Introduction
Elie Wiesel, who lost both his foundation and his personal fortune to financier Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, [ABC News] was asked how he would like to see the scam artist punished. Wiesel answered: “I would like him to be in a solitary cell with only a screen, and on that screen for at least five years of his life, every day and every night, there should be pictures of his victims, one after the other after the other, all the time a voice saying, ‘Look what you have done to this old lady, look what you have done to that child, look what you have done,’ nothing else” [ Chicago Tribune]. This is a curious panopticon – the jailer sees to it that the incarceree must see, all the time, the eyes of the victims confronting the evildoer. He becomes the central observer of a unique show, not himself pinned by the surveillant gaze of a central prison authority but instead trapped in a private exhibition constructed just for him of pictures intended to evoke memories of a wounded collective of victims.[1] One problem with this punishment is that we cannot be sure that it actually would be one. Wiesel wants to remind Madoff that his acts had consequences but if Madoff is as sociopathic as his acts would suggest, it is equally possible that he would find the pictures a source of perverse pleasure, reminding him, while incarcerated, of his abundant successes, making the pictures “trophies” of bad acts to be delectated over, a customized pornography not unlike the collections of victim’s personal belongings made by some serial offenders. For instance, news reports of the arrest of Philip Markoff for killing a young woman offering massage services on Craig’s List made sure to note early on that he collected panties from the victims [Netter], conforming him to previously existing stereotypes of compulsive killers.
Wiesel betrays a naïve belief in the realistic power of photographs — that his picture gallery will communicate “see these victims” to its audience, Bernie Madoff, with all that implies to him, Elie Weisel. This in turn depends upon his belief that these pictures will reveal truths about which we can all agree because they describe a commonly shared perceptual reality captured by a mechanism that we believe has no desires of its own: the camera. Photographs are commonly understood to have been caused by the reality before the camera, light carrying information and imprinting it on a sensitive surface that can then be prepared for display. Consider this statement: “ ‘Photographs are traces left when objects causally interact with cameras, and these elements can be preserved.” On the face of it this denies the frame of human making and misses (as does Peirce) the propositional aspect of all pictures.” [Hookway, p. 65].
Photographers know that this is a misconception but the general public doesn’t seem to share that awareness. Certainly the United States Supreme Court is no different in this general attitude toward photography than was Elie Weisel. Confronted with dashboard camera video evidence in the Scott v. Harris case, Justice Scalia, writing for the Court declared, “We are happy to allow the videotape to speak for itself.” [Scott][2] Generally, the Supreme Court only reviews matters that pertain to the interpretation of the law. In Scott v. Harris they were asked to decide a qualified immunity case that had never actually gone to trial and so, unusually, the Court was confronted with evidence, in this case copies of police car dashboard camera video tape of the incident that brought about the filing of Harris’ suit against Scott.
Implicit in Justice Scalia’s assertion is that we will see and believe and therefore agree with the Court’s assessment of the case and its decision. Like Weisel, the Court does not imagine that there can be substantive disagreement in viewers’ assessments of the meaning of the video evidence in their case(s). An empirical study of public response to the Scott dashboard camera tape showed that, while the majority agreed with the outcome of the case, believing that the tape did reveal that the driver of the car was, in fact, driving too fast and the police chase justified, the study responses did vary with political attitudes of survey participants. [Kahan] My methodology does not make empirical claims; it depends upon knowledge of the medium, how it is made, and attending to what is observable in the piece of video. (Readers are encouraged to view for themselves.)
And it is video, a very particular form of video, that concerns me here – that generated by Tasers, (ECDs, or electronic control devices or stun guns), when they are equipped with recording devices that document their use – what I will call tasercam video. Taser International markets this equipment to move interactions involving police use of Tasers from “he said/she said” claims to more evidence-based records that permit review of the circumstances of police use of Tasers post-deployment. I will discuss, briefly, the landscape of legally relevant video and then discuss the characteristics of this kind of video in particular, concluding with some thoughts on why, even given its extremely potent and limited nature, we need to pay more attention to the media effects, not less, with tasercam video.