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Should We See Everything a Cop Sees?

By October 20, 2016 September 7th, 2018 No Comments

One of the first bodycam videos that Clemans uploaded shows a young black woman sitting on a bed in a hotel room. The officer wearing the camera is a disembodied voice but for a fleeting glimpse of his face and torso in a mirror. His manner is professional and sympathetic, and he says he doesn’t want to arrest her. “Will I be charged?” she asks. “Let’s get to that later,” he says. He asks her if she would be willing to talk to a counselor. “So you can get some other kind of job so you don’t have to do this anymore, O.K.?” he says. “Our ultimate goal is that there is no prostitution, O.K.?”

He begins filling out a form — Escort Face Sheet — on a clipboard. She answers every question, sharing the intimate details of her life. She tells him about her relationship with her boyfriend, her clashes with her strict father, her time as a runaway, her drift from strip clubs to Backpage.com escort ads, her few regular johns. She claims she’s new to this work. She explains that she charges per hour or half-hour. She has a dog, she says. She can rely on her parents in times of need, she says. She gives him their street address. She gives him her full name. She shares her private email address and phone number. She shares all this with the camera too.

When the interview is done, she asks about it. Is the image clear? “It’s pretty clear, yeah,” the officer says, but “if the press wanted it, we can redact faces — can blur out the faces and whatnot.” Body cameras are new to his city, and he doesn’t know that what he just told her isn’t entirely true. A lawyer will decide that the video is in no part exempt from the Public Records Act, and the officer will later be shocked to see it on YouTube. He will try and fail to have it taken down. The woman in the video is easy to find in her other internet life. She’s on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, where she chats with friends and posts images of dresses and animals and nail polish. You can visit her parents’ house on Google Street View.

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