Why I’m Teaching My Kids That Computers Are Dumb Machines

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A few days before virtual learning started in D.C., I watched our 5-year-old try to scroll on the Dell laptop we had just picked up from the school. He dragged his two fingers down the track pad, but his fingertips are so small that the computer thought they were one finger, and the cursor just moved up and down. So I guess that’s the first lesson of kindergarten, before “raise your hand” or even “mute your microphone”: Hold your fingers a little bit farther apart when attempting to scroll down to find the “join” button for today’s video chat with Señor C.

I’m the director of technology for Slate. I manage the software engineers, write software, and also manage our IT department. I’m also the de facto IT helper for my family, the in-laws, and a lot of other adults. But now, pandemic-induced virtual learning has introduced me to a whole new set of potential IT frustrations, and this time it’s with little people who aren’t nearly as capable of controlling their emotions.

Our son was clearly frustrated by this new device that couldn’t differentiate between his two fingers, but hardware like that track pad is probably the lesser of the computer problems children are facing in virtual school. As anxiety-inducing as adult-size track pads can be for tiny hands, the software they’re encountering suffers from many more issues. In several cases, it wasn’t made for children. Even if it was, it very likely wasn’t made for children of all ages. The math program available to our son (after the school retracted his favorite one two weeks into school) only has buttons in English, with no symbols, to get you to the next exercise. He is 5. He cannot read. And that’s just the beginning.

Microsoft Teams, which both our second grader and kindergartner use for video conferencing, is designed for businesses but has been warped into use for school. Teachers and students use about one-eighth of its feature set, but all the features are floating around the interface waiting to confuse and confound students—or lure them away. Even second graders quickly learned to create a “back channel” to chat in while the teacher is talking. Teachers can’t seem to turn it off, so any of their students who can read and write are sending messages and GIFs, and the rest are spewing emoji as quickly as they can click.

Then there are the learning management systems, which both kids use for accessing assignments and prerecorded videos. These systems purport to do it all. They allow for attendance reporting, tracking homework, creating quizzes and assignments, grading, and more. The one that D.C. Public Schools is using is especially awful, but they all probably are. The most particular annoyance we’ve encountered is that the only way for the attendance tracking to work is for students to both log in and out every day. This makes sense from a programming perspective: The school is tracking attendance using the login event, and without a logout event, there would be no login event to track the next day. Of course, good luck explaining that to a second grader who can easily see that it’s a waste of time. Within the first week, my daughter was groaning: “Why can’t they just know I’m here because I’m on camera? Or because I clicked on ‘Social Studies?’ ”

We’ve all been frustrated to tears by a bad website (looking at you, expense report filing systems), and now our kids are sitting in front of shoddy user experiences for hours and hours every day. They’re understandably exasperated. But there are a few different approaches I’ve found to combating this anxiety. Of course, everyone’s mileage may vary, and the ages of our kids (5 and 7) means they have a different set of anxieties from, say, teenagers. But this can be a start.

A 7-year-old should be learning to read and write, not to navigate a “learning management system.”

For hardware, there are some cheap solutions. If kids are having trouble with the track pad, you can get a cheap mouse for $8. If they keep accidentally hitting the track pad with their hands, you can get a keyboard for $17. If your school provides computers, use them. Not only will they probably have better restrictions in place than the ones you’d set up yourself, but they will also have the same hardware that most of the other students have. This means that when teachers or other students are trying to help your child fix an issue, they’ll at least be familiar with the computer and have no excuses about it not being a school-issued laptop. Yes, it might be underpowered, but the school shouldn’t be asking them to do anything that they can’t do on a school computer anyway.

Software is a different ballgame. A lot of these programs are being used in ways that neither their creators nor the educators anticipated, so issues that pop up for your kids may be new, at least to their teachers. Some of the teachers at our school were only trained on these programs the week before school started. You can help your kids by talking to their teachers about the software issues they’re encountering. The teachers are just as frustrated if not more frustrated with the software and they will understand. If you work with them to find ways around the frustrations that don’t cause the teachers more work, everyone wins.

In week two, our 7-year-old scored a zero on her math quiz because instead of just typing the answer, she typed out the whole equation. I even watched her painstakingly figure out to hold shift for + but not for = as she entered all 12 equations. The next day, the teacher asked students to type the whole equation, but our daughter got them all wrong again because she didn’t put spaces between the numbers and symbols.

Any teacher would have given her credit if this had been on paper. But the computer, of course, only knows what you tell it, nothing more, nothing less. Quizzes are graded immediately upon submission, and seeing her score of zero, our daughter frantically turned on the microphone and sobbed to her wonderfully patient teacher that she’s getting them all wrong.

“Don’t worry! We get all the answers printed out and I will score it again. It’s OK.”

I understand why it’s like this. The learning management system doesn’t support multiple correct answers. Even if it did, entering every possible correct combination of symbols and spaces would take the teacher all night.

But a 7-year-old should be learning to read and write, not to navigate a “learning management system.” She should be learning math, not Microsoft Teams, pop-ups, and the concept of a “chat.” I find our second grader concentrating more on typing the letters than on actually thinking about what she’s typing. Her brain is trying as hard as it can, but it’s focusing on how she’s learning instead of what, because the how is so new.

So I tell her to stop. Write down the answers on paper. If she can do that, I’ll type them in for her. Or we can take a picture and send it to her teacher so she can get credit for having done the assignment.

I want my kids’ first experience with a laptop, which this is, to be fun, not stressful. When I was growing up, I might have occasionally had to muddle through the early word processing program WordPerfect to type and print something for school, but otherwise I used it for drawing or to play Myst. Eventually, once we got a modem, I might have used it to chat with a friend on AIM. But the computer never stood between me and learning something. It was a toy, and thus, not scary.

So I let my kids play with their new tool. I want them to learn by experimentation—not by sitting through the 30-minute video on how to find their class in Canvas. If they’re scared that one wrong click will ruin their day, they might be afraid of computers the whole year and maybe their whole lives. I let them try all the buttons in Microsoft Teams to see what they do. If they make a mistake, we can usually undo it or go back to where they were. Starting over from the beginning is the oldest trick in the IT manual, so if they really mess things up, we reboot or reinstall. I want my kids to understand that computers are dumb machines that will do only what you tell them to do.

After two weeks, both kids are navigating their little universe of educational apps with only three or four hiccups a day. I watch over their shoulder as they try to get past notifications and pop-ups that intercept their attempts to get to the actual thing they’re supposed to be learning. I listen to the 7-year-old stress out at bedtime about whether she remembered to log out so that her attendance is counted. And I weep for their lost innocence. They shouldn’t know this bullshit yet. They shouldn’t be adapting to this terrible system of logins and passwords and websites that work one second but don’t the next because their “session on Clever has timed out.” Even when things are working smoothly, I don’t want them to be good at this. I want them to be good at reading and math and to just be good people, not good at navigating cluttered interfaces that have been hurriedly foisted on our overworked educators. But last week the 5-year-old figured out that he can hold down the mute key so that the sound goes on and off really quickly and makes his teacher’s voice all choppy. Maybe they know more about having fun than I do and will figure out a way to turn the computer into a toy no matter how hard the software tries to make school a chore.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

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Do Millennials Really Believe the Holocaust Was “Exaggerated”—or Caused by Jews?

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by IanaChyrva/iStock/Getty Images Plus and the Guardian, NBC News, the NYT, and the Washington Post.

Recently, you may have heard that many young Americans are unaware of what happened in the Holocaust, or who was to blame for it. Worse, many believed it was a “myth” or “exaggerated.” “Nearly Two-Thirds of US Young Adults Unaware 6m Jews Killed in the Holocaust,” a headline blared in the Guardian, over a piece that asserted “shocking levels of ignorance about the greatest crime of the 20^th century.” NBC News also reported the numbers, writing that the survey “showed that many respondents were unclear about the basic facts of the genocide.”

The study in question came from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. It included people ages 18–39 in all 50 states, and it generated a number of alarming statistics, including that 11 percent of survey respondents “believe the Jews caused the Holocaust.”

If young Americans’ shocking ignorance sounds familiar, that’s because the Claims Conference and other organizations have commissioned similar surveys on Holocaust knowledge for decades—often with explosive results. Just two years ago, the Claims Conference released another survey of Americans that found “Two-Thirds of Millennials Don’t Know What Auschwitz Is,” as a Washington Post headline summarized it. The New York Times reported on the numbers at the time as proof that the “Holocaust is fading from memory.” Lest it appear the group is singling out Americans, the Claims Conference also released surveys with “stunning” results from Canada, France, and Austria.

But a deeper look at the Claims Conference data, which was collected by the firm Schoen Cooperman Research, reveals methodological choices that conflate specific terms (the ability to ID Auschwitz) and figures (that 6 million Jews were murdered) about the Holocaust with general knowledge of it, and knowledge with attitudes or beliefs toward Jews and Judaism. This is not to discount the real issues of anti-Semitism in the United States. But it is an important reminder that the Claims Conference, which seeks restitution for the victims of Nazi persecution and also to “ensure that future generations learn the lessons of the Holocaust,” is doing its job: generating data and headlines that it hopes will support its worthy cause.

The new Claims Conference survey is actually divided into two, with one set of data from a 1,000-person national survey and another set from 50 state-by-state surveys of 200 people each. In both iterations, the pollsters aimed to assess Holocaust knowledge according to three foundational criteria: the ability to recognize the term the Holocaust, name a concentration camp, and state the number of Jews murdered. The results weren’t great—fully 12 percent of national survey respondents had not or did not think they had heard the term Holocaust—but some of the questions weren’t necessarily written to help respondents succeed. Only 44 percent were “familiar with Auschwitz,” according to the executive summary of the data, but that statistic was determined by an open-ended question: “Can you name any concentration camps, death camps, or ghettos you have heard of?” This type of active, as opposed to passive, recall is not necessarily indicative of real knowledge. The Claims Conference also emphasized that 36 percent of respondents “believe” 2 million or fewer Jews were killed in the Holocaust (the correct answer is 6 million), but respondents were actually given a multiple-choice question with seven options—25,000, 100,000, 1 million, 2 million, 6 million, 20 million, and “not sure”—four of which were lowball figures. (Six million was by far the most common answer, at 37 percent, followed by “not sure.”)

Methodological choices conflate specific terms and figures about the Holocaust with knowledge of it.

“Any one question by itself can be thought of as just trivia,” said Alan Cooperman, director of religion research at the Pew Research Center, which published the results of its own Holocaust knowledge survey this January. (By policy, Pew does not comment on outside surveys, but Cooperman agreed to speak with me about surveying religious knowledge and attitudes more broadly.) “I don’t think there’s any objective standard for how much knowledge someone should have about something,” he told me. “It’s always good to know more, but who’s to say what’s insufficient?” It’s also not difficult to imagine how posing a question a little differently—asking “What is Auschwitz?” for example, and providing multiple-choice answers—might generate a different result.

Even more complicated is when so-called “trivia” questions are used as proxies for questions probing respondents’ attitudes toward Jews and Judaism. In the Claims Conference survey, “the questions measure a set of assumptions and attitudes and knowledge all at once,” said Andrea Orzoff, an associate professor of history at New Mexico State University and a Holocaust scholar who was not involved in the survey. “In some cases, the questions are written in such a way as to highlight, without stating it specifically, some skepticism with official history—with the official record—and making that look like Holocaust denial.” For example, the belief that the numbers of Jews murdered in the Holocaust is under 2 million—or that the history is generally “exaggerated”—can be a form of Holocaust denialism. But whether respondents are actually Holocaust deniers or simply uninformed on some specific details about the Holocaust was not something the Claims Conference survey was equipped to assess.

This complexity is especially clear in the question behind the much-publicized statistic that 11 percent of Gen Z and millennial respondents surveyed nationally believe Jews caused the Holocaust, a disturbing bit of victim-blaming on a grand-historical scale. But the firm asked the question in an open-ended format (“Who or what do you think caused the Holocaust?”) and multiple answers were accepted. The vast majority correctly named Hitler, the Nazis, and Germany as culprits. It is not clear if, or how many, named Jews alone, or whether they actually intended to blame Jews.

Schoen Cooperman Research could not immediately answer how many respondents blamed Jews alone. But a representative of the firm, Arielle Confino, said that drawing conclusions about people’s attitudes from this data was warranted. “From my point of view, knowledge and attitudes and misperceptions, particularly about something like the Holocaust, are just intertwined,” she told me. Confino pointed to the large numbers (49 percent in the national Claims Conference survey) of young Americans who have seen Holocaust denial or distortion on social media and other platforms: “It really all goes hand in hand, where you take someone who really does not know really much or anything at all about the Holocaust, you have that person being inundated with disinformation about Jews or about the Holocaust online, and then lo and behold they hold anti-Semitic tendencies.” (The Claims Conference survey did not find that many American millennials and or Gen Zers are “inundated” with disinformation about Jews or the Holocaust; about 10 percent said they had seen such material “often.”)

Asked about the survey, the Claims Conference offered less certainty about the relationship between beliefs and knowledge. “The survey is just data points,” said Greg Schneider, the executive vice president of the Claims Conference, and any conclusions drawn from the data are secondary. “There might be questions [where] one could draw implications” about attitudes, he said, but he emphasized the organization’s interest in knowledge gaps, which he hopes will inform the school districts and teachers responsible for carrying on Holocaust survivors’ memories.

Schneider nevertheless defended the foundational questions. On the Auschwitz statistic, for example, he told me: “Auschwitz is synonymous with evil. And to not know what Auschwitz is an indication that you really don’t have a sense of what the Holocaust was or what happened during the Holocaust.” He added, “If you don’t know what happened or what Auschwitz is and why it’s important, then obviously you’re not in a position to have learned the lessons of the Holocaust.” But still in doubt is whether the survey actually showed that 56 percent of millennials and Gen Zers “don’t know what happened or what Auschwitz is” or if they just couldn’t come up with anything when a pollster asked them to name a concentration camp.

Whether or not the assumptions in the Claims Conference survey are fair, and how to tell, is at the core of a decadeslong debate over Holocaust knowledge surveys, which are notoriously difficult to design. In 1994, Roper Starch Worldwide, which conducted a poll for the American Jewish Committee, admitted that its widely publicized Holocaust denial question was “flawed.” Initially, it appeared that 1 in 5, or 22 percent, of Americans thought it was possible the Holocaust never happened. But pollsters later determined that the question—“Does it seem possible or does it seem impossible to you that the Nazi extermination of the Jews never happened?”—was confusing and biased the sample. In a subsequent Gallup poll, when asked to explain their views on the Holocaust in their own words, “only about 4 percent [of Americans] have real doubts about the Holocaust; the others are just insecure about their historical knowledge or won’t believe anything they have not experienced themselves,” according to an Associated Press report at the time. More recently, the Anti-Defamation League was criticized for a 2014 worldwide study that asked respondents to rate 11 statements—“People hate Jews because of the way they behave, for example”—as “probably true” or “probably false.” If respondents said “probably true” to six or more of the statements, they were considered to harbor anti-Semitic views, a line that many experts said could not adequately represent real beliefs.

To address this problem, Cooperman, the Pew researcher, pointed to a question in the center’s own study designed to test whether ignorance about specific figures and locations from the Holocaust indicates anti-Jewish sentiment. The Pew center used a “feeling thermometer,” which asked respondents to rate the warmth of their feelings to a given group on a scale of 0 to 100. While people who knew more about the Holocaust had slightly warmer feelings toward Jews, Pew determined that of the 15 percent of total respondents who underestimated the Holocaust’s death toll, about 9 in 10 expressed “warm” or “neutral” feelings about Jews. Only 1 in 10 of that 15 percent expressed “cold” feelings.

While public opinion data makes headlines and can offer important insight, Cooperman stressed that its applicability on such thorny issues as attitudes toward people of other races, ethnicities, or religious affiliations is limited. “The most important measure of anti-Semitism is not public opinion,” he said. Rather, Cooperman pointed to the importance of tracking the changes in the number of hate crimes against Jews over time—and society’s response to them. Last year saw the highest rate of anti-Semitic crime since the ADL began tracking these numbers in 1979, with 2,107 hates crimes against Jewish people reported in the U.S.

Perhaps it’s because of that environment that the Claims Conference numbers got so much attention. But Holocaust education—the purported emphasis of this survey—remains a widespread cultural value in the United States. In fact, in addition to statistics indicative of ignorance and anti-Semitism, the Claims Conference’s own survey data from 2018 and 2020 has shown that the majority of Americans consistently express the desire for more Holocaust education, a commitment to educating future generations, and the belief that it happened.

Continued Holocaust education alone won’t solve systemic racism and violence. But if Holocaust scholars like Orzoff have their way, the future of Holocaust education won’t only teach Americans the real number of Jews who were killed or the names of the most famous concentration camps. It will also focus on explaining the process by which Germany went from a democratic state to a genocidal one in the span of roughly a decade, and that Hitler’s rise to power was a symptom of decay, not its origin. The choices of everyday Germans become more central in this telling, so that students can see themselves in the story.

“The process really matters,” Orzoff said. “The process should be at the heart of the way we teach political violence.” And, perhaps, reflected in our public opinion research.

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ISS Daily Summary Report – 9/30/2020

Payloads Sally Ride Earth Knowledge Acquired by Middle Schools (EarthKAM) Lens Change: The crew exchanged the currently-installed 50mm camera lens for an 85mm camera lens.  This activity is typically performed about halfway through an EarthKAM mission to give the students different options for their targets.  As of the last report, almost 21,000 students from 33 …

October 01, 2020 at 12:00AM
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Satellite Captures Active Fires in the Western U.S.

Our Aqua satellite captured this composite visible and infrared image on Sep. 29, 2020, which shows that fires and smoke continue to dominate the landscape of the western U.S. via NASA https://ift.tt/2ESB4sQ

Federal Food Box Aid to Millions of Americans Now Required to Include Letter Crediting Trump

Who’s hungry? Brian Blanco/Getty Images

President Donald Trump might not know how to run things, like a country, or accomplish things, but he is a true savant when it comes to taking credit for things. Couple this sixth sense with the fact that Trump likes putting his name on things and it should come as no surprise that the Trump administration is now requiring federal food aid boxes delivered to struggling Americans be accompanied by a letter from Trump taking credit for the government help. The practice was Ivanka Trump’s idea, according to Fox News, and first got started over the summer with Trump’s note being included in some boxes along with a message about coronavirus safety.

With the election just over a month away and Trump trailing in the polls, the optional part of the Trump branding was dropped, Politico reports. The Agriculture Department has begun requiring all of the USDA’s $4 billion Families to Farmers Food Box Program being distributed by entities with government contracts include the one-page letter. “As President, safeguarding the health and well-being of our citizens is one of my highest priorities,” the letter reads. “As part of our response to coronavirus, I prioritized sending nutritious food from our farmers to families in need throughout America.”

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The USDA program redirects food that may have gone to waste, distributing it in more than 100 million boxes for household use since May. The boxes of meat, dairy, and produce, like the stimulus checks that came earlier this year, will now be explicitly branded as a Trump act of magnanimity. There are questions of whether the move violates the Hatch Act, prohibiting use of federal resources for political activity. The Trump administration gave it a moment’s thought before saying nothing could be further from the truth. “Politics has played zero role in the Farmers to Families food box program,” the Agriculture Department said in a statement. “It is purely about helping farmers and distributors get food to Americans in need during this unprecedented time.” Purely.

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The Unfulfilled Potential of Police Body Cameras in the Era of Black Lives Matter

A Los Angeles Police Department officer wears a body camera on June 11, 2017, in Hollywood, California. Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

Public demand for racial justice and police accountability will remain a defining feature of 2020 long after the coronavirus pandemic has subsided. In the aftermath of police violence resulting in the deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Daniel Prude, and Rayshard Brooks, many took to the streets to protest police brutality and to demand changes. Currently, public officials across the United States are considering major reforms to address the entrenched institutional biases that have influenced policing policy and interactions with Black and Hispanic community members. Some proposals are sweeping—like dramatically curtailing the funding and fundamental purpose of police departments—while others are more incremental, like making data on complaints against officers publicly available, developing a national database to track police shootings, improving deescalation training, and passing laws to curb the use of pretextual traffic stops.

While these alternatives are being considered, it is important to take a moment to reflect on whether we should expect these proposals to work—and what “work” means here. When people propose a particular police reform, they often do not explain why they expect it to make a difference. When there is a sense of urgency, there is also a tendency to think that there are obvious solutions. But common-sense solutions can often turn out to be nonsense in the realm of public policy, leading people to search for the next idea to implement immediately. (Scared Straight and DARE are familiar examples of highly touted programs that failed to live up to expectations). Unfortunately, there is no vaccine for solving the complex problems of police violence and racial injustice. As evidence of that, we can look to the body-worn camera.

Police departments started adopting body cameras 10 years ago, and their use accelerated after the police killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in 2014. Nearly half of police departments in the U.S. (7,259 agencies) were using the devices in some capacity by June 2016, according to a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. (That number has almost certainly gone up, but there is not more recent reliable data.) After the New Orleans Police Department transitioned to body cameras, Superintendent Michael Harrison noted in the Daily Signal, “Because we are truly transparent, we are given the benefit of the doubt many times. Citizens are feeling better about us, and officers are feeling better about their department.” Similarly, Travis Easter, media relations coordinator for the San Diego Police Department, asserted, “If officers and citizens are being watched, we are both more liable to do the right thing.” But these optimistic statements, made in 2016, feel tone-deaf now.

Body-worn cameras did not prevent Floyd, Prude, and Brooks from dying at the hands of police violence while being recorded by the officers at the scene. Indeed, it may even seem that things are getting worse since the implementation of body cameras.

Part of the problem lies in the assumptions people make about widespread adoption of body cameras: that they will create more transparency and accountability for officers on the job, which in turn will reduce abuses of authority and, eventually, will increase trust and confidence in the police. The unrealized potential of body cams should serve as a reminder as policymakers undertake police reform at this critical juncture in U.S. history.

This logic is flawed for three reasons. First, although the devices have created more transparency around how officers respond to calls and interact with community members, this has not generated greater accountability in many police jurisdictions. The technology itself does not produce accountability—rather, it comes from the departmental policies dictating how and when the devices are used in the field.

Research we conducted in 2012 in Mesa, Arizona, found that police turned on their cameras 70 percent of the time under a mandatory activation policy, but activations dropped to 50 percent under a discretionary policy. In another large department with 12,000 officers, we are finding that officers turn on their cameras at fewer than 25 percent of calls for service. (This research has not yet been published.) There is too much latitude for officers in some jurisdictions to not activate their cameras or turn them off, possibly in situations where they feel their actions may come under scrutiny. This problem may not be widespread, but according to a report by the National Institute of Justice, use of force occurs in 1 percent of police contacts and deadly force occurs in only a small fraction of this 1 percent. If police departments do not require officers to turn on their cameras, then many of these violent encounters will not be captured. (And of course, as our Mesa study suggests, police may refuse to turn on their cameras even when required.) One of the officers who conducted the raid on Breonna Taylor’s Kentucky apartment was wearing a body camera—why wasn’t it turned on in advance? Policies also regulate how video is stored, chain of custody, and access to the footage. For example, the video footage of Daniel Prude’s death was not released to his family’s attorney until nine weeks later, after a determination was already made about the officers’ culpability. In short, the use of body cameras is not leading to accountability because the departmental policies are insufficient. Until these policy gaps are addressed, body cameras are unlikely to make police officers more accountable.

The second reason body cameras may not have lived up to their early hype is that more transparency around police violence has created a distorted representation of people’s experiences in different parts of the country. Police violence is more visceral and upsetting when viewed through the lens of cameras worn by officers at the scene. As the video footage is played on repeat on news channels and social networking sites, police departments are not just seeing reputational damage—they are hemorrhaging public trust and confidence in some jurisdictions. People will typically draw from personal experience when forming opinions about the police, but in the absence of direct contact with the police officers, their judgments can depend on news coverage.

Ted Chiricos, a criminologist at Florida State University, conducted research on fear of crime that offers insights on how these individuals might fill in the gaps. Chiricos’ research finds that reading news stories about crime makes people more afraid of crime, as one might expect. Local news stories have the most significant impact on fear, followed by regional and national-level news stories. Without the local news, people will base their fears on what is happening at the national level. A person who has not come in direct contact with law enforcement may make assumptions about their local police based on what is happening in other communities, like Minneapolis and Portland.

This is not to say that police violence in the U.S. is overstated: The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that 1,200 arrest-related deaths occurred in the 12 months ending in May 2016 across 17,000 jurisdictions (and crowdsourced data from Mapping Police Violence has found 826 deaths in 2020). It is only to say that there is a natural tendency for people to fill in the gaps in their local knowledge of the police with what is happening on the national scale. The wide circulation of body camera footage accelerates this process. The media is saturated with videos of police engaging in violent and unlawful behavior, but good cops also engage in kind and compassionate behavior on a regular basis. Those contrasting images are not swamping our media outlets. Thus, the aggregate effect of this continual stream of negative video footage is to do harm to police legitimacy and public trust, despite the benefits of body cameras making police more transparent.

The final reason body cameras have not ushered in widespread changes is that police departments are implementing the technology with a tactical focus, rather than for strategic purposes. Tactical functions are aimed at collecting evidence for court, investigative support, social control, and protecting officers in the line of duty. These goals benefit officers, but not as much the communities that police are sworn to protect and serve. Police in several countries have noted that false complaints against officers have plummeted since their adoption of the technology. This is a positive outcome, but why have body cameras been used more effectively to keep citizens accountable?

Police body cameras in the era of Black Lives Matter are no panacea and it was naïve to think they would be. In his 1921 Nobel lecture, historian Christian Lange noted, “Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master.” The problem is in believing that cameras (or any new technology) can be a quick fix in the absence of strong departmental policies that are fit-for-purpose and focused on strategic objectives. We should not be surprised, then, to see that cameras have not empirically demonstrated consistent effects, as a new systematic review shows. At a time when there is such momentum at making meaningful changes that will improve how police do their job, we should be mindful of the pitfalls of common sense. In 2014, body camera advocates did not expect that in 2020, a Louisville, Kentucky, police officer would simply fail to turn on his camera before entering an apartment. We should not be surprised when solutions that seem common-sense today fail to deliver on their promise in the future.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

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DHS Points Reportedly Emphasized Kenosha Shooter’s Side of the Story

A person holds a sign that reads “Kyle’s Life Matters” at a far right rally in Portland, Oregon. MARANIE R. STAAB/Getty Images

NBC News obtained internal Department of Homeland Security talking points that reveal a disturbing framing of the August shooting of two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The memo directed federal law enforcement officials to bend over backwards to portray 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, who was arrested and subsequently charged with murder for fatally shooting two protesters, in a broadly sympathetic light. The DHS, of course, hasn’t been alone in coming to Rittenhouse’s defense, President Donald Trump himself instantaneously defended the teenager, who packed up weapons and drove from another state to notionally “defend” a car dealership in the unrest following the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Many conservatives have similarly rallied behind Rittenhouse’s claim to be acting in self-defense.

The DHS talking points go to great lengths to emphasize what has been a conservative line of thinking on the shooting: that Rittenhouse was in the area to defend local businesses and that he was being chased by protesters.

It’s not clear where talking points originated, but they instruct officials to emphasize several things:

• “[Rittenhouse] took his rifle to the scene of the rioting to help defend small business owners.”
• “Kyle was seen being chased and attacked by rioters before allegedly shooting three of them, killing two.”
• “Subsequent video has emerged reportedly showing that there were ‘multiple gunmen’ involved, which would lend more credence to the self-defense claims.”

This framing of Rittenhouse’s shooting three and killing two is couched in the larger yes-but-law-and-order justification being spun on the right as a justification for wantonly shooting three strangers, killing two of them. “This is also why we need to stop the violence in our cities. Chaotic and violent situations lead to chaotic, violent and tragic outcomes,” the talking points explain. “Everyone needs law and order.”

Officials were told to state they will not comment on an ongoing investigation, buuuuut to add: “what I will say is that Rittenhouse, just like everyone else in America, is innocent until proven guilty and deserves a fair trial based on all the facts, not just the ones that support a certain narrative. This is why we try the accused in the court of law, not the star chamber of public opinion.”

Oh, now we’re into due process and fair trials.

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