Body Cams Won’t Protect Us
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Sources
Farooq, Umar. “How Police Have Undermined the Promise of Body Cameras.” ProPublica, December 14, 2023. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-police-undermined-promise-body-cameras.
Kapur. “House Clears Key Hurdle to Reopening the Government Later Tuesday.” NBC News, February 3, 2026. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/house-path-end-government-shutdown-tuesday-dhs-trump-rcna257138.
McCracken, A. B. C. “Jeffries: DHS Should Be ‘dramatically Reformed’ after Democrats Delay Government Funding Bill.” ABC News. Accessed February 3, 2026. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/jeffries-dhs-dramatically-reformed-after-democrats-delay-government/story?id=129749877.
Santana. “Every Homeland Security Officer in Minneapolis Is Now Being Issued a Body-Worn Camera, Noem Says.” AP News, February 2, 2026. https://apnews.com/article/immigration-enforcement-minneapolis-secretary-noem-homeland-security-37af4947057e64efee5e43a8f2e018bb.
Sarai, Tamar. “The Complex and Troubling History of Police Body Cameras.” Prism, July 16, 2024. https://prismreports.org/2024/07/16/complex-troubling-history-police-body-cameras/.
Transcript
Hi it’s Tuesday, February 3rd, 2026, you’re tuned into Why, America? I’m Leeja Miller in Minneapolis. Yesterday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary and self-proclaimed Dog Killer Kristi Noem announced that all 3000-plus homeland security officers, including ICE agents, on the ground in Minneapolis would be issued body-worn cameras effective immediately. She also said the bodycam program would expand nationwide as soon as funding became available. And with that, I feel safe again. Order is restored. Accountability and transparency, right? RIGHT? This means the footage from the body cams that the border patrol officers who executed Alex Pretti in the street a mile from where I’m sitting WERE ALREADY WEARING this means that footage will be made public, right? Of course not. There’s a reason Kristi Noem is willing to grant demands from lawmakers that ICE agents be made to wear body cameras. Because she knows it’s actually mostly ineffective or, if anything, a win for her if the federal government has access to increased amounts of footage of protester faces to feed into their Palantir databases. Body cams, whether they’re worn by ICE or border patrol or your local police, are a popular “solution” to officer brutality against civilians because they’re a convenient way to make it look like accountability is happening without said accountability ever actually being borne out by the data. Today we’re talking about why body cams won’t protect us. If it’s something Kristi “dog killer” Noem and spineless Democratic leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer can all happily agree upon, you can bet your rapidly declining 401(k) that it’s gonna be bad for all the rest of us.
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This headline from Common Dreams about this story helped inform my reporting, “‘Surveillance Is Not Accountability’: Noem Sending DHS Agents in Minnesota Body Cameras.” Using the Ground News browser extension, I can get helpful background information on this publication in one quick glance. To get the big picture, I can click on Full Coverage, which will show me coverage of the same story from publications across the political spectrum.
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The House is scheduled to vote today to advance a spending package that would end the partial government shutdown until September when we get to do this all over again except for the Department of Homeland Security. That funding bill was given a 2-week extension so democrats and republicans can fight over funding without having to worry about other parts of the government also being shut down. Democrats are demanding what they’re calling “major reforms” to DHS, including barring agents from wearing masks while on duty and requiring agents to obtain judicial warrants before breaking and entering someone’s home to abduct them. Of course, it shouldn’t require Congress to pass a law to require judge-signed warrants for searches and seizures inside private property because we have the whole 4th Amendment thing that says that. But sure, that would be great if Congress could reiterate to ICE that even if someone wrote a memo saying the 4th Amendment doesn’t apply to ICE agents the actual letter of the law says that it does. And requiring DHS agents to unmask while doing their job is also a pretty low bar–DHS claims that the masks are required because otherwise their agents will be doxxed and harassed. Considering the fact that these agents are paid from government coffers and therefore work for us, we the people, the fact that they’re so scared about public backlash to their work indicates to me not that THEY need protection but that the people who pay their paychecks don’t like what they’re doing. This is indicative of something deeply wrong with the way DHS officers operate, not with the people who see what they’re doing and don’t like what they see. But, of course, the DHS officers brutalizing us in the streets, executing people in broad daylight, THEY’RE the victims. Okay so two pretty reasonable requests–judicial warrants and no more masks–and then, also, body cams for all DHS officers. Those are the three main requests that the entire opposition party can muster. I made an episode last week about abolishing ICE and why I think it should be the whole of DHS but even that probably won’t go far enough because of the fucking rot in this country. You can watch that after this. Even short of abolishing the whole department, these demands are fucking paltry.
And I just want to pause for a moment to reflect on and compare the work of the so-called “opposition party” democrats in Congress versus the people on the streets in Minnesota. The people in the streets are facing down heavily armed, militarized federal police forces who know they have the entire weight and support of the federal government behind them no matter what they do. And those people are facing them down usually with whistles and honda civics. Even the ones who are licensed to carry firearms like Alex Pretti aren’t using them against the armed federal thugs roaming our streets. It’s whistles and signal chats. And we’re making DHS officers’ jobs fucking hell, we are making it as hard as possible for them to do their work because we the people who pay their checks every month do not support this and we do not want them here. We are patrolling the streets day in and day out so that we can keep our neighbors safe. I can see out my window right now my neighbor who’s been keeping watch. We are providing groceries for our neighbors who can’t leave. We are doing whatever we can in whatever scrappy way we can to keep each other safe. And we’re doing it while also fucking terrified. My mental health is in the fucking gutter I’m in near constant fight or flight mode I meant to make this video yesterday but couldn’t because I had a panic attack instead, NO ONE is doing okay here, not least of which of course is our immigrant neighbors who are living through fucking hell. And we’re showing up in whatever way we can and we’re doing it anyway.
Meanwhile, in DC, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are asking in a strongly worded letter if pretty please the Republicans could maybe ask their goons if they could remove their masks and get a permission slip before abducting children from their homes. To say that this is cowardice falls so short of describing the injustice of this moment. That our lawmakers sit in their ivory tower with their thumbs up their asses while we’re literally out here dying in the streets. If this doesn’t radicalize an entire generation against centrist politics I don’t know what will. And what’s worse is that we have seen them capitulate to the Republicans in Congress over and over again while barely putting up a fight. WE suffered for 43 days of a government shutdown only for Schumer to fold on the ONE demand, lowered healthcare premiums, the ONE demand that the ENTIRE shutdown was for. Now Democrats have the opportunity to completely shut down DHS, to make huge demands of the agency, I’m not even saying abolish it at this juncture because I’m trying to be realistic here, they could make so many demands that could materially improve the lives of every person living in Minneapolis right now, because Republicans need their votes to pass this spending bill, and they’re asking for no masks, judicial warrants that are already required by the Constitution, and body cams. AND WE ARE DYING IN THE STREETS. We are dying in the streets. And of course let’s not absolve the Republicans. It would take only a couple of them to grow a spine and say enough is enough in order to change the entire trajectory of the immigration crackdown in this country, in order to change what’s in that spending bill, in order to literally save lives because you know this is not the climax of the ICE crackdown in America, and you know they won’t do it. I mean call your members of Congress if they’re Republican and ask them to vote against the DHS spending bill unless it has major reforms, but let’s be realistic it’s not gonna happen, Republicans aren’t interested in being heroes they’re interested in being rich and powerful and to stay in office they have to keep daddy Trump happy. Which is why my rage is directed at the spineless Democrats who COULD do something, whose constituents are BEGGING them to do something, and who are throwing away the little leverage they have by making pathetic demands that they will probably capitulate on anyway.
Which brings me to the bodycams, sorry I needed to rant for a bit there. Body cams do nothing to keep us, civilians, safe. According to reporting from Prism, quote “the promises made by proponents of body cameras don’t always align closely with the data on their efficacy or the degree to which they actually increase public transparency. In the U.S., the number of civilians whom police have killed annually has only increased each year since the widespread adoption of body camera equipment, and in many cases, promises of increased transparency remain unrealized.”
Civil Rights attorney Alec Karakatsanis is the author of a book called Copaganda and has been writing about the misleading nature of body cam usage for years. According to him, body-worn cameras were first introduced to police not as a form of accountability and reform but instead major tech companies introduced them as a convenient way to expand their surveillance capacity and create “highly controllable evidence against the largely poor, largely black citizens of whom police often seek to capture footage, and quell social unrest by creating comprehensive digital archives of attendees at protests for social change.” as Prism reports. A 2016 George Mason University study found that prosecutors offices used bodycam footage to prosecute police officers just 8.3% of the time. 92.6% of the time, body cam footage was used to prosecute private individuals.
After the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri in 2014, body cams were pitched to the public as a means of major police reform. And despite all the other demands that activists put forward at the time for meaningful police reform, body cams were about the only thing that was successful. This is because by pitching the body cams as useful for accountability, police departments would then receive necessary funding in order to afford them–something they severely lacked back when they were just being used as a convenient secretive surveillance tool. Grant funding flooded police departments with cash for body cameras, police unions argued cops should get pay increases for having to wear them, and the companies peddling the products were able to weave the cameras into limitless government contracts not just for the cameras themselves but for the ai and cloud computing necessary to store and manage the troves of data being collected via those body cameras.
A report by ProPublica and the New York Times back in 2023 found that quote “without further intervention from city, state and federal officials and lawmakers, body cameras may do more to serve police interests than those of the public they are sworn to protect.” Body cameras fell far short of the lofty promises of accountability that were sold to us a decade ago. Quote “as policymakers rushed to equip the police with cameras, they often failed to grapple with a fundamental question: Who would control the footage? Instead, they defaulted to leaving police departments, including New York’s, with the power to decide what is recorded, who can see it and when. In turn, departments across the country have routinely delayed releasing footage, released only partial or redacted video or refused to release it at all. They have frequently failed to discipline or fire officers when body cameras document abuse and have kept footage from the agencies charged with investigating police misconduct.
Even when departments have stated policies of transparency, they don’t always follow them. After George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police officers and amid a wave of protests against police violence, the New York Police Department said it would publish footage of so-called critical incidents “within 30 days.” There have been 380 such incidents [in the last three years]. The department has released footage within a month just twice.”
As the article goes on to say, quote “body cameras represent the latest chapter in America’s quest for a technological fix to the deeply rooted problem of unchecked state power.” Unquote. And I want to acknowledge that we are talking about body cams worn by DHS officers but we are using data and information about the use of body cameras by police often in an effort to try to manage unchecked state power against mostly black Americans. Many many black people online and black scholars, etc., have been pointing out that America has always been fascistic towards black people. It is only now being called what it is because that state violence is now being directed in varying degrees towards ALL people who do not comply, regardless of skin tone. White men are now being gunned down in the streets. So now it’s full blown fascism. Ignore the centuries of state violence against black and brown bodies. Many are comparing modern day ICE not to Hitler’s gestapo but instead to the slave catchers in the antebellum south. Regardless of race, however, we are once again attempting to find a technological fix to the deeply rooted problem of unchecked state power, this time by saying lets put body cameras on ICE officers to increase accountability of that agency’s unchecked power that’s being used against ALL of us. We’re doing this and we’re expecting different results. There’s a reason why Kristi “dog killer” Noem agreed to these body cameras. Because history and statistics show it will do literally nothing other than increase the DHS budget and give the DHS more evidence and data to be used against us. The officers who executed Alex Pretti were wearing body cameras. That footage hasn’t been released and it doesn’t sound like DHS plans on releasing it. The officer who executed Renee Good was literally holding his phone up and filming while he did it. Even with that footage released, the federal government refuses to investigate Renee Good’s killer. These ICE officers knowing they’re being filmed has not stopped them. Because they know the entire federal government will back them up no matter what they do, so they can get away with literally anything. Body cameras are not going to change that and Kristi dog killer Noem knows that. Which is why it’s the most insulting of all the three total bleak fucking meager demands that the Democrats are trying to push for before signing this DHS spending bill. And what’s worse is they probably won’t get the other two. DHS knows a fuck ton of their officers will refuse to work if they have to remove their masks and reveal their faces. And DHS thinks it can legally break into peoples’ homes without a judicial warrant and has been doing so already. There’s no way Republicans are going to concede on even those two meager demands. But they’ll give the agents body cams, because they know that they’ll do nothing, and then Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer will turn around and try to sell it to us as a win–well, we didn’t get everything we wanted but we’re just a weak little minority party anyway, and we got you body cameras, so order and accountability will be restored. You’re welcome, now donate to my re-election campaign. Mark my fucking words if that’s what happens I will be doing a round of I told you so’s. Don’t let them fool you when it happens, though. Know that when they say we were successful because we got body cameras, that’s a fucking lie and the only people who will benefit are the tech companies who supply the cameras and DHS whose budget and surveillance capabilities will be increased.
I like to end these things with a “what can we do” section. Like I said, everyone’s mental health is in the fucking shitter here, mine included. The people experiencing the worst of it are our immigrant neighbors who will be dealing with the trauma and PTSD of living through this for the rest of their lives. I have put two donation links in the description for funds that help BIPOC folks access mental healthcare in Minneapolis. One is the Abundance Therapy Fund through Root to Crown Healing & Wellness and the other is the Flourish Fund through Reviving Roots, a black-centered health and wellness organization that I actually used to share an office building with back when I rented an office. Action is the antidote to anxiety, and giving funds is absolutely an action you can take right now.
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And if you liked this episode, you’ll like my episode from last week about abolishing ICE.
