We live in what is becoming more and more a surveillance state, and quite obviously, there are some advantages to the general population of being able to draw upon that surveillance in the sense that people are probably safer, when those that would be their instigators know that they are being recorded; and further to the point, the actual camera footage of an incident is of immense value in the eventual pursuit of the perpetrator and ultimately of justice. Of course, there are disadvantages to being constantly surveilled, which has a lot to do with the erosion of privacy in the public sphere, along with the fact that often, the answer to the question, “who is watching the watchers,” does not appear to be satisfactorily answered.
The one thing, that people and institutions are missing though about all these cameras being utilized to record interactions and activities, is that the perspective of that camera actually makes a material difference in how an independent party will view an event that has so occurred. In truth, it has to be remembered that there are two basic types of cameras that record events, of which the most prevalent one is the camera which is located in a fixed location, such as a corner light pole or a camera such as a dashcam which though it’s in a fixed location within the vehicle, will however, take in different scenes whenever that vehicle is moving. Then there is the type of camera such as a bodycam that a police officer will wear, along with other cameras so available that attached to a person’s helmet and so on.
The thing about bodycams, is that we read at insight.kellogg.northwestern.ed, that when people view footage from the perspective of a given bodycam that they “were less likely to believe that the person instigating that action did it on purpose, as compared to people who saw the same interaction filmed by a dash cam.” The most probable reason why this is so, is because whenever we as a viewer, are seeing a video through the eyes of another person, we have a strong tendency to, as if in a video game that we have the controller of, identify and thus bond with that person and therefore of the perspective that they are seeing, as if it is our own. In other words, not all footage so captured through video, is going to be treated the same by our mind, of which, that footage captured which is from a neutral perspective, such as from a dashcam, or from a fixed spot off of a lamp pole, is not going to be viewed the same, as a bodycam, which lends itself to us seeing such in a first person point of view.
This signifies, that though what we are seeing via a dashcam or a bodycam is absolutely real, the perspective of such is different enough, that it thus becomes more difficult to establish the non-bias truth and therefore the full story of an encounter when the only camera capturing the incident is a bodycam, as compared to there being multiple cameras and therefore multiple angles that would provide to us, a more complete and comprehensive story. That is to say, whenever the police bodycam is the sole video so taken in a given incident, the scale of justice is not in balance, because what we are critically missing is the bodycam of the other person, as well, and therein lies the rub.