on December 8, 2025, 6:45 pm, in reply to "Indeed worth pointing out, thx. Wasn't aware of that history, must've passed me by... cheers, I (nm)"
What many people don’t know is that internal documents, public statements, and industry materials reveal that police officials and for-profit manufacturers of body cameras and related software had been clamoring for the technology for years. However, prior to Michael Brown’s murder, police and prosecutors had been unable to get local governments to spend the billions of dollars needed to outfit every cop with a mobile surveillance camera that the cops themselves control and that prosecutors would use almost exclusively against marginalized people accused of minor crimes. Several large companies—who were eyeing body cameras as a multi-billion-dollar industry—had unsuccessfully lobbied for years for government funding to help police procure the money needed to integrate body-camera data into cloud-based computing systems and artificial intelligence algorithms that operationalize facial and voice-recognition. In the absence of government funding, they had even turned to the vast world of private police foundations, raising millions in donations from people like Stephen Spielberg to privately fund body cameras because police wanted them so badly.34
After police shot Michael Brown in 2014, the cops, prosecutors, and companies seized their opportunity, taking advantage of public outrage and a willing news media to convince local government officials to pay for the most expensive expansion of police surveillance technology in modern history. They reframed cameras as a “reform” to control police violence, almost always excluding from media coverage the views of experts, social movement leaders, and directly affected people who were warning that the technology, in the hands of the police and prosecutors, would not only fail to stop police violence, but usher in a new era of state surveillance and big data–fueled repression.
In my 2024 study of body cameras, Body Cameras: The Language of Our Dreams, I show how police and their allies used the news to dispense talking points that police lacked funding for crucial technology to hold themselves accountable. In reality, in addition to new surveillance technology useful in intelligence gathering at protests and to protect against civil liability for individual officers, police and prosecutors wanted body cameras because the technology gave them a powerful new form of evidence: an outward-looking camera that government agents control in terms of what it captures, from whose perspective, when video is publicly released, and how videos are edited. Body-camera videos are now routinely used in every courtroom in the U.S. to convict people of things like drug possession and trespassing and are almost never used against police. They help the punishment bureaucracy process more arrests because police, prosecutors, and judges use the videos to pressure people to plead guilty more quickly and to secure harsher punishment with that increased leverage. This is precisely the future police chiefs and corporate sales representatives envisioned over a decade earlier. The leading manufacturers of the cameras and purveyors of the software, like Axon (renamed from TASER), grew by billions in net worth, and many of the largest companies in the world—including Microsoft and Amazon—are making a lot of money from the perpetual surveillance technology contracts for software, databases, storage, and training.35
The news media collaborated every step of the way in this charade. In the nine years of media coverage I examined for my study, nearly every article characterized body cameras as a “reform” offered to promote police “accountability” and “transparency.” I demonstrate that the news used buzzwords and carefully chosen “experts” to disseminate police talking points with little critical perspective, and never mentioned the actual history about the long-standing desire that punishment bureaucrats and surveillance companies had for them or why. A common police refrain parroted by cherry-picked “experts” was that the cameras were a “win-win.” Even the growing number of detailed news investigations in recent years that accurately discuss the evidence from the government’s own studies concluding that body cameras do not make police less violent or more accountable nonetheless erase the true history that body cameras were not intended as a well-meaning police accountability measure. Copaganda manufactures both consensus for dangerous policies and powerful mythologies about the intentions of the punishment bureaucracy.
Provided with the illusion that body cameras could protect marginalized people from police violence—the opposite of why they were created and how they were marketed to police and prosecutors internally—it is no wonder that huge percentages of people supported the technology despite knowing very little about it. Meanwhile, the news’s focus on individual police body-camera videos after each new incident of police violence steered conversations away from deeper systemic questions about the purpose and function of policing, why police violence was still increasing, and the nature of policing reform.
In the wake of the 2023 murder of Tyre Nichols, New York City mayor Eric Adams went on national television to explain his decision to resurrect a controversial police unit similar to the SCORPION Unit that killed Nichols in Memphis. He argued that the NYC squad would be trained to “keep your body cameras on,” and he used Nichols’s murder to celebrate body cameras (even though they had neither prevented the murder nor provided the definitive footage of it).36 The mere existence of the body-camera technology was now used as an excuse to engage in the practices that had been protested. The dots had all been connected, the circle completed.
The police, prosecutors, courts, prisons, and probation and parole officers, along with the multi-billion-dollar industries that evolve in symbiosis with them, use their own violence, waste, and ineffectiveness to justify securing ever more power in a perpetual cycle of “reform.” Each failure becomes a reason to hoard more money doing the same things.37
The corporate media are complicit in the Gaza genocide.
Never forget what they did. Never forgive them for it.
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