Body cams are one perspective on an encounter. Most of the data we get officer reported. So they're useful em it's not clear whether body cams are going to be an important form of data in policing, but i suspect overtime they will be. But do you think police would behave better if they knew they were always being taped? Some people say they'll just turn off the body cam or you won't be able to prosecute them anyway. What's your empirical view? Well, so i'm not a social scientist. I try to follow the social sien i this area. And i can tell you that what we know right now is that the results of studies of body cameras...
Long before becoming a legal scholar focused on police reform, Rachel Harmon studied engineering at MIT and graduate philosophy at LSE. “You could call it a random walk,” she says, “or you could say that I’m really interested in the structure of things.” But despite her experience and training, even she can’t identify a single point of leverage that can radically reform the complicated system of policing in America. “We have been struggling with balancing the harms and benefits of policing since we started contemporary departments, so I don’t think that we’re going to suddenly fix this by flipping one lever.”
She joined Tyler to discuss the best ideas for improving policing, including why good data on policing is so hard to come by, why body cams are not a panacea, the benefits and costs of consolidating police departments, why more female cops won’t necessarily reduce the use of force, how federal programs can sometimes misfire, where changing police selection criteria would and wouldn’t help, whether some policing could be replaced by social workers, the sobering frequency of sexual assaults by police, how a national accreditation system might improve police conduct, what reformers can learn from Camden and elsewhere, and more. They close by discussing the future of law schools, what she learned clerking under Guido Calabresi and Stephen Breyer, why she’s drawn to kickboxing and triathlons, and what two things she looks for in a young legal scholar.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.
Recorded June 8th, 2020 Other ways to connect