Issues involving police use of force are nothing new, perhaps due to increasingly ubiquitous video cameras. They seem to be the issue of the day in the United States and Canada. Video cameras are increasingly used by random passersby, mounted by businesses in front of which events occur, and used by many police agencies. Some video evidence has exposed bad acts by some police officers and helped exonerate others. The same holds true for some average citizens too.
In Canada and the United States, growing numbers of citizens and politicians call for body-worn video cameras to be used by police officers. In part, the frequency of these calls seems to have increased due to the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, one of many jurisdictions where police are not yet equipped with video recorders.
Video evidence will undoubtedly and increasingly factor into investigation of police officers and regular citizens alike. Moreover, publicly captured video will, via social and television media, increasingly influence public judgement of police and citizen actions, often in minutes. Video evidence will help reasonable professionals and reasonable citizens get at the truth of serious matters, sometimes for and sometimes against the main protagonists, who are often police officers. There is, however, a big problem.
Most judicial decisions are widely available on the web and viewable by anyone. They assess decisions and actions, usually but not always by police, on whether they were reasonable in all the circumstances known to the citizens or officers at the time of an incident. These judicial decisions make it clear that what was known or ought to have been known to the involved parties can come from information received from other people as well as from their perceived senses. It would, then, seem that assessing what a citizen or officer knew, visually at least, is easy when a video camera records the immediate area of an incident, especially if mounted directly on the officer. As it turns out, these cameras will not necessarily capture what people saw or what they knew.
In 2010, researchers Daniel Simons and Daniel Levin released what became a viral video known as the Monkey Business Illusion wherein a number of young ladies were shown passing basketballs between themselves. Viewers were asked in advance to count the number of passes made collectively made by the girls. What most viewers missed was a person in a gorilla suit walking through the middle of the set. Of course, that video trick was done by others before 2010 so some viewers saw the gorilla, many because they fell for the trick previously. I was one of those people. Yet Simons and Levin included other visual happenings, most which were missed by viewers even if they did notice the gorilla. Me again.
Their objective was to demonstrate that when people focus on some things they can miss other things even if those are right before their eyes. This is a phenomenon known as “inattentional blindness”. In a 1998 research project, Simons and Levin had an actor with a map ask pedestrians for directions. Halfway through the exchange, other actors carried a door between the pedestrians, during which the actor asking for directions was switched. In 50% of the tests, the pedestrians failed to notice they were speaking to a different person after the distraction.
In some instances and perhaps many, video images will show what a citizen or officer saw and by extension knew, but not in all instances. Consider too that neither the pedestrians in the switch experiment or, presumably, those watching monkey business videos were stressed whereas many citizens and officers in critical incidents are considerably stressed, whether officers like to admit that or not.
Writing on The Wisdom Daily website in 2013, Irwin Kulla noted that there are so many videos online which show inattentional blindness that he watches one weekly as a reminder to “…be a bit less sure of what I know, to be a bit more skeptical about my own perceptions, memories and judgements, and to hold what I do know a little more lightly.”
Mark Twain once wrote, “I am not one who in expressing opinions confines himself to facts.” We can’t expect the public at large to do their homework on inattentional blindness, although it would be nice. In the search for truth, though, we should expect investigators and jurists to consider all relevant facts in a set of circumstances.
While inattentional blindness should not be a default excuse for bad acts, some people and some police officers who say they did not see something will be telling the truth even if video images suggest otherwise. I don’t know of any technology that has sorted that problem out yet.