Early last year, Eric Umansky was reading about the police killing of Tyre Nichols, the latest in a long line of Black men whose names are now seared into the public mind. Among the litany of horrors from that night—the pummeling, the tasing, Nichols calling for his mother—one line stopped Umansky. Some of the officers who beat Nichols to death were aware that their body-worn cameras were on.
Why would officers brutalize a citizen knowing they were being recorded? Surely they’d think twice. After all, that was the very presumption and promise that fueled the spread of body cameras across the country a decade ago, in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests fueled by the killing of teenager Michael Brown.
That disconnect set off a light for Umansky. He had been covering police impunity in New York for years and had seen how the NYPD often failed to disclose footage. But he realized there was a much larger story to tell: How the world’s largest municipal police force had systematically thwarted the accountability that the cameras were supposed to bring.
So Umansky began digging into the technology that represented the largest new investment in policing in a generation, and what he found was a public policy failure with dire implications for New York City and the nation. Authorities not only rarely released footage but even more rarely punished officers when cameras captured misconduct.
We detailed it all in a searing exposé, jointly published by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine. The investigation took months. We interviewed dozens of police insiders, government lawyers and others, and we reviewed hundreds of pages of internal reports, and dozens of hours of body-camera footage, including some police fought against disclosing. The result was the most exhaustive examination of its kind, revealing a staggering failure of civilian oversight that shocked even some of the most ardent supporters of body cameras, including the federal judge who prescribed them to stop unconstitutional policing in New York a decade ago.
At the center of the story, Umansky reexamined the first police killing that was ever captured on body-worn cameras in New York, home of the nation’s largest police force and a bellwether for law enforcement policy. He obtained the full footage of the shooting, video that the NYPD had fought for years to keep secret, as well as the department’s own internal investigation. It all showed that while the NYPD had publicly praised the officers for their restraint, they had, in fact, killed a man who internal investigators concluded “was contained and posed no immediate threat of danger.”
Putting all of this into context was not easy. There is no national tracking of which cities disclose what body-camera footage. So we did it ourselves. Working with Umansky, Umar Farooq cataloged every police killing during one month in 2022. Then, he contacted 131 law enforcement agencies in 34 states to obtain the associated video. More often than not, departments declined to release any footage.
