On the latest episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver delved into the proliferation of police bodycams, “the devices that gives us a nipple’s-eye view of law enforcement’s interactions with the public” and which represent what some experts have called the largest new investment in policing in a generation.
Bodycams have been viewed as a “popular solution regarding transparency in law enforcement”, he explained, with many Democratic lawmakers currently calling for “masks off, body cameras on” in negotiations over the Trump administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in US cities.
“That notion that bodycams could be a way of calming down interactions with law enforcement is appealing, and it may be why it seems like we’re about to slap them on the chests of all ICE agents across the country in the name of accountability,” Oliver explained. “But the thing is, the more you look into bodycams, the more you realize they are only effective if used properly and in many cases, they are just not.”
Oliver enumerated the limitations of body cameras, including the obvious fact that recordings are restricted to thee camera’s view, which can incomplete or misleading. “Those limitations get even more acute when cops mute, obscure or turn off their cameras, which happens, and sometimes on purpose,” Oliver said before a bodycam clip of an Oklahoma police officer pulling over a man for suspected drunk driving. The man, a police captain from another department, requested that the officer turn his camera off.
“It makes sense for these things to have an off button,” Oliver noted. “Cops need to be able to take a shit in peace like the rest of us, and some of the people they talk to might need their privacy protected too.” Some states, such as Connecticut, have laws mandating body cameras be turned off during encounters with undercover officers or informants, when an officer is on break or engaged in personal business, or when a person is undergoing a medical or psychological evaluation. “But obviously, some critical interactions when people have been hurt or killed by police still go unrecorded.”
But even if an officer does turn on their camera, and even if it shows what happened clearly, there is still the issue of what happens to all the footage. And there is a ton of it – Axon, the nation’s largest police bodycam provider, offers cloud storage for its client with a database for more than 100 petabytes of storage, equivalent to more than 5,000 years of high-definition video. “Which is pretty wild,” said Oliver, “both that there is so much of it and that ‘petabytes’ is a real unit of digital storage and not what it sounds like: a snack-food brand exclusively for pedophiles.”
Most of that footage, however, will never be watched by anyone. “It’s impossible for agencies to look at every minute of footage from all these cameras,” Oliver conceded. “But far too often, even footage that documents misconduct isn’t meaningfully reviewed, meaning departments miss opportunities to spot both problem officers and patterns of abuse.” Oliver pointed to the fact that after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, a review of Minneapolis police footage 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 had access to the recordings yet cleared Chauvin’s conduct. When a state civil rights commission then reviewed 700 hours of bodycam footage, it found Minneapolis officers repeatedly used neck restraint, and concluded that if the department or city had conducted a “substantive audit” of the footage, they could’ve observed the pattern of abuse and taken steps to stop it.
“And clearly, someone should have done that!” Oliver fumed. “Because there’s no point in the police just stacking up thousands of hours of footage that no one’s ever going to see. Especially given that we all know that that is Paramount+’s job.”
“Hey, what’re they gonna do?” he joked of his likely new “business daddy”, as Paramount-Skydance is poised to purchase HBO owner Warner Bros in a staggering $110bn deal. “Take us over and immediately cancel us? I’m genuinely asking.
Anyway, Oliver continued, “maybe no case illustrates the extent to which the mere presence of bodycams is insufficient to prevent police violence or indeed bring accountability more than that of Ronald Greene,” a Black man from Louisiana who died after an encounter with police in 2019. Officers initially told his family that he died on impact after crashing his car in a police chase (a dangerous police tactic Last Week Tonight has covered before). Even though bodycam footage of the incident existed, the department, backed by public officials up to and including the governor of Louisiana, refused to release it for two years. Eventually, the video was leaked to the Associated Press, showing that a state trooper wrestled Greene to the ground, put him in a chokehold and punched him in the face. As he drove away, another officer on the call reminded him that the bodycam was on and he immediately turned off the camera. “Which is pretty damning,” said Oliver.
That man ended up dying in a car crash a year later; the other five officers involved faced diminished charges, and three were let off entirely due to “insufficient evidence”. “That might be because even though there was bodycam footage, the microphones weren’t always on, and not all of the troopers at the scene had their cameras on during the arrest,” said Oliver. “And that does not seem like a coincidence,” as the AP found that officers in the department routinely had their cameras off during arrests; one internal investigator said it was “common practice” to rubber-stamp use-of-force reports without reviewing body-camera footage.
“If you’re not even going to watch the footage, why give officers bodycams at all?” Oliver wondered. “You might as well hanging a bologna sandwich off their shirts instead. It would lead to exactly as much accountability and they’ll have a little meat snack in case they get hungry.”
“Hoping for leaks cannot be the system here,” he added, before arguing for taking the power for camera use back from officers, with “clear, enforceable rules saying the footage must be retained, routinely reviewed and released in a timely manner, especially concerning critical incidents” ideally monitored by a third regulatory body independent from police influence.
Federal agents, Oliver reminded, has bodycam footage from the shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis – they’ve just refused to release it, “kind of rendering that whole ‘masks off, bodycams on’ slogan pretty toothless”.
“The reason we know what happened to Alex Pretti isn’t because of bodycams. It’s because of all the other people with cellphones filming what happened,” Oliver concluded. “And that is going to need to continue. Because until we see significant changes, bodycams will never live up to their promise of shining a real light on misconduct.”
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