ICE Agents to Wear Body Cameras But the Fix is In

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After years of delays, ICE has announced that it will equip all officers with body cameras. But, the agency’s policy says that it will retain broad control over what videos are released to the public — and that in particular it will only release footage of serious bodily injuries and deaths in custody if “it is in the best interests of the agency.” This is exactly the opposite of a policy that will make body cameras an effective oversight and accountability measure.

At the ACLU we’ve been saying from the beginning that body cameras won’t be an effective accountability measure unless they’re accompanied by good policies on exactly how they’re used — and that foremost among those policies must be ensuring appropriate public release of recordings. Without good policies, police body cameras are reduced to yet more government surveillance devices, with all that implies (such as over-policing and prosecution), and to propaganda systems that let agencies publicize videos showing officers in a positive light while burying those that don’t.

Some states and cities certainly have good policies and practices for the appropriate release of body camera videos where the public has a compelling interest in such access (such as after a shooting, as opposed to recordings of privacy-invasive situations where the public’s interest is low — see our model policy for details). But the failure of many states and municipalities to enact such policies has been a big reason why the technology has been substantively ineffective at reducing police shootings and abuses.

Most police departments trying to bury footage at least attempt to make bogus claims about the public interest, such as by citing the needs of “an active investigation.” With characteristic Trump Administration arrogance, however, ICE is not even trying to pretend that blocking release of body camera footage will be in the best interests of the public or of the nation — they explicitly say that they will release footage only when it’s in the best interests of the agency.

This immediately brings to mind the brilliant Pournelle’s Law, which says that “In any bureaucratic organization, there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization and those who work for the organization itself,” and that “the second group will always gain control.” That’s a recognition that the narrow protective bureaucratic instincts and actions of an agency not only don’t necessarily match the public good, they often don’t even match the agency’s mission.

And we know what those protective instincts look like: burying videos showing abuse. After more than 6 months, DHS has still not released footage from the body cameras worn by four officers at the Minneapolis shooting of Alex Pretti. There have also been serious problems with compliance with and enforcement of body camera rules. Last year, a Chicago judged ordered immigration agents to use body cameras in their operations there, but compliance was questionable. In one high-profile incident, only one of three Border Patrol agents at the scene activated their camera, for example. This is something that we’ve seen for years at the local level — and all indications are that the lawless and undisciplined DHS immigration agencies are likely to match the worst rather than the best US police departments on that score.

DHS and other federal police agencies generally lack good body camera policies or federal legal requirements, including around the release of video. Of course, even with bad or absent policies, some incidents have been recorded with body cameras that have saved people from charges based on lies by federal agents. Certainly, many wish there was body camera video of recent DHS agency shooting deaths in Texas and Maine. But overall, without good rules, body cameras can be worse than nothing by giving agencies footage to use and misuse as they like.

The larger issue
The new body camera deployment comes in a context of frequent and ongoing violations of human rights and the Constitution by ICE and other DHS agencies. Even with good policies, no amount of body cameras are likely to rein in the chaos and cruelty of our growing national deportation policing force. Far deeper reforms are needed. US lawmakers need to go beyond calling for masks to come off and body cameras to go on, and enact much more far-reaching reforms of agencies that are fast-becoming a blueprint for authoritarianism in the United States.

In particular, as my colleagues recently outlined in a major ACLU report, Congress should enact such measures as a restructuring of the immigration agencies, a repeal of legal immunities they enjoy, an end to mass immigrant detention, and the creation of fair, dignified, and efficient citizenship and immigration rules.

Instead of focusing on just trying to get DHS agencies to record their violence and abuse, Congress should be more focused on ending it. The idea of body cameras is appealing to many, but in the end it is only a band-aid — and they only work if they constrain the power of law enforcement. We have seen locally that in too many departments, police officers do not want to be so constrained, and their management is not inclined to force them to be. When it comes to deployment of this technology at the federal level, it’s pretty clear that here, too, the fix is in.