On the latest episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver delves into the proliferation of police body cameras, “devices that allow us to get an up-close look at law enforcement’s interactions with the public” and which some experts say represent the largest new investment in policing in a generation.
He explained that body cameras are seen as a “popular solution for law enforcement transparency,” with many Democratic lawmakers currently calling for “taking off the masks and turning on the body cameras” in negotiations over the Trump administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in U.S. cities.
“The idea that body cameras can be a way to defuse interactions with law enforcement is appealing, which is probably why we seem to be slapping them on the chests of all ICE agents across the country in the name of accountability,” Oliver explained. “But the problem is, the more you study body cameras, the more you realize they are only effective if used correctly, and in many cases, they are not effective at all.”
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Oliver cited the limitations of body cameras, including the obvious fact that recordings are limited to the camera’s field of view, which can be incomplete or misleading. “These restrictions are exacerbated when officers mute, cover, or turn off cameras, which happens all the time, sometimes on purpose,” Oliver said in front of video footage of an Oklahoma police officer pulling over a man suspected of driving under the influence. The man, a sergeant with another department, asked the officer to turn off the camera.
“It makes sense for these things to have an off button,” Oliver points out. “Cops need to be able to poop calmly like the rest of us, and some of the people they’re talking to may need to protect their privacy, too.” Some states, such as Connecticut, have laws that require body cameras to be turned off during encounters with undercover officers or informants, when officers are taking a break or conducting private business, or when someone is undergoing a medical or psychological evaluation. “But clearly when people are injured or killed by police, some important interactions remain unrecorded.”
But even if the officer did turn on the camera, even if it clearly shows what happened, there’s still the question of what happened in all the footage. There’s a lot to it – Axon, the largest provider of police body cameras in the United States, offers cloud storage to its customers and has a database of more than 100 petabytes, equivalent to more than 5,000 years of high-definition video. “It’s crazy,” Oliver said, “that there’s so much of it and that a ‘petabyte’ is a real unit of digital storage and not what it sounds like: a brand of snacks specifically for pedophiles.”
However, most of the footage will never be seen by anyone. “It’s impossible for agencies to look at every minute of footage from all of these cameras,” Oliver admitted. “But too often, even footage documenting misconduct is not meaningfully reviewed, meaning departments miss opportunities to identify problematic officers and patterns of abuse.” Oliver noted that a review of Minneapolis police footage following the 2020 murder of George Floyd found more evidence of Derek Chauvin kneeling on the necks of other civilians, including a handcuffed Black woman and a 14-year-old Black boy. In both cases, supervisors reviewed the recordings but still cleared Chauvin of his conduct. When the state Civil Rights Commission subsequently reviewed 700 hours of body camera footage, it found that Minneapolis police officers repeatedly used neck restraints and concluded that had the department or the city conducted a “substantial review” of the footage, they could have observed a pattern of abuse and taken steps to stop it.
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“Obviously, someone should do this!” Oliver was furious. “It just doesn’t make sense for Cops to just pile up thousands of hours of footage that no one will see. Especially considering we all know this is Paramount+’s job.”
“Hey, what are they going to do?” he joked, joking that he might be the new “business dad” as Paramount-Skydance prepares to acquire HBO owner Warner Bros. in a stunning $110 billion deal. “Take us over and cancel us immediately? I’m asking this with all my heart.
Regardless, Oliver continued, “Perhaps no case better illustrates that the mere presence of body cameras is not enough to prevent police violence, or indeed to create accountability, than that of Ronald Greene, a black man from Louisiana who died after an encounter with police in 2019.” Police initially told his family he died on impact after crashing his car during a police pursuit (a dangerous police tactic Last Week Tonight has previously reported on). Although body camera footage of the incident exists, the department, with the support of government officials including Louisiana’s governor, refused to release the footage for two years. The video, eventually leaked to The Associated Press, shows a state trooper throwing Green to the ground, choking him and punching him in the face. As he drove away, another responding officer alerted him that his body camera was on, and he immediately turned it off. “It’s just too bad,” Oliver said.
A year later, the man died in a car crash; the other five officers involved faced reduced charges, and three were released outright due to “insufficient evidence.” “This may be because, despite body camera footage, the microphones were not always on and not all officers on scene had their cameras on during arrests,” Oliver said. “This does not appear to be a coincidence,” as the AP found officers in the department frequently turned off their cameras during arrests; an internal investigator said it was “common practice” to rubber-stamp use-of-force reports without reviewing body camera footage.
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“Why do you put body cameras on police officers if you don’t even want to see the footage?” Oliver wondered. “You might as well hang a bologna sandwich on their shirt. It creates just as much responsibility, and they get a little meat snack in case they get hungry.”
“The system here cannot expect leaks,” he added, before arguing for taking back the power to use cameras from the police, with “clear, enforceable rules that footage must be retained, regularly reviewed and promptly released, particularly in relation to major incidents”, preferably monitored by a third regulator independent of police influence.
Oliver reminded that federal agents have body-worn camera footage from the shooting of Alex Pretty in Minneapolis — they just refuse to release it, “making the whole ‘masks off, body cameras on’ slogan moot.”
“The reason we know what happened to Alex Pretty is not because of the body cameras. It’s because everyone else filmed what happened on their cell phones,” Oliver concluded. “And this needs to continue. Because until we see significant change, body cameras will never deliver on their promise to truly expose wrongdoing.”
