CAN POLICE TURN a perceived nuisance into an opportunity? Can they benefit from the efforts of smartphone-wielding “cop watchers” who dog them at crime and emergency scenes? The answer is yes. The images and words captured from these encounters could, as part of a larger reform, help to improve police practice.

Police are on camera as never before. With the prevalence of security cameras, drones, body and dash cameras and individual smart phones, our police officers probably should qualify for the NIL (Name, Image and Likeness) compensation that college athletes receive. Being recorded has become a regular aspect of the daily and nightly tour of duty; images of police encounters with the public are as ubiquitous across the web as images of kittens and last night’s restaurant meal.

With 310 million Americans estimated to use phones with cameras, this blizzard of bits and pixels will only grow. People making digital recordings of everything is a characteristic of American culture, across ethnic, racial and gender lines. At the moment, the only uses of these records of policing seem to be as evidence in disciplinary proceedings, evidence in civil and criminal cases, and as profitable images for news media of all descriptions, amateur and professional.

Of course, some citizens recording police behavior have performed an invaluable service, with perhaps no clearer example of this than the young Minneapolis woman whose phone captured the brutal killing of George Floyd in 2020.

While everyone, it seems, will capture a police incident at some point, a dedicated group of “cop watchers” (who prefer the more grandiose handle of “first amendment auditors”) has grown up around the country. They listen to scanners and head out to record police performance on the street. Many have their own channels on YouTube and other platforms and make a living from ads and subscribers. Some became watchers from mistrust of the police, some for the money, and some because they were bored.

Earlier this year, the Washington Post reported on cop watchers, including Sean Paul Reyes, “arguably YouTube’s most popular auditor.” Reyes, the paper said, “turned on his camera at Suffolk County, N.Y., police headquarters for the first time in 2021, bored and frustrated, he said, after being furloughed from his job as a logistics director for a warehouse company.” However watchers got there, they are staying. So, officers may as well smile; they will be perpetually on not-so-candid cameras.

The market for all this video recording of the police profession seems to be formed from a combination of our fascination with police action and the public demand for greater transparency and accountability. Police should be held accountable. The police role in society is by its nature controversial and consequential. We authorize the police and only the police, in lawful circumstances, to take away our liberty and use force, indeed deadly force, against us. So, when police are recorded abusing the terms of that authority it is, as it should be, hot stuff. The public has a right to demand, and police have the obligation to embrace, accountability.

Accountability and transparency are also key ingredients in the formula for continuous improvement in individual judgment and institutional policy making. The policing reforms of the past 65 years, driven by Supreme Court rulings and social upheaval, have in almost all cases resulted in more secure individual rights, greater police effectiveness and greater officer safety. Accountability has improved systems across the board. Indeed, most of today’s officers would neither recognize nor work for the Boston Police Department captured in an early iteration of cop watching, the 1961 CBS News expose of corruption in the department, entitled “Biography of a Bookie Joint.” Some of the first anti-corruption reforms in the department came in response to this documentary, including the eventual ouster of see-no-evil Police Commissioner Leo J. Sullivan.

Even if today’s DIY documentarians can be hard to take (The Post reported on one Arizona watcher encountering at a stoplight an officer with whom the man had had an earlier beef. The watcher “leaned out the window of his truck and shouted: ‘Do the department a favor and eat one of your service rounds!’), the right of these folks not to have their speech, texts, and images suppressed or abridged by the government is enshrined in the First Amendment. But these pain-in-the backside shutterbugs could be an asset. The giant missed opportunity is failing to use this valuable data for continuing education for the officers who generate all this content.

Officers and supervisors could study “game film” just as Bill O’Brien and Mac Jones do for the Patriots (though, admittedly, those study sessions don’t seem to be helping much this season). Police can always view the footage of misconduct and controversy on the watchers’ platforms. The more valuable recordings are the meat-and-potatoes incidents that characterize a typical shift. There’s a lot of learning hiding in those bytes.

It would be easy to identify the regulars among local cop watchers. Local police leaders could reach out for a parley with them. After all, authorities regularly ask for the public’s help in identifying suspects from existing footage and soliciting phone footage to aid investigations.

In return for making their data available, watchers would have the promise from police that it would be used for purposes of improvement in police practice. Watchers could become a tremendous crowd-source for continuing education. Recruiting this citizen corps of cameras would not mean tolerating interference with police operations. (They like any persons are subject to the rules and officer’s orders). It’s unlikely all of them would be willing to participate. But no change starts with everyone.

Among the group will be early adopters, both watchers and officers, willing to take a risk.  It would take time for trust to take hold between police and the watchers. This would require patient leadership from police executives. Trust comes not from words but from shared actions, from making mistakes, making amends and moving on.

The bigger reform would be a new departure in continuing education at the patrol level. Officers learn a great deal from every encounter. Currently, no system exists to capture that learning and facilitate applying it to future practice. Departments might begin such a process even without data from the public. They could use their own body and dash cam “footage” for purposes of after-action reviews. Currently, almost no time is committed in policing to reviewing with patrol officers how they are doing on the street.

Specialized units like SWAT and bomb squads regularly do probing after-action reviews of both live experiences and training exercises. Such a review seeks to learn from experience. Everyone participates; subordinates are permitted to speak up in the presence of their bosses. It’s not the finger-pointing fest that too often takes place with reviews of policing practices. Specialized units embrace continuous learning and continuous improvement, with encouragement from leadership. But no effort is made to use the same, valuable learning techniques for the bread and butter of the police service: uniformed patrol.

Though new, applying the after-action technique in patrol may not be entirely foreign, especially in smaller agencies that do not have standing specialized units. While personnel have primary assignments in patrol, investigation or administration, they train as specialists teams and come together as circumstances require.

These game film/after action sessions could take place weekly, in 30- to 60-minute meetings. No special equipment is needed. They could use the station’s roll call room, community room, or guardroom. Each week two or three incidents could be chosen for review. The officers who handled the encounter would explain their reasoning for each step. At the first such session, many minutes of silence will open the meeting. The supervisors who convene them will have to be patient. Police organizations, like most bureaucracies, have no tradition of bosses listening to the experience of front-line personnel. The closest they get to the topic is to employ the rebuke masquerading as a question, “What were you thinking?”  But once trust and a sense of safety begin to grow – i.e., no one gets embarrassed or punished – the conversations will grow.

The sharing of what one perceived and what went into judgment based on those perceptions is essential to helping improve judgment. Police typically arrive on a scene with limited, fragmented information. They likely are operating in an emotional state colored by uncertainty and fear; anger and fatigue may also be factors. Stress imposes myriad impacts on the body and brain. Under stress, humans default to cognitive biases. Those biases, including racial bias, might be making the call if the individual has not had the opportunity to learn about how their brains work under stress.  That learning will flow from discussing their reasoning in an after-action setting.

This approach to continuing education certainly would be an item for collective bargaining, as have past changes such as the issuance of individual radios and body armor. It is worth mentioning that in the 1970’s, officers resisted the individual two-way radio. They were convinced at the time that the radio was just a tool for the bosses to track them. Today, one cannot imagine an officer agreeing to hit the streets without one.

The notion of cop watchers cooperating with departments, and police officers openly sharing thoughts, questions and, don’t laugh, feelings with each other and supervisors, might seem pie-in-the-sky to grizzled police personnel and jaded citizenry. But at least as likely is the release of pent-up knowledge and emotion that would be a revolution in continuous improvement in the policing profession.

Jim Jordan is the retired director of strategic planning at the Boston Police Department. He has taught police strategy at Northeastern University, the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and in training settings around the country.