A dear friend texted me in February, saying: “Hey sweetie, the bodycam footage of you getting arrested got leaked on YouTube.”
My fingers typed out a quick reply – “Omg lol haha what?” – as the rest of my body cramped in horror. Surely it wasn’t anything too bad? I’d been arrested in Athens, Georgia, back in 2021, because my car looked like one that had been involved in a hit-and-run. It wasn’t, but it then turned out that my driver’s license wasn’t a driver’s license but rather a state identification card. A misunderstanding, but I was also in the middle of a crisis. Things went to hell in a handbasket, I went to jail overnight, but everything was eventually sorted out and I’ve had lots of great therapy since then.
My friend sent me a link and I clicked, anticipating a fuzzy video of my car being pulled over. I thought it might have five or six views. Instead, the video was titled, “Cops ENTITLED SON Can’t Believe He’s Getting Arrested for DUI” and had over 50,000 views and 1,100 comments. It was 30 minutes of my own nervous breakdown, with close-ups from three different bodycams.
It was almost funny. Definitely sad. The incident in question had happened 18 months into the pandemic. I’d been home with toddlers that whole time. My husband was in Switzerland with his family for a post-pandemic reunion, leaving me alone with young kids and old dogs and my dissertation defense a month away. I’d argued with him the night before and then chosen violence by texting all my grievances to his family’s family and friends group chat. I’d had a Britney moment and shaved my head. I was – and this was God punishing me, I know it – trying out a mustache. I had a Chewbacca tank top on. I was in pink booty shorts and red Crocs flip-flops. I had a lone, limp, two-minute noodle stuck to my chest.
All of this going into a police stop, and then I made it worse. First, I cried: “My daddy is a cop!” which immediately calls to mind Reese Witherspoon’s iconic “Don’t you know who I am?” DUI moment. Then, I spotted the arresting officer’s bracelet, one of those Thin Blue Line things.
“You’re one of those,” I said.
“Those what?”
“You don’t think Black lives matter,” I said, in my best Law & Order district attorney voice.
I want to shake October 2021 Mike, but I’m also grateful for the opportunity to extend him a little bit of grace. He was trying so hard. He was sad, he was scared, and he was lonely. He was a mess.
I was a mess.
But what is it about my messiness that makes it OK for my bodycam video to be put up on a stranger’s website for entertainment? I’m not alone in this experience. These bodycam sites and channels are everywhere, and the pool of content they pull from is basically limitless, nearly free and constantly refreshed. Most of the videos that are shared are of scantily clad young women or of Black people. The Freedom of Information Act allows for the information to be released, and recent Open Records policy changes and infrastructure improvements in states like Georgia have made acquiring bodycam videos easier than shopping on Amazon.
The official story is that these stories can be shared to educate the public, and the broader story is that bodycam videos are necessary for police accountability, as are record release policies. Neither story is true. Some bodycam sites or channels allegedly blackmail the subjects of their videos, often young women, by making them pay to have their videos taken down. My own lawyer even spelled it out for me, writing: “Open Records laws were designed to keep the government accountable to the citizens, but they have been used to exploit citizens, most notably young, intoxicated females, on public internet forums.”
The second point deserves attention as well. The common refrain is that the increase in bodycam footage was in response to public outcry following the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. However, the civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis has argued in a fascinating Twitter thread (which summarizes his article in the Yale Journal of Law & Liberation), that bodycam videos are desirable to police because they allow for easier surveillance tactics and propaganda, with potential for “lucrative contracts to link the new video with AI facial and voice recognition software and predictive policing algorithms”.
Karakatsanis’s most chilling revelation is that “the federal government’s own review of studies shows body cameras do not make police less violent”; a Department of Justice observed that “a comprehensive review of 70 studies of body-worn cameras use found that the larger body of research on body-worn cameras showed no consistent or no statistically significant effects”.
There must be some way to restrict the use of these videos for entertainment, or at least to mandate the blurring of our faces and removals of our names from the videos. A number of states have started to discuss amendments to the Open Records policies, but none of these discussions seem to give any more agency to those featured in the videos. The governor of New Jersey recently signed a controversial “Opra reform bill” that will give government clerks and police more discretion over the release of bodycam footage and other public records. As with so many legal matters, getting any relief may become a matter of who you know rather than anything to do with justice.
I looked to the comments to see if, perhaps, folks had shared what they’d learned from watching me embarrass myself. Every one of the 1,100 comments was an insult. One commenter blamed me for the failure of the entire Star Wars franchise. Was the force of my gayness so strong that I could tank a multibillion-dollar film franchise? Another one said that, as a gay person, he was mortified by my stereotypical mannerisms. Was I too gay for gayness? Had I transcended? Most of the comments made fun of my voice or speculated on how embarrassed my father was to have a son like me or suggested that I’d enjoy being raped by the police or by other inmates once I was in jail.
Maybe this is what the sites mean by education. I learned, after a lifetime on the Internet, that 1,100 strangers enjoyed kicking me while I was down. I learned – even though I’ve had a lot of great therapy, even though I know you’re not supposed to read the comments, even though I know and love myself – that 1,100 insults could break my heart.
