In contrast, hand held devices (cameras, video camcorders, still photo and video cell phone cameras, audio recording devices) are often pulled out in a hurry, subject to amateur deployment with shaking hands and wandering gaze leaving data confusing at best. These “informal” video fragments will become evidence, sometimes requiring courts to sort out different and partial accounts of the same event as evidenced by the products of different “observers” – there may be surveillance camera footage, cell phone footage, dashcam video from police vehicles, and footage from passersby on the street — all relevant to the legal determination to be made. Police are ambivalent about citizens’ use of technology for public purposes. On the one hand, they create websites where citizens can send text messages containing tips, and, now, cell phone video, and on the other, they will attempt to confiscate cameras and camera phones if they believe that they will be caught on them in ways harmful to their interests [Baker] [Hauser].
An example of how complicated this new visual environment can be for law enforcement is a story concerning the shooting at point blank range of a young man in the wee hours of January 1, 2009, at a BART Station (Bay Area Rapid Transit) by a uniformed officer of the transit police [La Ganga, & Dolan]. Presumably there was surveillance camera footage from the station. Some travelers managed to hide their devices from police collection and later posted clips to YouTube, forcing authorities to deal with a problem that wouldn’t go away. Potential problems of authenticating these kinds of video fragments, and then relating them to one another as decision makers must, in order to construct coherent narratives of the events, abound.
So, like it or not, decision makers are going to have to become adept at fitting these video pieces together in sensible ways. They will need to understand that the video they are asked to use in judgment requires reading and interpretation, not just viewing. Some surveillance footage can only be specifically interpreted using other first person accounts, other footage, and technological enhancement, because it is low resolution and shot at some distance from the relevant actions being recorded. See, for instance, footage from more than one fixed camera in the 95th Street Red Line station in Chicago where Officer Alvin Weems shot Michael Pleasance on Saturday, March 8, 2003. Without the voice-over explanation of what we are seeing, very little is clearly understandable. [Chicago Reader]