(mumbles)
- This is footage from a police body worn camera
taken at a protest in Atlanta on May 30th.
It captured a moment of police violence
that feels all too familiar.
- And we're getting our first look at police body cam video,
showing the tasing and arrest of two college students.
- The two students are stopped by police
as they're driving home.
They've just witnessed the arrest of a friend.
And after a back and forth with officers
they're shot with tasers, pulled from the car
and arrested themselves.
(mumbles)
- The video went viral another example
of police violence against black civilians.
It's hard to know what to take from the one clip,
but there are other angles available.
Another body camera and two different shots from news teams.
As viewers, we get different details
from the different angles, but according to some research,
the perspective of a clip can influence
us in more subtle ways.
And it can affect whether or not we hold police accountable
for the actions that they take.
There's never been more footage of police on the job.
Body worn cameras in particular
had spread rapidly over the past decade.
They're a broad effort to bring
more accountability into policing,
but they also raise questions
about the power recordings have.
There's a bunch of research into how police react
to being filmed, but that's only half the equation.
- But what we didn't know
is how do we as the community, right?
Make judgements when we're presented
with this type of information.
- Broderick Turner researches consumer behavior
at Virginia tech.
Last year he published a paper
that looks at how viewers interpret police footage.
He thought, okay, we might know what happens
in a body camera clip, but what are we assuming
about the officer's intentions in that moment?
- Did a person like mean to do a thing, right?
Did they set out to go from A to B, right?
That's our general measure of intentionality.
- For the study, his team downloaded every body cam
and dash cam clip they could find on YouTube.
They measured how often and for how long
officers were visible in each clip.
They even filmed more abstract incidents of their own.
- So I got my cohort mates in the PhD program
to like wear body cams and bump into each other or drop
things, do all these random things around our office.
- Finally, they showed a few of these clips to participants.
Some got the dash cam version of an event,
others got the body cam.
And they asked what were the intentions
of the people in the shots?
The answers were striking
and they hinged on who was visible.
- What we found was that to make attributional judgments,
our brains need to attach those judgments to a person.
- To see what that means, let's go back to Atlanta.
Here's two views of the young woman
being pulled from the car.
One clip is an officer's body cam,
the other is a news broadcast.
In the first we see mostly the students,
the officers are off screen, save for an arm,
wielding a taser, or grabbing the student.
In the second clip, we actually see
the officer behind the body cam.
So we watch them do the things
that happen in the first clip.
The big difference is who's on screen the most,
the officer or the student.
And according to the study, that's what drives our judgment.
Viewers who get a good look at police
tend to hold them more responsible for what they're doing.
- And so it just makes it easier for us to attach
these attributional judgments when we can see
the person doing the action.
- Other research supports this idea
that body cameras could let officers off the hook more.
But for Broderick, the camera that took the footage
is ultimately not the issue.
- There's no like, a categorical difference
necessarily between dash cam and body cam.
What's important is the information that's like
available within those videos, right?
And so the available information in these videos
allows us to see the person doing the action.
- Here, one officer's body camera clearly shows
another officer striking the car with a baton.
- One way to think about body cams is that essentially
we're able to turn every cop
into a surveillance of other officers.
- "The Verge" actually provided Broderick
with the Atlanta footage and he ran a version of his study
with this body cam clip and this news clip.
The results were curious.
Viewers judged the officer and the news clip
a bit more harshly than in the body cam,
but not by much.
That didn't phase Broderick.
He pointed out that the officer's arms
are visible in the body cam.
And according to his original work,
that's more than enough for our brains to hook onto.
- And so what we found is that if you can see the hand
do the action, the intentionality judgment looks almost
exactly the same as you can see the whole person doing it.
- The more striking result was this.
As a baseline, Broderick showed some participants
no video at all, just a written news
article about the incident.
54% of those respondents thought the officer
in the story should be fired.
But the people who saw the news and video, 80%.
Similar story for the body cam,
either video perspective was a game changer.
And as other research shows,
it's not just perspective that sways us.
If a video is played back more slowly,
people see more intention in the actors.
A different study showed viewers footage of an arrest,
but some also read a police report
containing misinformation.
Those people judged the suspect more harshly,
even though the video does not corroborate the report.
The point is video has power over us,
whether we realize it or not.
There's one perspective we haven't accounted for,
the two students in the car.
- And it was just chaos, really, like they started
rushing the car and telling us to like, get outta here.
And, you know, we were just kind of terrified.
- Messiah Young and Taniyah Pilgrim describe a lightning
fast escalation by the police that night.
Officer's appearing out of nowhere,
attacking their friend and then turning
their attention on the car.
They've seen some of the footage,
but they barely recognize it.
- I really feel like a different person.
- Every time I see it, I'm like that can't be me
because like I said, I would never think that
I would be in a position like this because.
- It's like being disconnected from reality.
- Yeah.
- Both Messiah and Taniyah were released.
Messiah was treated for multiple injuries,
including a cracked wrist and a gash on his arm.
The only charges that stuck were against six
of the officers, four were fired.
- Messiah and Taniyah can't know the officer's true
intentions any more than we can, but they have an idea.
- What probably upset them so much
was us seeing them attacking our friend.
So they were like.
- They were embarrassed.
- Yeah like what the heck.
- They were just kind of like reacting on like instinct.
Because if you're embarrassed you see that other people see
you doing wrong, you're going to try to cover that up.
- Whatever happens in our brains
when we watch footage of police, it matters.
The trend towards recording officers is gaining steam.
Some of that footage will find its way online.
Millions of people will see it.
Juries will evaluate it,
lawmakers will cite it.
It will continue to change
the national conversation on policing.
And overall Broderick thinks that's a good thing.
Even if the footage is biased or incomplete, it still helps
us understand what's really going on out there.
- What gets measured gets moved.
And so let's open up these measurements
like let's let the public see them,
let's let you know researchers work (mumbles) them.
And when police organizations make this possible,
it allows us to understand like policing
and their relationship to the citizen even better.
- This video is part of a larger project at "The Verge"
that looks at the power and consequences
of filming police violence.
Our other YouTube channel investigates
what can happen after you hit record, so check that out too
and thanks for watching.