Are Police Body Cam Compilation Videos Normalizing Authoritarian Violence?

Manufacturing consent through social media 

There’s a kind of content online that I find really alarming. 

It’s compilation videos of police body cam footage.

It’s not content I would ever willingly watch, but I see other content creators referencing it as their “comfort content”, it plays on the TVs above the treadmills in my gym, and it’s content I’ve seen people in the wild watching on their devices. It’s becoming really popular.

While this content is not new - the show COPS was at one time the longest running show on FOX News - it has now proliferated across the internet in a new form - this time from the cameras strapped to the officers’ bodies that are intended for use in investigations of police misconduct.

Immediately leading up to the start of the Black Lives Matter movement, bystanders' video footage of  violent police encounters were central to finally getting the white majority to care about the unnecessary, extreme violence police commit against Black and Brown people regularly. This was footage of the police killing Black and Brown people and it was hard to watch. In some ways, the shock was the point, as it led to a massive ground swell of support for justice, police reform and accountability - for change.

As a result, more police than ever are now required to wear body cameras, producing supposedly unbiased footage that would assist police departments in investigating extrajudicial violence. However, now the footage from those body cameras are now being clipped together and broadcast on my local gym’s TVs as if it is some sort of entertainment.

While similar to shows like Cops and LivePD, body cam footage compilation differs in several key ways. This is footage without people’s faces blurred out, with full names written in the video descriptions, and titles like “Entitled Woman Learns the Hard Way” or “Lady Gets Reality Check”. Many titles tout the “horrors” and violence that the police will encounter during the video - clickbait that establishes the frame of reference through which the viewer is interpreting the content  - including the expectation that the victim deserves whatever violence the police enact upon them. 

Besides questioning why people would want to watch this level of brutality, humiliation, and human suffering, it makes me wonder - given the current era during which this type of content is becoming popular in the US, is this footage manufacturing consent for continued authoritarian violence? 

Shows like COPS and LivePD were commonly criticized not only for their total disregard for the privacy of the individuals portrayed, but also the “copaganda” aspect - where the police are shown in an unfailingly positive light, a kind of PR stunt for law enforcement.

As the viewer watches footage of poor, Black, Brown, queer, and mentally ill people being manhandled and brutalized by police, are these images becoming normal to viewers? 

Flooded with this footage, we are inundated with these images and our brains, so uniquely attuned to novelty, will file it away as “normal” or “background noise”. Eventually, the next time we see state-funded violence - like the National Guard being weaponized against the City of Los Angeles, we don’t even blink. When we see masked secret police violently snatching people off the street, we’re not alarmed - these are things we’re used to seeing.

And, it is working. Here’s a Reddit post of someone saying that, based on the hours of footage they’ve watched, they don’t think police brutality is a problem. Elsewhere, someone commented that “Yeah demanding body cams was one of the biggest self-owns we've ever seen progressives perform.”

I find it hard to believe that the footage that makes it to the internet is going to be the footage that shows police in a negative light - the police departments just wouldn’t allow that. They face threats of being defunded whenever their bad behavior comes to light, so why would they endanger their jobs over someone wanting to make content?

We know that social media is used by the elite to promote propaganda - from the Cambridge Analytical scandal, to Trump “saving” TikTok from being banned, it is a tool that those in power would be foolish not to exploit. Algorithmic feeds give the illusion of being random and based on the individual’s watch history, but I think it’s naive to think that’s always true. It’s a massively powerful tool that we have an inkling is being used for more nefarious reasons - like the researchers who let a brand new TikTok account autoplay for several days and on day one it started suggesting manosphere content - the content that has contributed to large number of young men who have joined the Alt Right and elected Trump again. 

In the 1988 book Manufacturing Consent, the writers put forth a theory of how mass media (at that time newspapers and TV) manufactured consent for interventionist policy abroad. The same phenomenon is still happening except via algorithmic feeds, and I’d argue, it’s trying to manufacture consent for authoritarian violence against us. 

And I don’t know what we should do about it - social media serves an important function as a space for sharing information and organizing, just as it is a major arm of modern propaganda efforts. It is a known tool for mass surveillance, and a way to stay connected to community and share information in a time when we are atomized and made to feel isolated and powerless.

I’m also conflicted about this because the video footage of ICE stealing people from hospitals and schools is important. It’s a public record of what happened during a regime that is constantly trying to rewrite history. While these videos don’t have the same emotional priming as the police body cam videos, I do fear that videos of ICE are going to become normal or even banal as this regime drags on.

And they kind of are. 

Just today I saw a video of ICE shooting a woman in a car to death, and had the quiet realization that this was the inevitable next step in the occupation of our cities by a secret police force. I have no hope that this tragedy will have any justice served, and I don’t have any hope that this era of American history will end any time soon. I’m just hoping we all stay clear-eyed about what’s going on, and don’t fall for the propaganda being beamed into our devices.