Three North Carolina police officers were fired from their jobs this week after investigators found incredibly racist, troubling conversations, and threats of violence accidentally recorded by the cops’ own dashboard camera.
The dashboard camera in Officer Kevin Piner’s patrol car captured more than 46 minutes of relevant footage from a two-hour recording, Wilmington Police Chief Donny Williams said Wednesday.
According to the department’s report (PDF), Piner’s camera was recording due to “accidental activation.” That activation ended up capturing Piner and two other officers, Jessie Moore and Brian Gilmore—all white—discussing Black members of the force as well as local protesters, using well-known racist slurs. At one point, Moore said a local magistrate, a Black woman, “needed a bullet in her head,” before the three discussed their feelings that a civil war was coming, for which all three claimed to be ready. “We are just gonna go out and start slaughtering them fucking n——s,” Piner added.
The conversations “were brutally offensive and deserved immediate action,” Williams said. “When I first learned of these conversations, I was shocked, saddened, and disgusted. There is no place for this behavior in our agency or our city and it will not be tolerated.”
Williams also added that he was petitioning the court to determine whether the footage could be released publicly, in accordance with North Carolina law.
Proof vs. accountability
Police body or dashboard-mounted cameras are often promoted as a boon to police accountability, and the Wilmington case seems to prove why.
Many state and local governments have rushed to adopt resolutions in recent weeks calling for increased camera usage or funding, in response the ongoing nationwide protest movement against police brutality and in support of Black communities. In New York state, for example, the state Assembly just passed legislation requiring body cameras for all state police. Speaker Carl Heastie said about the measure, “As one of the largest state police agencies in the country, the New York State Police should be one of the first agencies to set an example, to show others how to properly use body cams to deliver transparency and accountability to the public.”
Sometimes the footage does indeed work as intended. In 2017, for example, 34 criminal cases were thrown out in Maryland after footage from body-worn cameras showed police planting drugs near suspects.
But the technology is not in and of itself a panacea. “Police departments large and small are rolling out expensive body-camera programs without consistent answers to the questions or, according to policy experts, convincing evidence that the cameras ensure the level of accountability that the public demands,” The New York Times reported back in 2017, and those questions do not yet seem to have answers.
A study conducted in Washington, DC, in 2017 found no change in police behavior or citizen complaints after police in the nation’s capital began wearing body cameras. In 2019, researchers who published a meta-analysis of 70 studies on police body-worn cameras found that DC was not alone, and cameras did not have “a consistent or significant effect” on officer behavior or complaints overall.
Privacy
Privacy advocates have also warned consistently about the dangers posed by body-worn police cameras, not only when police are speaking with individuals who deserve privacy, but also in situations such as mass protests when demonstrators believe they have anonymity.
“Reform activists should not simply demand hardware,” the American Civil Liberties Union wrote in a blog post today. “They should demand effective body camera programs, which include not just cameras but also strong policies and institutional practices to make those cameras effective.”
