Herman Whitfield III’s parents braced themselves as they watched their only son dying on the video captured by the officers who killed him. When the footage the Indianapolis police released to the public ended, Gladys Whitfield blanked. Herman Whitfield Jr. felt his stomach roil and tears soak his cheeks. But it wasn’t so much what they saw on video that deepened their anguish — it’s what they didn’t.
Nowhere in the 13-minute video posted to YouTube — spliced together with slick graphics and narration of the April 25, 2022, early morning when the Whitfields called for an ambulance for the 39-year-old they called Trey and got the police instead — could he be heard yelling, “I can’t breathe.” He’d repeated the phrase as officers left him lying facedown in a position known to be deadly.
“It made me sick,” Herman Whitfield said of the omissions in the video.
The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department’s editing, the Whitfields claimed, cut out what they had seen that night with their own eyes: an officer shooting a Taser at their son, who was in the midst of a mental health crisis, and other officers leaving him to suffocate as he lay in cuffs.
“People need to know what happened,” Herman Whitfield said.
And in his view, they weren’t going to learn it from the bodycam footage.
Bodycams were supposed to be the tool that changed policing. The arbiter of truth. The captor of what really happened. By recording interactions between police and community members, body cameras would deepen trust between the beat cop and the corner kid. They would provide irrefutable evidence of misconduct; police unions also supported them because they claimed the footage would clear the names of officers falsely accused of abuses. They would give reason for officers to think twice before engaging in abusive — or even deadly — behaviors.
Nearly a decade ago, a call for body-worn cameras swept the nation after the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The Presidential Task Force on 21st Century Policing, assembled by the Obama administration in 2015, listed body cameras among its core recommendations. More than half of the nation’s estimated 18,000 policing agencies now use them, and President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice has proposed a budget for 2024 that would include $89 million more to outfit even more police officers with the technology. Meanwhile, the two leading manufacturers of the body-worn cameras, Motorola and Axon, recently reported banner profits in spite of the economic turmoil felt across industries in the US. Motorola saw a 12% jump in overall sales to more than $9 billion dollars. Axon closed out 2022 with a record 38% revenue growth for $1.19 billion, while announcing what it calls its moonshot initiative to cut police killings of citizens by half over the next 10 years.
But there’s a detail that never seems to make it into the press releases about body-worn cameras.
There’s little evidence to prove that they do any of the things they were promised to.
Body-worn cameras “have not had statistically significant or consistent effects on most measures of officer and citizen behavior or citizens’ views of police,” wrote researchers in 2019 after evaluating over 70 studies of the technology. “Expectations and concerns surrounding BWCs among police leaders and citizens have not yet been realized.”
Meanwhile, police have killed more civilians in the same time period that more departments have opted to use body-worn cameras. Law enforcement officers killed 1,096 people in 2022, compared to 958 in 2016, the year after the 21st Century Policing Task Force recommended widespread adoption of the technology.
Instead of holding officers accountable, videos captured by the body cameras are more likely to be used to prosecute civilians. Researchers found that 93% of prosecutors working in jurisdictions in which police use body cameras said they had used the footage to build cases against civilians — compared with 8.3% who said they’d ever used the cameras to bring charges against an officer.
Axon and its partners are “committed to develop realistic, research-based and responsible solutions to achieve this important goal,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. “Body camera footage can provide us more information and evidence to support that effort. We see the role of body cameras playing a part in all three of the strategic areas we have identified for greatest impact, through expanding new technology, supporting further and more immersive training and playing a role in directly elevating trust.”
The company highlighted a 2022 study published in Brazil which reported a “significant reduction” in police killings over 12 months after the Sao Paulo State Military Police adopted body cams.
Motorola did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
For thousands of family members whose loved ones die in police encounters — particularly Black and brown families who contest the circumstances of their loved one’s killing — body-worn cameras offer a devil’s bargain: trading an opportunity to see and share what happened in exchange for the trauma of having to watch the death of a child, a sibling, a friend, on an endless loop on cable TV or a click away on YouTube.
“As a mother, it was my duty,” said Olivia Crosby, who watched video of her 41-year-old son, Jesus Crosby, being fatally shot last November by Albuquerque police as he, like Trey Whitfield, experienced a mental health episode.
But increasingly, families are finding that with body camera footage, what they see isn’t always what their loved ones got.
Olivia was kneeling at the gravesite of her second-oldest son, whom everyone called Jesse, two days before Christmas 2022. Two of her three surviving sons, John and Carlos, stood beside her, blocking the chill of the wind across the dormant grass.
Forty-three days had passed since a doctor from the University of New Mexico Hospital had called Olivia around 5 a.m., telling her that her son — the one who had entertained his nieces and nephews by eating jalapeños until sweat dripped from his pores, the one who had shown both academic and athletic prowess until schizophrenia symptoms emerged in his late teens — had been shot and killed. It wouldn’t be until Albuquerque TV stations aired their newscasts later in the morning that the Crosbys would learn who pulled the trigger. A TV reporter stood in front of the yellow police tape near the Albuquerque Police headquarters, reporting that officers had fired their weapons at a man nearby. John knew it was his brother when, just beyond the reporter, he spotted what he recognized as Jesse’s tennis shoes peeking out from the sheet covering his body.
John had met his brother for lunch the day before the shooting and had noticed the telltale signs of his brother’s disorder emerging. And as he saw his brother’s shoes on the TV, he considered the location of his death and concluded what had likely happened: Jesse, feeling the schizophrenia symptoms, had likely left his apartment in the middle of the night to seek help from one of the only places he figured was open: the police prison transport center. And instead of help, he got bullets. But no one from the police department, the Crosbys said, ever called to confirm Jesse’s manner of death.
Instead, more than a month later at the cemetery, as the family wiped tears and stifled sobs, Olivia’s phone rang.
A reporter from the Albuquerque Journal was on the line, asking if the family wished to comment on the release of the police lapel video showing Jesse’s killing.
John took the phone from his Spanish-speaking mother.
The reporter told John the department had released the footage hours earlier. The Crosbys had filed a formal request for the footage days before and heard nothing from the department. Now, Albuquerque police had released video of Jesse’s death right before Christmas, without so much as a warning.
“APD kept us in the dark,” said Federico, Jesse’s youngest brother. “All these days and weeks went by with no contact. No courtesy, no call — at least check on us or give us some type of update. But at least give us a simple call so we as a family can understand. There was no respect.”
John wondered why the video’s release couldn’t have waited another week or two until after the holidays to spare the family of a new wound at an already difficult time. With gifts under the tree for a Christmas that would be their most difficult yet, she and John settled in to watch the video online.
“I had to,” Olivia said. “I’m his mother.”
“One of the most haunting things about watching that video is that it’s almost like you can see a judgment by the officers where they’re just deciding that Jesus’s life isn’t worth anything.”
- Mark Fine, an attorney for the Crosby family
While police repeated their own version of events — that Jesse, a “homeless” man “lunged” at officers with what they believed to be a knife — Olivia saw a different story unfold frame by frame when she returned home from the cemetery. She saw her son surrounded by officers with guns drawn, not so much lunging as shuffling, like a boxer dodging a punch only he could see.
“Put down the knife, Jesus,” she heard the officers say on video.
Her son tossed an object from his left hand but held fast to something else in his right. He looked like a baseball player caught in a pickle while trying to steal a base, not sure whether to run forward or retreat.
“You take one step, we’re going to shoot you,” an officer said.
Jesus shuffled forward. The sounds of gunfire popped. From her computer screen, it didn’t appear that her son’s danger escalated as much as it seemed that officers’ patience dissipated.
That “knife” the officers kept telling him to drop turned out to be nail clippers. That unhoused person police mentioned in their statements to the media had a home of his own and a family who made sure to see him daily. The video couldn’t show that.
Even as Olivia and John felt compelled to see the final violent moments of Jesse’s life, Federico and Carlos couldn’t bear the thought of watching their brother being shot. Months later, while reading an article online about his brother’s death on his phone, Carlos’s finger accidentally hit the “play” button of the police video embedded with the story. His heart raced as he tried to hit the tiny X in the corner of video, trying to make it stop. But as the video continued, as police raised their guns on his screen, Carlos threw his phone across the room, begging his wife to pick it up and make it stop.
Though study after study has shown the impact — or lack thereof — of body-worn camera on police interactions, there’s next to nothing known about the tradeoffs families like the Crosbys make in order to hold power to account, and, in the Crosbys’ case, undermine the police narrative that Jesse posed a threat.
What is known is that the shootings of unarmed Black men by police are linked to days of poor mental health among Black residents; one study showed the effects are felt statewide on average for three months following the killing. Harvard economist Desmond Ang discovered that “on average, each officer-involved killing in the County caused three students of color to drop out of high school.” In the immediate aftermath of a police killing, student absenteeism spikes in schools within a half-mile of the scene, grade point averages dip, and emotional disturbances rise.
“Video is not this unbiased source of perfect information about what happens for an event because we are not unbiased individuals.”
- Psychology professor Deryn Strange
For the Crosbys, being blindsided by the release of the video has only deepened their pain. Among the demands of a lawsuit filed against the city of Albuquerque, the Crosbys called for APD to notify families before the release of videos.
APD did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
“One of the most haunting things about watching that video is that it’s almost like you can see a judgment by the officers where they’re just deciding that Jesus’s life isn’t worth anything,” said Mark Fine, an attorney for the Crosby family. “Then when they know there’s a family involved and they don’t make any effort to notify the family, then it also feels like they don’t feel like their life is worth much. And the bottom line is, if the police are not viewing citizens’ lives as worth that much, then you can do whatever you want with policy and mandating training, but if they don’t feel like the citizens of Albuquerque — that their lives — are worth much, then this is going to continue.”
The videos have been complicated for Olivia. She is both tortured by their contents — the sight and sounds of her son falling in a barrage of bullets — and comforted by them. The images have given her nightmares, but also something else just as indelible: the truth.
Since the March 29, 2021, morning when a Chicago police officer shot and killed her 13-year-old brother, Adam Toledo, sometimes scrolling through Instagram means spiraling down an emotional vortex for 26-year old Esmeralda Toledo. Adam’s story went viral, so a post will sometimes randomly pop up on her feed, a freeze-frame of her brother, his hands up, in the millisecond before the bullet enters his chest. Over the past two years, Adam’s family has occasionally ventured out to a restaurant, only to hear the patrons in adjacent tables talk about his shooting and ask, “What kind of mother lets her 13-year-old out at 2 in the morning?” never knowing that the mother — the one who was so certain her son was tucked in his bed when she went to sleep that evening — was at the next table eating up every critique and judgment.
In the days following Adam’s death, his mother, Elizabeth Toledo, heard the police narrative repeated on the news, in the papers, and around the neighborhood: A Chicago police officer shot her son after what they said was an armed confrontation. Another technology with skittish results — ShotSpotter — had alerted officers to the sound of bullets fired in Adam’s predominantly Mexican American neighborhood of Little Village. Officers found Adam, along with a 21-year-old, as they searched for the source of the alleged gunshots. Adam fled on foot, running with a gun in his hand. The officer, Eric Stillman, yelled, “Show me your fucking hands!”
But to Elizabeth, her son wasn’t the kind to engage in an armed confrontation, or a young gang member roaming the streets in the middle of the night, or most of the other descriptors used on the evening news. He was, to her, the lovestruck kid likely sneaking out of his room to see his new girlfriend, who lived near the scene of the shooting. He was the one responsible for making popcorn — sprinkling it with hot sauce — for the family’s weekly movie night. He was the one, she said, who made her stop her car as they passed by a collection of buskers playing in front of school, and gave them the only money he had — a $20 bill.
The video, she was sure, would show that there was no armed conflict.
Then the city released the footage.
The video debunked the armed conflict story, but instead of showing what happened in real time, slow-motion video played on news broadcasts. A timer calculated the fractions of a second between when Adam is alleged to have tossed a gun and put his hands in the air in a sign of surrender and the officer pulling the trigger.
As soon as a video is edited, Deryn Strange, a psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and an expert on memory distortion, said, “it loses its probative value.”
Those tricks of memory will be key as as Stillman faces the Chicago’s Police Board on charges that he violated seven different department policies, including unnecessary use of force, in Adam’s case. Chicago’s interim Police Superintendent Eric Carter recommended that he be fired, though Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx declined to press criminal charges. Meanwhile, the Toledo family has filed a wrongful death suit against the city and Stillman that is making its way through the courts.
“We look forward to presenting our case to the Police Board and believe his actions will be deemed justified,” Tim Grace, a lawyer for Stillman, said in a statement.
Strange points to research showing that when surveillance video is slowed down, the intent of the subject is perceived to be worse, and it perpetuates the idea that the person in the video may have had more time to deliberate consequences and actions. In Adam’s case, Strange explains, releasing video in slow motion “could suggest that the officer had more time to decide whether to shoot or not than they actually did. It could also suggest, depending on the framing, that the suspect had the time to do whatever they should have done to prevent it from happening.”
“Video is not this unbiased source of perfect information about what happens for an event because we are not unbiased individuals,” Strange said. “So what we see with our eyes is going to be processed by a bias frame. So whatever information we have already about a case, what we’ve been informed of either via tweet or the news reporter, it affects our viewing of the video in any additional information, colors what it is that we actually see and ultimately what we remember.”
Though Gladys and Herman Whitfield haven’t read much of the research on bodycams, they intuitively understood the main findings.
Video of their son’s death — chopped up with graphics and a narrator — didn’t tell the story of what they saw last April on the first floor of their family home. Would the video of George Floyd’s murder have been as powerful if it had been edited for time, the nine minutes he lay on the asphalt with a knee to his neck cut out?
So the Whitfields sued. They held rallies. They passed around petitions and hounded politicians. They demanded the release of all the videos from all the responding officers showing their son’s last moments.
A spokesperson for the Indianapolis Police Department said the department contracts with a California-based company called Critical Incident Video to assist with the release of important footage. The department doesn’t have a policy regulating how footage from incidents like the Whitfields’ is edited.
These videos, the Whitfields knew, wouldn’t show how Trey could transform the sound of the wind through the trees or the whoosh of traffic on a freeway into a melody or a beat. They wouldn’t reveal his brilliance at the piano or show how he could break down the geopolitics of historical empires. But they could show how he was killed.
A judge, over the city’s objections, agreed.
Following the judge’s orders last December, the residents of Indianapolis saw officers tase Trey, heard him crying “Fire! Fire! Fire!” as his body absorbed the electric jolts, then heard him repeat the phrase that has become an omen, a plea, and a rallying cry for reform. “I can’t breathe.”
A grand jury convened. The officers were placed on administrative duty.
By early April, the Whitfields had a new video to watch: News footage of the officers who had come to their home now arriving at a courthouse to enter not guilty pleas in the death of their son.
Melissa Segura is an investigative reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New Mexico.