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We may have reached the point where video technology is producing a full-fledged revolution in policing. That revolution has been crystalized, or at least revealed by, the events in Ferguson.

The first element of that revolution is a growing expectation among Americans that any dramatic event that takes place in public will be recorded on video. As I argued last January:

We are currently transitioning toward a new set of societal expectations surrounding video surveillance. Under the old expectation, the default expectation was that any given event would not be photographed. In this mindset we hear people exclaim in wonderment when an incident "happens to" get caught on camera. That is rapidly being replaced by a new mindset in which the default expectation is that something taking place in public will be recorded.

Sure enough, in the wake of Michael Brown鈥檚 shooting in Ferguson, we saw much discussion of video, or the lack of it. The result of this trend is that, like it or not, the actions of police officers will increasingly be photographed. Officers or departments can fight mandates to wear body cameras, they can try when they don鈥檛 want their actions recorded, they can to the public, they may allow mysterious technical 鈥渁ccidents鈥� to that has been captured, they can try to intimidate citizens into not photographing them, they can even try to steal cameras or memory chips (or ) in an effort to prevent video from coming to light. But as the police (along with the rest of us) become increasingly enveloped by video cameras, none of these measures will ultimately withstand the pressure of public expectation. 鈥淪omething bad has happened? Well let鈥檚 see the video!鈥�

If there is no video, that in itself will increasingly come to be viewed as suspicious, and the police will find their credibility weakened.

That dimension of the video revolution in policing will in turn have an even more significant effect. To illustrate how, consider the following passage from Graham Greene鈥檚 darkly comic 1958 spy novel, :

鈥楬ow are you certain that Cifuentes is not my agent?鈥�
鈥楤y the way you play checkers, Mr. Wormold, and because I interrogated Cifuentes.鈥�
鈥楧id you torture him?鈥�
Captain Segura laughed. 鈥楴o. He doesn鈥檛 belong to the torturable class.鈥�
鈥業 didn鈥檛 know there were class-distinctions in torture.鈥�
鈥楧ear Mr Wormold, surely you realize there are people who expect to be tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea. One never tortures except by a kind of mutual agreement. . . . Dr Hasselbacher does not belong to the torturable class.鈥�
鈥榃ho does?鈥�
鈥楾he poor in my own country, in any Latin American country. The poor of Central Europe and the Orient. Of course in your welfare states you have no poor, so you are untorturable. In Cuba the police can deal as harshly as they like with emigres from Latin America and the Baltic States, but not with visitors from your country or Scandinavia. It is an instinctive matter on both sides. Catholics are more torturable than Protestants鈥�.
鈥極ne reason why the West hates the great Communist states is that they don鈥檛 recognize class-distinctions. Sometimes they torture the wrong people. So too of course did Hitler and shocked the world. Nobody cares what goes on in our prisons, or the prisons of Lisbon or Caracas, but Hitler was too promiscuous. It was rather as though in your country a chauffeur had slept with a peeress.鈥�
鈥榃e鈥檙e not shocked by that any longer.鈥�
鈥業t is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.鈥�

Although the cynicism of Greene鈥檚 police captain is exaggerated, there is certainly a core truth here: that as 鈥渁n instinctive matter鈥� the police know whom they can torture鈥攍et us broaden the concept and say 鈥渕istreat鈥濃�攁nd whom they cannot.

In America, African-Americans, especially but not exclusively those in poor inner-cities, are part of the mistreatable class. Take for example a video like , in which a St. Paul man is Tasered (Tasers often being used for punitive torture in response to the act of 鈥渄issing a cop鈥�) and arrested for no legitimate reason after he had questioned why he was being ordered to leave an apparently public seating area while waiting to pick up his children from school. It is very hard to imagine that this would have happened to an otherwise identical man who was white.

What about the point Greene鈥檚 character makes about 鈥渕utual agreement鈥�? The St. Paul man, and most other victims, certainly don鈥檛 seem to consent to their mistreatment. Perhaps Greene refers to the fact that oppressed people in some times and places, when their oppression is bad enough, quite rationally recognize that any protest would be futile鈥攁 helplessness that contributes to a broader social reality that the authorities are 鈥渁llowed鈥� to mistreat certain people.

Invisibile or not believed

If police have generally been able to get away with abusing people, then much of the problem lies in the fact that judges, juries, prosecutors, and the public have too often deemed police officers more credible than abuse victims鈥攅specially black and poor victims. Part of the power that police have wielded comes from knowing that, should their victims complain, they will experience the nightmare of not being believed.

I give the American public enough credit to believe that if police have had wide latitude to abuse black people (and others in Greene鈥檚 鈥渢orturable classes鈥�), it is only because such abuse is either invisible or not believed. There may be a segment of the population that, out of fear and prejudice, would like to give the police license to abuse African-Americans, but I think the public at large wouldn鈥檛 tolerate it鈥攊f nothing else, because it does not comport with the story we tell ourselves about who we are.

So that is the other part of the video revolution in policing: increasingly, abuse of this kind will no longer be hidden, and the victims will be believed. Without his cellphone camera, the St. Paul man may well have received jail time, or at best have just been sent along to stew in his own anger. Instead, he鈥檚 at least had the satisfaction of seeing his situation become a controversy, sparking press coverage and forcing a . And his formal complaint may or may not be satisfactorily addressed, but it will certainly not be buried.

If the police find it increasingly hard to abuse citizens, that will be true not only because there will often be video (or hard questions about its absence), but also because, as Conor Friedersdorf summed up nicely in the headline of a , 鈥淰ideo Killed Trust in Police Officers.鈥� The antecedent of course was the beating, but in the past several years the combination of a video camera in every pocket and YouTube has generated an increasingly regular supply of videos showing civilians being abused by officers. This has opened a broader spectrum of people鈥檚 eyes to these realities, and that spectrum will only grow wider over time.

That Ferguson may represent a watershed moment in this dynamic is somewhat ironic since the shooting of Michael Brown was not caught on video. But the very lack of a video record of Brown鈥檚 shooting has only confirmed the dynamic I discussed above, sparking widespread for mandatory police body cameras (and prompting the Ferguson police to the technology several weeks after the shooting). And the video-driven 鈥渄eath of trust鈥� in police probably played a role in amplifying the situation in Ferguson鈥攄rawing the interest of reporters and the national public, influencing the balance of opinion about how likely it was that the police officer was in the wrong, and generally changing how the situation was perceived.

The Ferguson uprising may be forgotten in a year, but there鈥檚 also a chance that it will come to be seen as a significant inflection point鈥攖he moment when awareness crystalized among both African Americans and police officers that there is no longer a "torturable class" in the United States.