On March 11, Boston police officer Nicholas O’Malley allegedly shot and killed Stephenson King, an unarmed Black man, in Roxbury. O’Malley has been charged with manslaughter. Police body-worn camera footage has been cited as key evidence in support of the criminal charge.
Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden is refusing to release the video despite calls for its release in the interest of so-called transparency and accountability. Even if the video were to be released, it is unclear whether this would achieve either transparency or accountability to the public’s satisfaction, because there is no universal definition for either of these terms.
In my new book “Police Body-Worn Cameras: Media and the New Discourse of Police Reform,” co-authored with Erick Laming, we illustrate how the concepts of transparency and accountability evolve over a period of decades, from the early 2000s to the 2020s, into a dominant police reform perspective. Both transparency and accountability are very difficult to define and operationalize, so the research tells us nothing about whether body cameras actually achieve transparency and accountability…