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Body cams suck, actually
1.3k Plays1 year ago
Police body cameras are sold as a solution that will increase trust, transparency, and accountability with police. Daniella Barreto of Rights Back at You joins host Duncan Kinney to debunk every one of these claims and make the case that police body cameras actually suck ass.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Overview
00:00:02
Speaker
Hey folks, Duncan Kinney here, host of The Progress Report. Today we're speaking with Daniela Beretto, the host of the Rights Back At You podcast, to talk about the recent UCP announcement that they are mandating body cameras. And look, maybe you think that body cameras are good, amazing, something that's actually going to make a difference. Well, I'm here to tell you, no, they suck. And by the end of this pod, if you think that way, I hope I've changed your mind at least a little
Affiliation and Podcast Recommendation
00:00:25
Speaker
bit.
00:00:25
Speaker
Also, the progress report continues to be a member of the small but mighty Harbinger Media Network, and I'd like to recommend the latest pod from Sarah Burrell at Unmaking Saskatchewan. I've recommended this pod before, and I'm going to recommend it again, because it's that good. The latest episode of Unmaking Saskatchewan gets into the groundwork that was laid there before Tommy Douglas ever got elected, and before Saskatchewan ever became the cradle of Medicare.
00:00:49
Speaker
There's actually a lot of organizing happening in Saskatchewan around getting people access to doctors, nurses, hospitals, and infectious disease treatment long before the CCF were even a thing.
Support Appeal
00:01:00
Speaker
And of course, if you like what we do, if you regularly listen to the pod, if you like the investigative journalism we do, if you like our newsletters, please consider becoming a recurring donor. Our content is 100% free, never behind a paywall, and it is listener supported. So if you donate, if you can donate, please do.
00:01:16
Speaker
There is a link in the show notes, or just go to the progressreport.ca slash patrons. And now, onto the show.
Body Cameras Mandate Discussion
00:01:35
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney, recording today here in Amiskwitchi, Wisconsin, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta, here in Treaty 6 territory on the banks of the mighty Kaskasawana Sipi, or the North Saskatchewan River.
00:01:49
Speaker
Joining us today is Daniella Beretto. Daniella is a fellow podcaster and the host and producer of Rights Back At You, which is part of her job as digital activism coordinator for Amnesty International Canada. Daniella was also an organizer with Black Lives Matter Vancouver when she and her comrades found out that they were actually under police surveillance, which is actually going to be relevant for our conversation today. But before we get into what the hell it is we're talking about, Daniella, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing?
00:02:17
Speaker
Hi, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. I'm doing well. Thanks. So, um, you know, are you, is it rainy? Is it warm or is it signs of spring in Vancouver yet where I was very jealous of the early spring that our friends on the coast get? There are signs of spring. I've seen some daffodils blooming and today's the warmest day of the year so far. I think it's supposed to reach the low teens.
00:02:41
Speaker
Ooh, brilliant. I mean, it's a nice day here too. Plus six sunny, but it's, it comes a little later in Edmonton this spring. We're not here to talk about the weather. We are here to talk.
00:02:53
Speaker
about a recent announcement from the United Conservative Party here in Alberta. This was announced by Public Safety Minister Mike Ellis and yeah, they're bringing in body cameras. The UCP are mandating body cameras for all the police forces across the province.
00:03:12
Speaker
And you might wonder why we're talking about this. You might wonder what the hell the purpose of this podcast is, because maybe you think body cameras are good. Maybe you think body cameras are a useful tool. And I'm here to tell you, and Daniella is also here to tell you that they're not.
00:03:29
Speaker
They suck, they're bad in fact. If you think the other way, don't feel bad, this is probably the general vague default setting for most people.
Critique of Body Cameras
00:03:40
Speaker
But we are here today, Danielle and I, to convince you, the humble, smart, beautiful listener of this podcast, that body cameras are in fact an incredibly evil thing that hurts rather than helps. So, Danielle.
00:03:53
Speaker
The reason you're here today is because you wrote a very well done article criticizing body cameras that was published in the Taiyi. You wrote this after the city of Vancouver announced they were bringing them in, the new kind of pro-cop mayor there decided that this would be like, I don't know what, a sop to the people who were criticizing him or what? I'm not entirely sure, but the stated justification is to make everyone safer.
00:04:22
Speaker
Mm. Yes. That, that thing about safety gets repeated a lot here too, but there's all sorts of reasons and rhetoric that get thrown around about why, you know, the powers that be bring body cameras in. Why don't we just take a minute to listen to public safety minister, Mike Ellis, just to get a sense of the kind of language here. Here's a clip. This transformational change is about a paradigm shift as police are no longer seen as an arm of the state, but rather an extension of the community that they serve.
00:04:52
Speaker
as well as being a reflection of that community as well. In order to become an effective extension of the community, there must be trust, oversight, accountability that need to be built between communities and the police serving them. The demand for transparency has never been more clear. The desire for policing services to be committed to ensuring that
00:05:17
Speaker
They are worthy of the trust that we put in them to protect the public is high. In Albertans, I hear you. This government hears you. That is why I am pleased to announce today that Alberta's government is taking steps to increase accountability and trust in policing by mandating the use of body worn cameras for all police services in the province.
00:05:41
Speaker
So there, there it is 10. Wow. That's a paradigm shift. The police will no longer be seen as an arm of the state. Did you get that? Yeah. I mean, you can say that, but that's categorically what they are. So I don't know about you, but if I trust someone, you know, deeply and intimately, the first thing I do when I start having a conversation with them in public is I pull my phone out and I record the conversation. Is that, is that what you do as well?
00:06:10
Speaker
Absolutely, definitely. But trust, they talk about trust a lot here. Do you think mandating body cameras province-wide will increase trust? I mean, no. Just to come out and say that from the get-go, I think we have to ask whether communities trust the police in the first place. And if this is why they're bringing in body cameras, I think there are more fundamental issues that need to be addressed between policing
00:06:38
Speaker
and communities. And I mean, as we'll get into, body cameras are not the fix to that. Body cameras and recording every single transaction, no matter how interaction, no matter how mundane, that would seem to be prima facie evidence of a lack of trust. But no, people don't in fact trust the police.
00:07:00
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah, it's it's really hard to dress that they're coming in with good intent and they can say that. Sure. But for the reality, the reality for many black people, indigenous people, poor people is is the question of whether these new tools are going to be used against us somehow.
00:07:16
Speaker
And yeah, like perhaps it's something that could repair, say your relationship with someone is at zero and you don't trust them at all, then maybe you would have to record every single interaction with them on a camera. But it doesn't speak well to the relationship when the assumption is I have to record everything that happens.
00:07:40
Speaker
Exactly. And I think there's the question of power too. It's not, it's not the people being policed who are doing the recording. I mean, they do, but it's not in that same kind of way when the police have the power to turn on and off body cameras, when the police have all of that footage to begin with. I don't think that's addressing,
Surveillance and Privacy Concerns
00:07:56
Speaker
addressing trust at all. That's just perpetuating this power discrepancy. Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about power relations here. Like, like do body cameras change anything when, uh, you know,
00:08:09
Speaker
a police officer is interacting with a homeless person who they are evicting from an encampment? I mean, I think here we have to look at evidence around whether it does change police officer behavior and from what researchers have seen what many studies have looked at is there isn't a significant difference in at least the way that police officers act. And so putting all this money into
00:08:39
Speaker
outfitting departments with these expensive body cameras and the expense that comes with having to store all that data. If you're a poor person, a Black person, an Indigenous person interacting with the police, that's just a ton more of your data being vacuumed up into the state. And I think that should be a much bigger concern for people than I think it is.
00:09:05
Speaker
I mean, the elephant in the room around this conversation is like police brutality and police violence, particularly against black and indigenous people, right? And in your piece that you wrote for the Ta'i, you know, with the headline, Body Cameras for Police Threaten Public Safety, you know, one of the very first points that you make in that piece is that body cameras don't stop police brutality. They merely record it.
00:09:28
Speaker
Uh, you know, how many examples do we have of, of black and indigenous people simply being brutalized or even killed on camera, you know, like tire nickels in Memphis, George Floyd in Minneapolis. These people are no longer with us, but the fact that the police were wearing body cameras didn't stop them from being killed.
00:09:48
Speaker
Exactly. And I think that's one of the fundamental misunderstandings. I think people often equate body cameras to stopping this violence. But the reason we can see all this violence and these deaths live on camera is because they were recorded. And body cameras record it, but we see time and time again, it doesn't seem to stop the killings.
00:10:13
Speaker
Yeah, like making the brutal reality of policing more publicly known and more and more recordable, more documentable doesn't seem to have done anything to change the brutal nature of policing, right? Which is extremely cynical to say, but like body cameras have been used widely in the United States for going on a decade now. And you would think that would make the United States a safer place to be, but I don't see that panning out.
00:10:44
Speaker
The other big argument you make in your piece is one that I haven't really seen a lot of people make here. There's a lot of arguments against body cameras. Obviously we're going to go through over them all today. But the one thing that I think you bring up that is very important is about surveillance and how this increased surveillance really just gives the police more opportunities to criminalize, marginalize and over over policed people. Um, I'm going to just quote from your piece.
00:11:12
Speaker
Body cameras are a colossal expense, and we'll also introduce the potential for further harms associated with facial recognition technology.
00:11:19
Speaker
Canadian police departments already employ facial recognition technology and have been dishonest about its use. One month after denying they use it, the Toronto Police Service admitted to deploying facial recognition software in 2019. Just a sidebar, Edmonton police actually did the exact same fucking thing at pretty much the exact same time. Continuing on, amid the resulting scandal, police departments in Calgary and Vancouver likewise admitted to using facial recognition technology as well as some units, RCP units in BC.
00:11:46
Speaker
In this context, the potential for body camera data to be used with facial recognition technology is a reasonable concern, and facial recognition technology is notoriously inaccurate. A study from the University of Essex revealed that it was accurate in only 19% of cases. Moreover, as Black American researchers Joy Boulamwini and Timnit Gebroud demonstrate,
00:12:08
Speaker
facial recognition technology is terrible at distinguishing black people, especially black women. There are also concerns about facial recognition technologies, accuracy in identifying indigenous people, trans people, and people who have had facial surgery. So I think like we are so surveilled. We are so under the eye of the Panopcon that it's just like
00:12:27
Speaker
People kind of just accept and dismiss surveillance state criticisms, but why are these concerns about privacy and surveillance so important to you when it comes back to pushing back on body cameras?
00:12:40
Speaker
I mean, to put it simply, body cameras just mean more surveillance. They're a portable surveillance device. I've learned not to read the comments, but one appeared pretty soon after that piece was published that basically said that I was conflating two issues, which I think might be reasonable to say at first glance. But if you look at what happened with the Edmonton Police Service, if you look at what happened with the RCMP where
00:13:08
Speaker
They were using tools that unlawfully, like facial recognition with Clearview AI, that I don't think it's actually too far a leap to make.
00:13:25
Speaker
surveillance begets more surveillance, like Axon body cameras, which are on a lot of police officers in Canada. The Axon ethics board had to tell them to pause the facial recognition capabilities on those cameras. I think that was in 2019.
00:13:42
Speaker
And I'm actually not sure what's happened with that since, but the fact is that technology already exists. And there's so many problems that could come with things like real time facial recognition with the issue of misidentification. There are issues that could come with retroactively being able to apply facial recognition to all of this stored data, all of the stored footage that police would then have. So I do think that there are surveillance issues which are
00:14:11
Speaker
obviously connected to human rights issues around privacy, around your ability to basically just walk through the world without being tracked and monitored, your rights to non-discrimination, freedom of expression, all of these things that are so connected to privacy and surveillance that would then just be strapped to a police officer and wandering around your neighborhood. I mean, surveillance is the classic kind of boiling frog shit, right?
00:14:40
Speaker
We are the most surveilled people ever. And the only people who will be more surveilled than us are the people tomorrow, you know, like the state and corporations are constantly inventing new ways to track us and, and to document where we are and keep all that data and monetize it or use it to their own ends. And again, like I started off this, this, this little bit by being like, I think people just don't care. Like, I don't think it's a high priority for anyone, but
00:15:08
Speaker
Dramatically increasing the amount of police surveillance that happens is bad. And that's what happens when you put a camera on every single cop that patrols your city.
00:15:18
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. We actually got into this a little bit in our podcast with Dr. Chris Gilliard, who basically studies surveillance and policing and has a lot to do with neighborhood surveillance. But he says that the reason that people are so attached to the idea that surveillance equals safety is because there has been this longstanding campaign by police and society at large, he says, to equate surveillance with safety.
00:15:47
Speaker
And these claims often don't bear out, and the question really is safety for whom? I mean, you just said that we're the most surveilled people, I think. I think that definitely falls a lot along lines of race and class and gender. But
00:16:07
Speaker
I think we really have to interrogate that claim that surveillance, i.e. body cameras, make us more safe. Because I think the real question is safety for whom and from whom. I mean, Indigenous people, I would contend, are the most surveilled people in Canada from birth.
00:16:24
Speaker
And I don't think body cameras or more surveillance is going to make indigenous people more safe from the threat of policing.
Personal Experiences with Surveillance
00:16:32
Speaker
I don't think that's true for black people. I don't think that's true for Muslim people, homeless people. Anyone who dominant society is scared of is not going to ever be made more safe by more surveillance.
00:16:48
Speaker
Yeah, really like the only thing that the kind of ubiquitous body camera use in the United States has shown is like, if they do, if the police do something so brutal and so terrible, and it's caught on camera, people might get mad about it after the fact. But again, that doesn't help the people in the moment. Those people are still facing the violence, brutality, discrimination that they're facing. Like, you know, like again, the surveillance protects whom is an excellent is a great point. And
00:17:18
Speaker
It's certainly, yeah, again, it's really not making the people at the pointy end of the stick when it comes to dealing with police more safe.
Financial Implications
00:17:26
Speaker
But I understand that you even have some like firsthand experience about being surveilled by police when you were with Black Lives Matter Edmonton. What happened there?
00:17:34
Speaker
Yeah, so I was with Black Lives Matter Vancouver and we were organizing around, obviously at that time in 2016, 2017 time, a lot of the police killings that were happening in the States and sort of equating that to police violence in Canada. And this was probably a year after I'd been quite involved with the organization that
00:17:56
Speaker
we found out that the vigil that we'd held outside the Vancouver Art Gallery to remember Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, two people who'd been killed just a day apart by the police in the United States, that the RCMP had sort of flagged that as a serious event or serious crime, unfolding event, and had all of these internal documents flying around about social media surveillance of the event. And it was just, it was unsettling.
00:18:26
Speaker
I've said this before, but also unsurprising that black groups, indigenous groups are often going to be under surveillance. It sort of comes with the territory, I guess, if you're organizing against the state. But that's definitely what sparked my interest in surveillance or police surveillance specifically as a concept and the way that it impacts our rights to protest and our rights to freedom of expression.
00:18:53
Speaker
Yeah, scary shit. And it's, uh, I don't think we really contemplate just how much resources the police have and how much they can sink into surveillance when they fucking feel like it, whenever they want. It's real panopticon shit. It's, it's, it sucks. It sucks to think about for more than five minutes and, uh, the longer you think about it, the worse it gets.
00:19:20
Speaker
The other thing you raise in your piece that I think is worth bringing up is you called body cameras a colossal expense. And that's the funny thing about this announcement here in Alberta is that there is no dollar figure. We have no idea how much money this is going to cost.
00:19:35
Speaker
Um, I've seen some estimates out of BC, actually, I think it was like a counselor out of Coquitlam who estimated the cost at like two to $3,000 a camera, which is just the capital costs. I don't think that takes into account operations, operational costs of just like managing the data, pulling the data off, having paying the salaries of the people managing that as well as the capital of those like giant hard drives. But. Yeah.
00:19:59
Speaker
You know, we also don't have any idea if the province is going to kick in any money. So it's very likely that the cities are just going to be paying full freight for this. And like, I'm just going to pull a number out of the air, just so we have a number to talk about here. But like, let's say it costs like $5 million to purchase the cameras. Let's say another million and a half a year to operate them in a mid-sized city such like Edmonton.
00:20:23
Speaker
$5 million a year plus one and a half million ongoing. What would you rather spend that money on to actually reduce crime and make people's lives better? A lot of things. I think there's often the question about whether this expenses is useful or whether this expenses
00:20:47
Speaker
going to change things and I know this is kind of a cop out answer I've already used before but kind of like for who benefits I guess is my question to most things and I think that for a lot of politicians
Budget and Accountability
00:21:03
Speaker
and a lot of people who want to look like they're doing something. I think this is a legitimate place to put money in their eyes, that it, to the public, looks like they're taking issues of police violence, police brutality, and police misconduct seriously, because look at all this money they're putting behind this accountability mechanism.
00:21:25
Speaker
And I think that there are a lot of other places that I can talk about a little bit and I'm sure you have ideas and there are many community groups sort of looking into where would we rather spend this money for actual public safety? What does public safety mean? But I think that there's a
00:21:45
Speaker
something that I wanted to touch on earlier when you were asking about trust and accountability, that there was an opinion piece by Eric Laming and Christopher Schneider, I think, very recently about what was happening in Alberta. And they make the point that trust and accountability are incredibly hard to measure. There's no standard understanding about what that means. And so to be promising that body cameras will increase trust and increase accountability when not everybody's on the same page about what that means,
00:22:14
Speaker
is a questionable claim. And so then to also be putting money into something that is not strongly supported by evidence that costs a lot where we could be putting it into things that have been proven to
00:22:30
Speaker
actually increase public safety. So things like housing, um, things like, you know, like you said, basically anything, um, crisis, crisis response. Yeah. Through those programs. I don't know what it's like in Vancouver. Those programs are so underfunded, so tiny compared to literally every other kind of emergency response system we have, whether it's police fire or EMS.
00:22:56
Speaker
Yeah, one of the things in Vancouver is this sort of car 87 that's supposed to have a mental health nurse in it too. And a lot of the criticisms around that are that that money is still going towards the police and the police just being there. An argument that many activists kind of refer to as well, the police just being there escalates the situation. And so why are we funding something that
00:23:23
Speaker
We could be looking at what actually makes situations safer, what actually deescalates situations. And I think there's so many ideas and so many community groups like in Vancouver, we have defund 604 that's doing incredible work around. They did a people's budget recently looking at where people actually wanted to spend this money. And it was overwhelmingly housing and peer support and the kinds of stuff that communities know work to make them safer.
00:23:49
Speaker
Yeah, like the demands since, you know, 2020 George Floyd, the demands for defunding the police have been quite clear and still ring true even though, you know, the powerful people that manage city budgets police budgets, don't want to do anything about it. Housing, mental health programs, harm reduction, civilian crisis response.
00:24:09
Speaker
These are easy. These programs largely exist and they just simply need a order of magnitude more funding. And police budgets are such a black hole, right? Like they suck in, like you said, with the nurses. We have a police chief here in Edmonton who's very gung ho about including public health in everything that the police do. So essentially you get the police in charge of public health. It is insidious, in fact, how often police are inserting themselves into
00:24:38
Speaker
all sorts of areas of service delivery and our lives that they have no business being in. And when it comes to body cameras, anything that adds more money to the police budget, even if it's just $5 million to like a $500 million budget, that's just never a good idea. It's such a black hole for money that can be spent literally on anything anywhere else that would help people.
00:24:59
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I think we are facing very similar, I mean, everyone across the country is facing very similar kind of like expansions by the police, right? Ken Sim and ABC in Vancouver with these mental health or these nurses alongside cops. We have Chief McPhee here in Edmonton doing very similar things like
00:25:18
Speaker
This is the trend and I think we have to be on top of it. I was going to say, I've heard the phrase cop lash, like backlash to the calls for defunding the police and how no police department across Canada has actually decreased their budget despite all of the support for redistributing some of those funds, putting it back into community.
00:25:47
Speaker
Yeah, anyone who says the police have been defunded is literally lying. The police budgets have increased across Canada, of course, and of course they did. The final kind of talking point from the UCP kind of reasons for bringing this in, and it's also a reason used even by the manufacturer itself, is accountability. That body cameras will make the police more accountable.
00:26:12
Speaker
I struggle with that one because the police accountability system in Alberta is irretrievably broken. It takes Acer, the body that's responsible for investigating.
00:26:24
Speaker
of police violence, serious injuries, police that cause death, like years and years to investigate cases. And you don't get it. It's not like you get an update. It's not like you get, oh, we're working on it. Here's what we can tell you. Like there was more than a year ago now here in Edmonton, police shot two people dead.
00:26:43
Speaker
One of them was just someone sitting in their house watching television. The other one was someone who had just robbed a liquor store of a liquor bottle, who apparently had a fake gun. But again, they haven't released a picture of the gun. We have no details on this investigation. It's more than a year later.
00:27:01
Speaker
police accountability. I think that's just one example of how the police accountability system is broken. I could, I could talk about that shit for hours. And so when you hear proponents of body cameras like Ken Sim, the mayor of Vancouver, like, you know, the minister of public safety here in Alberta talk about accountability, like, do you believe it for a second? I think it's another, it's a word that seems to have lost meaning.
00:27:30
Speaker
What does accountability mean in the context we find ourselves in? Like you're saying, the Investigations Office in Alberta is notoriously bad at investigating its own
00:27:47
Speaker
its own police force. The same in BC. There was a Globe and Mail piece that came out earlier this month and late last month, two of them actually, looking at how few police officers actually cooperate with the oversight office in BC. And there are lots of people doing so much more detailed work about this than I know. Minakshi Minow at Pivot Legal Society and Tonya Ghanaba there as well.
00:28:16
Speaker
There are two roles dedicated to police accountability issues in BC because the situation is so bad. And I think when it comes to body cameras, that issue of accountability in the context we are already in is a massive question. If so few police officers will cooperate with the investigations process to begin with, what does that mean around body camera footage? Will that ever be released? Does something so awful have to happen?
00:28:44
Speaker
that people already know about before the public gets to see any of this footage. I think that it just introduces so many more questions around accountability before we even start talking about body cameras. And then the final buzzword of all of this, transparency. This is going to increase transparency on the police. And it's like,
00:29:08
Speaker
Well, one, again, I mean, we've seen this in the United States. They can just shut them off when they know bad stuff. They're about to do bad stuff, or they know bad stuff is about to happen, or there's a malfunction, or right. But it's not like you're able to just turn on an on-duty cop's body camera and watch it like a Twitch stream. There will be rules around how this video footage is recorded and maintained and able to be accessed.
00:29:38
Speaker
I am really based on someone who foips police services a lot. I foip police, uh, commissions a lot. Like I, uh, there are always very creative exceptions that are used to not bring out
00:29:54
Speaker
or not to release potentially damaging information to the police. And even just the structure of the system here, like regular people in, here in Alberta at least, can't like, fwipe the details of a police disciplinary hearing if it doesn't involve them.
00:30:15
Speaker
And it doesn't, like there's just, there's so many, the structure of the system is set up to benefit the cops in such a way that I am really hesitant to believe that this would improve transparency in any meaningful way. And that's just as someone who does police accountability journalism and like deals with the way the system is set up and the structure of the system.
00:30:34
Speaker
Sorry, I think that the people who would be most affected by this and the areas that police are more frequently in filming all of this on body cameras are the people who probably have the least access and power to be able to even figure out how to get that footage in the first place when they're worried about having somewhere to sleep at night. Like this claim to transparency, I think it is very, very difficult to take at face value.
00:31:03
Speaker
you gotta hire a lawyer, you gotta fill out a form, you gotta wait two months, you gotta fill out another form, you know, like, get out, get the fuck out of here, it's not. I mean, the other funny thing too is that like the vast majority of the like terabytes and petabytes of like all of the footage that's going to be recorded of cops doing cop things,
00:31:20
Speaker
is that the vast majority of police work is like extremely mundane, like sitting in your car driving around shit. Um, which, um, there's just now, now Alberta is just going to have petabytes of that shit sitting on hard drives for, you know, the five years, however long you have to maintain it until you delete it. Right. Yeah.
Political Influence and Lobbying
00:31:38
Speaker
I love it. Finally, there's one final angle to this story that I feel obligated to bring up. We were the first to report on this. I don't see any other news outlet really pick up on this.
00:31:52
Speaker
Conservative insider Monty Solberg was hired as a lobbyist by Axon, the dominant manufacturer of body cameras in North America. He was hired by Axon to lobby the provincial government to push for the provincial government to look into body cameras, and lo and behold, the Alberta government mandated province-wide body cameras on planes. Interesting.
00:32:16
Speaker
Mm-hmm. That lobbying started on October 11th, according to documents from the Lobbyist Registry, and Monty Solberg's son, Matt Solberg, started working for the UCP government as the executive director of caucus in October as well. His son also worked at that same lobbying firm. Daniel, when I say all of those things in that order, what does that sound like to you?
00:32:37
Speaker
That sounds like a lot of people involved with each other and involved with Axon. I'm not sure what I can say about that. That is just very interesting information. It certainly is very interesting. I think you brought it up earlier, the who benefits part of this. You always got to look, who benefits? This reminds- One of the companies that benefits- Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead.
00:33:04
Speaker
I was just going to say this reminds me of some of the conversations around ShotSpotter in Toronto a few years ago, when basically the police were trying to put listening devices into neighborhoods where they thought gun violence was more likely to happen. And there were these sort of lobbying documents that
00:33:29
Speaker
surfaced around ShotSpotter-related individuals having meetings with the mayor at the time and just how interesting all the behind-the-scenes stuff was to be able to put this surveillance devices into neighborhoods.
00:33:49
Speaker
That definitely didn't go through. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association had a lot to say about that. Communities had a lot to say about that. And I think body cameras raise many of the same concerns around whether things like that are necessary, proportionate, constitutional or effective. And I think that same lens needs to be put on body
Research Bias and Surveillance Impact
00:34:06
Speaker
cameras. And when lobbyists are in there kind of talking to decision makers, I think that makes our lives very difficult as people trying to organize for community safety.
00:34:18
Speaker
And finally, when you look at who benefits, obviously, the manufacturer, Axon, is the company that makes body cameras, is going to benefit. And a funny thing about Axon, they're also the company that makes tasers, or as cops like to call them, conducted energy weapons. And over the past 20, 25 years or so, they've developed a real cottage industry of academics and think tanks that have tried to like,
00:34:44
Speaker
Well, they started with Tasers because that was the big obvious one because a lot of people were freaked out by Tasers. A lot of people were dying because of Tasers back in the... I mean, they're still dying today, but especially back when they were being deployed across police services across North America.
00:34:58
Speaker
Um, but then they've turned the same kind of like intellectual infrastructure to talk about the benefits of body cameras, making all sorts of claims about body cameras. So I would encourage you if you ever see studies around body cameras that are being cited by media or being cited by police, look into who's paying for them. Look into where those studies come from, which academics they come from, where those academics, uh, get their money from and who their associations are with because, uh, yeah, the benefits of, of body cameras, if you do see anyone talking about them tend to be.
00:35:27
Speaker
Vastly overblown there isn't a lot of literature to support them and the stuff that does kind of comes from pretty sketchy sources Mm-hmm. Actually when when I was kind of looking at stuff last night I came across something really interesting perhaps you have seen this stat thrown around to and the Calgary police have been wearing body cameras for a couple of years now and It
00:35:52
Speaker
there's this claim that they were the reason behind an 11% decrease in use of force incidents. And so, yeah, last night I was kind of looking around and from what I can see, it looks like the year before they implemented them and around 2018 was the year that they were the highest use of force incidents compared to the previous five-year average.
00:36:19
Speaker
And then to make the claim that that 11% drop from the highest year to still being higher than that five-year average is something that I think a lot of people wouldn't necessarily take the time to go dig through and look.
00:36:34
Speaker
look for. And so yeah, I think it's, there's definitely information I don't have access to, but this is what I could find in like 20 minutes of digging around online. But I do think that there's absolutely that question you raise of what data, where it comes from, first of all, but also kind of
00:36:54
Speaker
what it's being compared to, I think it's very easy to cherry pick statistics that look from one year to another that don't take into account kind of fluctuations over time, what it looked like before. To me, it looks like in Calgary, use of force incidents were lower before body cameras came into play than after them. And so I really want to echo your point that data is not always what it seems to be.
00:37:22
Speaker
Yeah. And cast a skeptical eye is always, always, always, especially when police in the state are talking about increased surveillance or things like tasers. But, but this has been a lovely, illuminating conversation. Daniela, thanks so much for coming on. What's the best way for people to follow along with your work and kind of keep up with what you do?
00:37:42
Speaker
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I really, really enjoyed chatting with you. Yes, so I produce and host a podcast with Amnesty International Canada called Rights Back at You. You can find it at amnesty.ca slash rightsbackatyou. We have five episodes out all about this stuff. The season is about anti-Black racism, policing, and surveillance.
00:38:02
Speaker
and it's all narrative driven. So I try not to make it super depressing and tell some stories about things that have happened mostly in Canada and also speak to people who have visions for a much better future and are organizing for that.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:38:16
Speaker
So I hope you check it out. And yeah, thank you again for having me on the show.
00:38:21
Speaker
Yeah, thanks for coming on. Folks, if you like this podcast, if you like what we do, if you like the newsletter we put out, if you like the investigative journalism we do, I would encourage you to join the 500 or so other folks who help keep this independent media project going and become a regular monthly donor. It's very easy to do that. There's a link in the show notes. You can go to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons, put in your credit card and contribute. We would really appreciate it.
00:38:45
Speaker
Also, if you have any notes, thoughts, comments, I am really easy to get ahold of. I am on Twitter far too often at, at Duncan Kinney and you can reach me by email at Duncan K at progress, Alberta.ca. Thank you to Jim Story for editing the pod. Thank you to cosmic family communist for our theme. Thank you for listening and goodbye.