology on a large scale.  

Though articles have been polluting Facebook timelines with titles like “Body cameras reveal officers speak more respectfully to White people than Black people”, or “Three ways police can use body cameras to build community trust”, it is time to recognize the truth: body cameras are a form of surveillance and will cause further harm.

We don’t need more surveillance to prove what should be common knowledge; that the prison industrial complex fueled by white supremacy requires police brutality. Devoted Black activists and Indigenous activists have been writing, speaking and researching the truth of this violence for years.

We don’t need more traumatic evidence that police brutality is real and happening consistently. And we know that evidence of police brutality very rarely leads to repercussions for police officers anyway. Recently, there was a police dash cam video that recorded police brutality against an Athabasca Chipewyan Chief in northern Alberta, and despite the video, the police superiors decided  the officer’s violent actions were “reasonable”.  Police with body cameras have been responsible for the murder of Indigenous and Black people in North America. In fact, Kevin Walby, associate criminal justice professor at the University of Winnipeg, said cameras in some cases make police “emboldened” to act in violent ways.

This is why body cameras are being implemented as another form of surveillance, specifically to be used against Black and Indigenous people. 

In fact the information collected by all kinds of surveillance cameras could be weaponized and violate the privacy of individuals.

From blackmail to improper use of personal data, there are many ways in which the police can inappropriately use information.  Moreover, the exploitation of data and distortion of narratives based off of the extracted information from body cameras can create large systemic issues.

In the book Nothing to Hide : The false tradeoff between privacy and security, privacy law professor Daniel J. Solove refutes that “privacy is about hiding bad things”, arguing instead that privacy is a freedom and right that should be granted to all citizens. He outlines how often governing bodies trump the importance of privacy with the importance of security which often leads to devastating outcomes.

The calls of the recent protests and acts of resistance across Canada are advocating to first broadly defund the police, before ultimately abolishing the police and policing technology—not to be surveilled, and policed through new mediums. 

 Instead of investing into the system of policing and surveillance, these funds could be relocated to mental health services, new strategies to tackle systemic racism and ultimately new systems that guarantee safety and privacy for everyone—not just the police.

Angelica Poversky is a queer non-binary media activist. Connect with them on Instagram or Facebook. Check out Angelica Poversky’s latest album and book about sexuality, queerness and gender on their website.