Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
Season 13 Episode 3
Aired on March 1, 2026
Main segment: Police body cameras in the United States
Other segment: Kash Patel
John Oliver discusses FBI Director Kash Patel’s presence at the Olympic Games, why his work trips look an awful lot like vacations, and why he seems more interested in “working the media” than working his actual job. Then, Oliver explains why police body cameras can be useful, or useless, depending on whether they’re used properly, and why YouTube may have been a mistake – no matter how many videos there are of goats screaming.
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Transcript
Note for Students & Writers: This transcript is archived here for educational purposes, critical analysis, and screenwriting study. All rights belong to the original creators.
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[Cheers and applause]
JOHN: Welcome, welcome, welcome to “Last Week Tonight!” I’m John Oliver. Thank you so much for joining us. It has been a busy week – and I mean really busy.
Trump, against zero odds, delivered the longest State of the Union in history.
The U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, with Israeli officials claiming they’ve killed the Ayatollah Khamenei – and look: we’re taping this on Saturday, so who the fuck knows what’s happened by the time you see this?
Meanwhile, the Clintons testified at the Epstein hearings.
And it turns out, we might be getting a new business daddy.
Netflix has backed out of its bid to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, paving the way for rival Paramount Skydance to take over.
JOHN: Yeah, not great news!
In fact, if I may quote anyone who’s ever accidentally sat on their Roku remote, “Oh shit, I’m in Paramount now, how the fuck do I get out of this?”
Also, last Sunday saw the U.S. men’s hockey team win gold, only for this to happen.
A wild scene in the locker room with FBI Director Kash Patel even spotted celebrating with the team, appearing to chug a beer before raising the bottle in the air, spraying it across the locker room.
JOHN: Yeah, that is the Director of the FBI, looking like a little kid who won a prize for collecting the most canned goods and got to go into the locker room.
Also, for what it’s worth, he didn’t “chug a beer, then spray it across the locker room.”
A successful chug would render the bottle unsprayable.
What he basically did was drink a beer weird, and then kind of fling his backwash around.
Anyway.
It was fun while it lasted, but it’s official: hockey sucks dick now, and sadly, not in the hot way.
Patel’s presence there was strange for a number of reasons, not least that his press office had insisted his trip to the Olympics was for work, trashing reports suggesting otherwise as “false” and “garbage.”
But when his itinerary was released, it showed his four-day trip contained only several hours of work meetings and a handful of meet-and-greets, broken up by long segments of personal and leisure time, with his final day consisting of just the gold medal game, followed by his flight home.
And look, nothing against going to Italy and getting a photo op.
A couple of years back, every living comedian but me pulled that same move, and I hear they had a great time.
But the work-to-play ratio seems a little off.
And this was just the latest instance of Patel seeming to use the FBI jet for personal trips, which is a little rich coming from him, given just over two years ago, he sat down with Glenn Beck and complained about his predecessor’s use of it like this.
Chris Wray doesn’t need a government-funded G5 jet to go to vacation.
Maybe we ground that plane.
$15,000 every time it takes off.
Just a thought.
JOHN: Okay, first, let me address this man-cave. Because it has everything to hang out with the boys: a chalkboard.
A typewriter in a box.
A second camera in frame.
And most crucially, three staggeringly different chairs.
Seating options.
You might all be talking, but those pieces couldn’t be less in conversation with each other.
But more importantly: the FBI Director is actually required by law to take the bureau’s private plane.
But crucially, if the travel is personal, they’re required to reimburse the government – though only for the cost of a commercial flight.
And Patel’s been using the jet a lot since he took office, to, among other things, go to an exclusive golf resort in Scotland for a getaway with friends, and to travel to a Real American Freestyle Wrestling event where his girlfriend was performing the national anthem.
He then flew to Texas to a resort literally called “The Boondoggle Ranch,” which’d be bad enough even if it didn’t happen during the government shutdown, and if he weren’t hosted by a Republican mega-donor named, and this is true, Bubba Saulsbury.
Which sounds like either the name of a baseball player from 1954 who was also in the Klan or a dinner special at Denny’s.
And when Patel and his country-singer girlfriend went on a podcast with Katie Miller, who is Stephen Miller’s wife, he offered up this not-great defense.
It’s ironic that they’re saying, oh, you’re going on vacation or you’re going to see your girlfriend perform.
And if I was actually abusing it, I would go see every one of her shows.
I think I get to like 15%.
JOHN: Oh, that’s okay, then. We all know it’s not abuse if you don’t do it as much as you technically could, you deeply weird man.
And by the way, if you’re expecting me to show you a clip of his girlfriend’s music, I refuse to do that.
I’ll just point out that if you go to the YouTube page for her song “Country Back” – about how she wants her country back – and scroll down, the top comment reads simply, “Damn… Patel borrow the jet and went to listen to this.”
And I’d love to agree with that except – again – he didn’t borrow the jet, we all paid for it.
Thousands of dollars to take off.
Just a thought.
And the thing is, Patel’s Olympic trip wasn’t even the first time he’s been accused of treating work like a vacation.
Last May, he went to the U.K. for a meeting of the “Five Eyes” – an intelligence alliance with close English-speaking allies, and also, by the way, my high school nickname when bullies determined something stronger than “Four Eyes” was required.
And while Patel’s U.K. itinerary was tightly packed with important meetings, according to one senior official, Patel wanted to move them to more fun venues, because, quote, “He wants Premier soccer games. He wants to go jet skiing. He’d like a helicopter tour. His staff only cared about three things: what his meals were, when his workouts would be, and what his entertainment would be. The biggest plan is how he’s going to get his girlfriend in there so she can go to Windsor Castle.”
Which feels like what a 15-year-old boy thinks a trip to England is.
Soccer, jetski with James Bond’s boss, and take your girlfriend to the castle.
I’m gonna show her the full Agent Cody Banks.
And it can seem like Patel’s much more interested in the trappings of his job than the job itself.
For instance, at one point he ordered special, extra-large challenge coins to hand out, which looked like this.
And I assume he hands them out after only the sickest quests, like completing No Nut November or failing anger management.
They look like the currency you use to pay for a divorce.
But the thing is, this fixation on optics can make him very bad at his job.
Take what happened last September, after Charlie Kirk was shot.
Within hours, Patel took to Twitter to announce that “The subject for the horrific shooting today is now in custody,” only to, 98 minutes later, have to follow that with a tweet saying, “The subject in custody has been released.”
And in the words of one FBI veteran, “It wasn’t a good look.”
Which makes sense – among other things, Patel’s first post sure made it sound like people could stop worrying about an armed shooter on the loose, when that was not the case.
And yet, he stood by his actions.
Could I have worded it a little better in the heat of the moment? Sure.
But do I regret putting it out? Absolutely not.
I was telling the world what the FBI was doing as we were doing it, and I’m continuing to do that, and I challenge anyone out there to find a Director that has been more transparent and more willing to work the media on high-profile cases, or any case, the FBI is handling.
JOHN: Okay, but the FBI Director shouldn’t be working the media for likes. You’re supposed to be solving the case, not providing running commentary.
There’s a reason the CIA has never sent out a press release saying, “We think we found an alien!”
And then 90 minutes later had to say, “Never mind, it was just a fucked up looking squirrel.”
And the chaos in the Kirk investigation continued once Patel landed in Utah.
Because according to one senior leader in counterintelligence, Patel didn’t have a raid jacket and reportedly ordered people to go find him one.
“He needed a size medium. They found him a female’s jacket that didn’t have the patches that he wanted, so he had the SWAT team taking their patches off to put on his jacket before he would go to the press conference.”
And sure enough, that’s what he then wore.
Now, I have to tell you, he disputes that account, and went on Fox to work the media on the story.
I was honoring my men and women at the FBI.
One of my agents handed me a jacket and said, hey, boss, you should probably wear this, we are going into the command center.
I said I would be honored to wear that.
The other one handed me the SWAT team badge of the unit that was protecting the area where Charlie was assassinated.
I wore that with pride.
JOHN: I mean, okay. Though to be fair, Kash wearing something with pride isn’t a high bar.
Given he might be the first FBI Director who has his own apparel line.
And yes, that is a logo featuring Trump as the Punisher as Santa.
And yes, his hat does say “K$H,” which I get stands for Kash, but makes him look like he’s in a shitty Ke$ha cover band.
But it gets worse.
Because when Patel and his then-deputy, Dan Bongino, joined a conference call about the shooting, FBI officials were apparently shocked by their fixation on social media, with one saying of Patel, “He’s screaming that he wants to put stuff out, but it’s not even vetted yet. It’s not even accurate. Everyone on the call is just like: this guy is completely out of control.”
And let’s just agree: you should never be on any conference call thinking, “This guy is out of control.”
At worst, you should be thinking, “If I died right now, would anyone notice? Would anyone care?”
And it says something that, by the time Kirk’s alleged killer turned himself in, Utah’s Governor Spencer Cox had taken the lead in handling the press, with a source telling Fox News that, quote, “Letting Kash talk much could fuck up the prosecution.”
The point is, Patel seems in way over his head.
But weirdly, Trump might actually like that right now, given there are certain areas where he might prefer loyalty over competence.
Most notably, the Epstein case.
Because before Patel became FBI Director, he insisted that the agency could release an alleged list of people Epstein had trafficked underage girls to – and was incredulous Republicans hadn’t already demanded that.
What the hell are the House Republicans doing?
They have the majority.
You can’t get the list?
You’re gonna accept Dick Durbin’s word or whoever that guy is as to who is on that list and who isn’t and that it can and can’t be released.
Put on your big boy pants and let us know who the pedophiles are.
JOHN: Wait, wait, wait, “put on your big boy pants,” I’m not sure that’s the language I’d use to talk about catching pedophiles, given it sounds more like the slogan for a clothing line started by Jared from Subway.
But Patel’s now singing a very different tune, arguing there’s no credible evidence Epstein trafficked young women to anyone beside himself.
And whenever the subject of Trump’s name being in the files has come up, things have been noticeably tense.
Did you tell the Attorney General that the President’s name is in the Epstein files?
During many conversations that the Attorney General and I have had on the matter of Epstein, we have reviewed —
The question is simple: did you tell the Attorney General that Donald Trump’s name is in the Epstein files. Yes or no?
Why don’t you try spelling it out.
Yes or no?
Use the alphabet.
Yes or no?
No?
A, B, C, D, E, F.
JOHN: Oh, you got him! You got him so good.
By the way, later that hearing, a photo showed Patel holding a note reading “Good fight with Swalwell. Hold the line.”
And I don’t know what would be more embarrassing – whether he wrote that note to himself, or his mom wrote it and slipped it in his Tasmanian Devil lunch box.
And his defensiveness there is striking now the files are being released, and Trump’s name is all over them.
And while that doesn’t necessarily show evidence of wrongdoing, this week NPR scrutinized the files and revealed something odd.
The spotlight tonight on what’s not in the millions of Epstein files released by the DOJ: summaries and notes from three separate interviews the FBI conducted with a Jeffrey Epstein accuser who also made sex abuse allegations against President Trump in 2019.
JOHN: Yeah, that looks pretty damning. In fact, the only thing that could be any more suspicious is if we eventually find out that the night Epstein died, Trump was caught buying a bunch of rope at Home Depot.
And look, I’m not sure how long Patel’s going to stay in this job.
Trump’s reportedly displeased with his Olympics hijinks.
But as stupid as the locker room and all of this is, when and if he’s eventually gone, someone else is going to have to lean up his fucking mess.
And now this.
Announcer: And now, The Dan Bongino Show is back and it’s weird as fuck.
It is good to see you guys.
It’s been a crazy year.
For those of you watching the show right now, we are obviously live.
Anybody can set a time and a watch, it’s fairly obvious.
I ate this morning for the first time in three days.
And man, I feel like a million dollars.
So just throwing that out there.
I was putting on her shirt the other day, my elbow snapped back and it’s killing me so I had to take an Advil.
What the hell?
I feel like I have something in my eye.
You see how it’s a little red over there.
I’ve got arthritis in my elbow.
I don’t have any boys.
I’ve got to tell you, I’ve got an older daughter and a younger daughter.
And they’re pretty far apart.
I probably should have more than three.
I’m one of three boys.
I have a step sister.
I’ve never had a boy.
Hey, Dick, Dicky.
Dicko.
Maybe they call him Dicko, I don’t know.
You don’t have to speculate.
That was my plastics agar.
Don’t get distracted, don’t get into another thing that’s not there because it takes away from the thing that’s there.
You get my point?
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JOHN: Moving on. Our main story tonight concerns the police.
The main thing Steven Seagal pretends to be, aside from “a guy whose hair is naturally black.”
Sorry, but the only way you get that color is by dunking your head in a vat of printer ink.
Specifically, we’re going to talk about a tool police use that’s responsible for, among other things, this incredible story.
A shocking scene for kids at a Chuck E. Cheese.
One minute they are just having fun and then all of a sudden police rush in and put Chuck E. Cheese in handcuffs.
We’re gonna detain the mouse dude.
Yes, we are.
We have one detained.
Hey, he’s a suspect.
He stole someone’s car here and has been using it, someone that was one of your employees or something like that, so, yeah.
No, Chuck E.
Chuck E., no!
JOHN: Wow, there is a lot going on there! From the kid screaming “Chuck E., no!” to the phrase “We’re gonna detain the mouse, dude,” which sounds like what an ICE agent would say if Fievel tried to immigrate to America today.
That arrest is one of many videos we’ve only been able to see thanks to police body cameras – the devices that give us a nipples-eye view of law enforcement’s interactions with the public.
They’re ubiquitous now, but body cams are still fairly new.
As recently as 2013, only a third of police departments had them.
But by 2020, 79% of officers reported working in departments with body-worn cameras, to the point it’s been said they represent the largest new investment in policing in a generation.
And body cams have been viewed as a popular solution to problems regarding transparency in law enforcement – which may be why a key Democratic demand right now for ending the shutdown of funding to DHS involves this catchy phrase.
We want there to be masks off, body cameras on.
Masks off, body cameras on.
We want masks off, body cameras on.
JOHN: Stirring stuff. That’s the leader of the opposition.
And that is truly the best he’s got.
Honestly, you could set a white noise machine to “fiery Chuck Schumer speech,” and get a full eight hours.
And the truth is, body cams can seem like a great tool for increasing accountability and building trust.
And cops themselves tend to value them – though for slightly different reasons, as for them, it’s more about reducing frivolous or false complaints.
In fact, according to a 2018 survey, while just 34% of local police and sheriffs’ offices said they acquired body-worn cameras to reduce use of force, nearly 80% wanted them in order to do things like improve officer safety, increase evidence quality, reduce civilian complaints, and reduce agency liability.
And look, ideally, you could have all those things.
In fact, as this police captain in Virginia sees it, the best-case scenario for body cams is them improving everyone’s behavior.
When a camera is present, everyone acts a little bit better.
So perhaps this is an opportunity for us to deescalate an incident.
If something is very escalated, it’ll be a reminder to everyone involved, to include the officers and the public, that a camera’s present and hopefully that we all are acting a little better, a little more civil to each other.
JOHN: Well, that certainly sounds nice, doesn’t it? Although “when a camera’s present, everyone acts a bit better” is an observation from someone who clearly doesn’t watch reality TV – a world in which a camera’s presence is your cue to throw a glass of pinot grigio into someone’s face and call them a whore in the middle of a nice restaurant.
Still, that notion that body cams can be a way of calming down interactions with law enforcement is appealing – and may be why it seems we’re about to slap them on the chests of all ICE agents across the country in the name of accountability.
But the thing is, the more you look into body cams, the more you realize they’re only effective if they’re used properly – and in many cases, they’re just not.
So, given that, tonight, let’s talk about body cams.
And let’s start with the fact that straight away, there are certain limitations to what they can tell us, as – because of their field of view – they can’t capture the full context of everything going on.
And while I think you probably already get that, just watch as this Today Show reporter demonstrates it in the weirdest possible way.
Seth is putting on a body camera.
My producer, Jovana, is off to the side, shooting from a distance on her iPhone, to give us the complete picture, like a bystander would.
Scenario one, something Seth calls deceptive intensity.
Watch this body camera footage closely.
What’s happening here?
All right.
Now let’s look from the bystander’s iPhone.
That’s right.
No brawl here.
Just really bad dancing.
JOHN: Okay, I’ll admit: that demonstration was effective because the body cam footage did look like a violent brawl, when we now know they were in fact doing a Richard Simmons workout at each other.
And that’s not the only weird demonstration like that.
Interpretation can be very misleading.
For example, you the viewer at home can only see me from the chest up.
You have no idea what’s in my hand.
However, the view from a second camera may show that I’m holding what appears to be a gun, when in reality, I’m just holding a flashlight.
JOHN: Okay, I’ll be honest, that felt less like a news segment and more like the routine of the world’s worst birthday magician.
“Gather around kids!
For my first trick, you probably think I have a gun in my hand, but it’s actually… a flashlight!
What’s that?
Your parents want their money back?
No problem!
Here’s their money… or is it actually… another flashlight!”
But those examples, while ridiculous, do show how hard it can be to interpret what’s captured on video.
But the audio can be deceptive as well.
Take this example from Florida, where the shouts of officers wound up shaping a very misleading narrative.
Officers were wearing body worn-cameras, and they were chasing after an individual.
He walked over to the sidewalk, and lay down on the sidewalk, spread-eagled.
And you can hear on the body-worn camera footage officers screaming, “Stop resisting, stop resisting!”
We will tase you!
Okay!
Get your hands behind you!
I didn’t move!
Stop resisting!
Stop resisting!
Stop resist — stop!
Stop!
Okay, okay!
Okay!
He claimed that they beat him unnecessarily, and nobody believed him until that video from the nearby building came out.
JOHN: Yeah, they’re yelling “stop resisting” when he wasn’t resisting at all. And it can be powerful to claim something’s happening that the camera cannot see.
It’d be like me telling you that under this desk I’ve got the thighs of a bodybuilder and an ass that won’t quit.
When the truth is, I’ve got two perfectly average thighs and an ass that quits all the time.
And that’s not a one-off.
A similar situation happened in the beating death of Tyre Nichols, where the audio on officers’ body cams picked them up saying things like “lay flat,” only for another video to emerge showing him lying limp as an officer handcuffed him.
The point is, there are immediately limits to what a camera can show you.
But those limitations get even more acute when cops mute, obscure, or turn off cameras.
Which happens – and sometimes, on purpose.
And that’s something driven home by this incident, where a police captain who was arrested for drunk driving kept urgently trying to convey something to the officer who pulled him over.
You’ve been drinking tonight?
I just got a ride.
You’ve been drinking tonight, sir.
I’m a captain.
In the police department.
What police department?
Oklahoma City.
Turn the camera off.
How much have you had to drink tonight, sir?
Turn your camera off, please.
Huh?
Turn your camera off.
I’m not turning my camera off.
Okay.
JOHN: Yeah, that’s a police captain whispering “turn your camera off” while simultaneously staring into it like a raccoon caught on a Ring doorbell.
And it is genuinely hard to imagine a more embarrassing way to get arrested than that.
Well — actually, there is one: saying something because you just saw someone get handcuffed while dressed like a giant mouse.
And look, it makes sense that these things have an off button — cops need to be able to take a shit in peace like the rest of us.
And some of the people they talk to might need their privacy protected, too.
That’s why Connecticut, for instance, has a law that says they have to turn cameras off in cases like during an encounter with an undercover officer or informant, when an officer is on break or engaged in personal business, and when a person is undergoing a medical or psychological evaluation or treatment.
But obviously, some critical interactions — when people have been hurt or killed by police — still go unrecorded.
And while you might think, “Well, maybe the incident escalated suddenly and officers didn’t have time to turn their cameras on,” you should know most body cams are basically always in a standby mode in which the camera is powered on and rolling, but not yet permanently saving the footage.
It’s only when an officer presses record that the camera will begin saving footage to permanent memory.
That saved clip then includes footage recorded for a predetermined amount of buffer time before the record button was pressed — which can range from 15 seconds to 2 minutes.
So there’s actually a meaningful amount of context that can get captured prior to an officer hitting record — if that’s something they’re inclined to do.
And yet, oftentimes, they just happen to be turned off during incidents of police violence.
For example, even though the LAPD requires officers to turn on their cameras before any interaction with the public, nearly a fourth of its officers involved in incidents where serious force was used failed to activate them in a timely manner.
And some unions and police officials are quick to excuse that sort of thing.
For instance, not long after Houston rolled out body cams, two police officers shot a man near a gas station, but neither turned on their cameras until the incident was over.
And this is how the police union’s then-president defended that.
This was the first real high-profile test of this department’s body-worn camera policy.
Pass or fail?
If the officer’s primary responsibility was his safety, he passed.
If his primary responsibility was videotaping the entire scene, he failed.
If he was your cameraman and only had to worry about videotaping that, I would blame that cameraman for not getting it.
But that’s not his primary responsibility.
His primary responsibility is to make sure he’s safe and the public’s safe.
JOHN: Okay, but he did shoot someone. My cameraman gets footage and has never shot anyone.
While doing this job, at least.
I don’t know what he does during his off-hours, that’s his time.
Also, activating a body camera isn’t exactly an overwhelming task.
We looked into it, and the process is:
Step one, press the record button.
Step two, end of steps.
But even if an officer does turn on their camera — and even if it shows what happened clearly — there’s still the issue of what happens to all the footage.
Because to be clear: there is an enormous amount of it.
To give you a sense of scale: Axon, the nation’s largest police camera provider, offers cloud storage for many of its clients’ footage.
And its database is more than 100 petabytes of footage, equivalent to more than 5,000 years of high-definition video.
Which is pretty wild — both that there’s so much of it, and also that petabyte is a real unit of digital storage and not what it sounds like: a snack food brand exclusively for pedophiles.
“Pedo-Bite: have a snack, you fuckin’ monster!”
And the thing is, most of that footage will never be watched by anyone.
Which is understandable.
It’s impossible for agencies to look at every minute of footage from all these cameras.
But far too often, even footage that documents misconduct isn’t meaningfully reviewed — meaning departments miss opportunities to spot both problem officers and broader patterns of abuse.
After the murder of George Floyd, it emerged that body cams had captured Derek Chauvin kneeling on the necks of others, including a handcuffed Black woman and a 14-year-old Black boy.
In both those cases, supervisors had access to the recordings yet cleared Chauvin’s conduct.
And when a state civil rights investigation later looked at 700 hours of body cam footage, it found Minneapolis cops repeatedly used neck restraints, and concluded that if police or the city had conducted a substantive audit of the footage, they would have seen how often officers there were using neck restraints, and could have taken steps to stop it.
And clearly, someone should’ve done that.
Because there’s no point in the police just stacking up thousands of hours of footage that nobody’s ever going to see.
Especially given we all know that’s Paramount Plus’s job.
Hey, what’re they gonna do?
Take us over and immediately cancel us?
I’m genuinely asking.
So internally, departments aren’t reviewing their own footage nearly enough.
And when it comes to public transparency, the results have been all over the map.
And you might be thinking, “Well, why not just put all the footage out there for everyone to see?”
The thing is, there are legitimate reasons not to do that.
First, there are issues with how the video can be fed into facial recognition.
But also, remember: body cams can show vulnerable or embarrassing moments, which can be exploited for entertainment.
And I know we’ve shown you a couple tonight.
But we thought a lot about why we were doing that and how.
In the mouse one, his face is covered.
And in the police captain one, you might’ve noticed, he was a police captain.
But there are countless channels on YouTube that’ve made a business out of obtaining body cam footage of people in distress, and which do feel like they’re leaning into exploitation.
One channel has videos called “Entitled Lady Finally Gets What She Deserves,” and “Buckle Up Kids, Grandma’s Drunk.”
Which sounds like a kids book written by Kathie Lee Gifford.
Another channel has videos — mainly of young women — with titles like “19-Year-Old Girl Arrested for DUI at Over Double the Limit After Getting Drunk at the Beach,” which is pretty grim.
And by the way, we’ve blurred faces here, but they don’t do that.
It almost makes me think YouTube as a whole might not’ve been worth it, offsetting its real accomplishments like this video of a chihuahua riding a turtle, this one of Kelsey Grammer falling off a stage, or this one of a sheep screaming like a human.
[Goat screaming]
JOHN: Yeah, that might be the best thing ever posted to YouTube, and if you’re thinking, “John, what about the several hundred episodes of your show?” I said what I said.
Now, those channels get videos through public records requests.
But police departments can have a huge amount of leeway when it comes to what they release, as in most places, policymakers have defaulted to leaving them with the power to decide what’s recorded, who can see it and when.
Just watch as a reporter asked Charlotte’s then-police chief how to reconcile his commitment to transparency with his department’s refusal to release video of a police shooting.
You seem to give mixed messages here.
On the one hand you’re saying we should have transparency, on the other hand you’re saying you’re not going to release the video.
How can you square those two things?
Obviously, the idea of transparency is release the videos so we can all see it.
Sure, I appreciate your passion, but I never said full transparency.
I said transparency.
And transparency is in the eye of the beholder.
JOHN: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Transparency is in the eye of the beholder? That’s fully nonsense. That sounds like the last thoughts of a pigeon that’s about to smash into a closed window.
And yet that’s been the de facto stance of many departments.
For example, even though in 2020 the NYPD promised to release footage of critical incidents within 30 days, when ProPublica looked into it three years later, they found that out of 380 such incidents, the NYPD had released footage within a month just twice.
And in South Carolina, while police there had killed at least 19 people in 2023, they’d only released footage in three of those cases, with one department refusing a request by saying, “We never release that footage.”
And a popular argument police use is that making video public would undermine the integrity of an investigation.
It’s an excuse which works in almost every state in the country, even when there are rules for public access.
They’ll also argue that reviewing the footage, and redacting sensitive information — like juveniles’ faces or witnesses’ identities — carries a prohibitive cost.
In Las Vegas, police charged about $70 an hour to produce footage, while in Memphis, journalists have been asked to pay as much as $3,100 in hourly labor costs for video from a single case.
And as one expert said, “For a local news organization, a bill for $2,000 might as well be a denial.”
Which makes sense.
Because local news are known for a lot of things — dedicated employees, probing investigations, inadvertently broadcasting massive dicks on their weather maps — but they’re not famous for rolling in money.
And even if footage gets released, it can be so heavily redacted it’s essentially useless.
For example, until last year, Tempe, Arizona’s police department had a policy which mandated that all body cam footage they released would include a general medium blur.
And just so you know, this is what their blurred footage looked like.
And it’s notable that when body cam footage shows officers in a bad light, they’ll often cite the cost and technical hurdles of redaction to not release it.
But when it shows them in a good light, those problems seem to disappear.
Just watch as a reporter in Texas confronts a police chief who was claiming that because they didn’t have the ability to redact video themselves, they couldn’t release a video of a police search during a traffic stop.
In the year 2024, why doesn’t this department have software to redact videos?
It’s really expensive for us to get.
Angleton Chief Lupe Valdez showed us a quote from their body cam vendor: more than $14,000.
Budget-wise, it’s not in our budget to do that.
But there’s this: body cam video Angleton police released a few months ago of a crash where officers heroically pulled a driver out of the burning car.
And look, portions are blurred.
How were you able to redact the video in that case?
We paid somebody to do that.
So, let me get this straight.
When your officers are heroes, you find a way to release it, but when your officers are scrutinized, you find a way to withhold it?
No, sir.
That’s what happened here, Chief.
No, sir.
JOHN: Uh… yes, sir. That’s exactly what happened.
That interview couldn’t have been more embarrassing for him.
Which is why I’m sure he’d prefer if we blurred him right now, but I’m not going to do that, because — much like him — I only pay people to redact video when I feel like it.
But maybe no case illustrates the extent to which the mere presence of body cams isn’t sufficient to prevent police violence or bring accountability more than that of Ronald Greene, a Louisiana man who died following an encounter with police in 2019.
Officers initially told his family that he’d died on impact after crashing his car at the end of a chase with police.
And even though there was body cam footage from officers on the scene, state officials — including the then-governor — repeatedly refused to publicly release it for more than two years.
In the end, someone wound up leaking the video to the AP, which is how people came to see a trooper wrestling Greene to the ground, putting him in a chokehold and punching him in the face.
And I’m not going to show you video of any of that.
But I do think it’s worth seeing one moment from one of the officer’s body cams as he drove away from the incident.
And I beat the ever-living fuck out of him, choked him, and everything else, trying to get him under control.
And then all of a sudden, he just went limp.
Yeah, I thought he was dead.
We set him up real quick, he’s on the ambulance en route to Lynwood, and I’m hauling ass trying to catch up to him.
You think you, uh, y’all got it on body cam?
JOHN: Yeah, as soon as he was reminded his body camera was on, he turned it off. Which is pretty damning.
It’s honestly the panicked move of someone whose internal monologue was essentially just this.
[Goat screaming]
JOHN: Yeah, exactly. Now, none of the six officers on the scene wound up facing much in the way of charges.
The guy in that video actually wound up dying the following year in a car crash.
As for the other five, only two were convicted on any charges, and those were misdemeanors pled down, but charges against the other three were dismissed, and the DOJ dropped its criminal investigation, saying it had “found insufficient evidence to support federal charges.”
But that might be because, even though there was body cam footage, the microphones weren’t always on, and not all of the troopers at the scene had their cameras on during the arrest.
And that doesn’t seem like a coincidence.
Because the AP found state troopers there had made a habit of turning off or muting body cams during pursuits, that when footage is recorded, the agency routinely refused to release it, and that one supervisor in the department even told internal investigators that it was his common practice to rubber-stamp officers’ use-of-force reports without reviewing body cam video.
And if you’re not even going to watch the footage, why give your officers body cams at all?
Might as well just let them hang a bologna sandwich off their shirt instead.
It’ll lead to just as much accountability.
And they’ll have a little meat snack in case they get hungry.
And the truth is, if someone hadn’t leaked that footage, we’d likely never have known about any of this.
But hoping for leaks can’t be the system here.
So what do we do?
Well, I’d argue we have to take back the power from police departments to decide when and how to use body cams.
Some agencies are transitioning to auto-triggering technologies, like sensors that switch them on when officers do things like draw their gun or exit their police car.
Experts told us these aren’t necessarily bad ideas, but they’re likely to fall flat if they aren’t combined with clear, enforceable rules stating the footage must be retained, routinely reviewed and released in a timely manner — especially in critical incidents.
One way of doing that is to have those rules enforced by an independent body, free of police influence.
And all of this is worth bearing in mind during the current debate over requiring federal agents to wear body cams during immigration enforcement.
Because it’s worth remembering a pretty important fact about the officers in the Alex Pretti shooting.
Customs and Border officers were wearing body cameras, the agency says footage is preserved and unclear when or whether the public will see it.
Can I ask you a question, why isn’t it automatic that the body camera footage would be eventually released?
You would think it would be.
Trump administration resisted cooperation with any investigation and remember that they’ve already drawn a conclusion that the shooting was justified.
JOHN: Yeah, they still haven’t released the body cam footage, kind of rendering that whole “masks off, body cams on” slogan pretty toothless.
Though to be fair, I guess “masks off, body cams on and operating under clear guidelines about when footage is released and overseen by an independent body to ensure maximum transparency” isn’t quite as catchy.
And if Chuck Schumer tries to say it, his head might explode.
The point is, the reason we know what happened to Alex Pretti isn’t because of body cams, it’s because of all the other people standing around him holding cellphones.
And that’s going to need to keep happening.
Because until we see significant changes, body cams will just never live up to their promise of shining a real light on misconduct.
And if you need a visual metaphor for a light being shined on things, don’t worry because I have in my hand — and this might surprise you — a flashlight.
That’s our show.
Thank you so much for watching.
We will see you next week.
Good night!
[Cheers and applause]
Don’t blur me!
Don’t blur me!
I don’t want to be blurred!
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