Can Video Make Fact-Finding More Objective?

What Frank Foresaw

Frank might be persuaded to qualify his position that fact-finding is inescapably subjective if he could pierce the veil of time and live in the world of ubiquitous video recording. A man of tremendous foresight who trusted the power of technology, he opined in Law and the Modern Mind that video records of trials might one day ease a Judge’s ability to discern facts from the record. Thus, twenty years before penning Courts on Trial, Frank suggested an avenue through which fact-finding might become more objective. I posit that the rapid growth in video recording will lessen the subjective nature of fact-finding to the point where courts may aggregate vast numbers of videos containing such large samples of information that fact-finding in the courtroom will begin to approach some semblance of the “Truth.”

The Model

If we postulate that objective reality as to events exists, then the Truth about any crime can be represented as a random variable equal to a sequence of parameters, each of which is one element of observable objective reality. This is a gross simplification, but it allows for some intriguing suppositions. Every sensory observation of an event is essentially a sample of some parameters of the random variable called Truth. Meanwhile, Truth has an expected value calculated from the aggregation all of its parameters, which cannot all be sampled at once by any technology. Nevertheless, by the Law of Large Numbers, as the number of imperfect samples of Truth approaches infinity, the average of the results from all the samples will approach the expected value of Truth. This means that given an infinite number of imperfect witnesses (samples), we would be able to ascertain the Truth about any given crime. It also suggests that as there are more witnesses to any crime, the average of their observations will converge towards the Truth.

A video is not “reality” is the sense that any individual video is a complete record of the full Truth. However, I presume that recording technology can indelibly capture more data than any human is capable of either measuring or retaining. If true, this means that a video of a crime is a larger sample of the Truth than a witness’ observation. Applying the Law of Large Numbers, if sample sizes are increased in every trial, then the rate at which the average of sample means converges towards the expected value of the population increases. Therefore, if I am right that video is a larger sample of reality than human observation, then adding videos of an event will lead to a faster approach towards the truth than adding an equal number of witness observations.

The essence of this sweeping argument is two claims: (1) Objective reality exists and can be represented by a random variable equal to all of its parameters and (2) Videos are larger samples of the Truth than witness observations. Robustly defending these two claims is beyond the limited scope of this exposition. Moreover, I am intentionally setting aside the complex problem of translating a record of the Truth into something presentable in a courtroom. Nonetheless, if the reader will stipulate to the validity of these two claims, then we may be able to do some work with their implications.

Application

The rate at which our world falls under overlapping surveillance is rapidly increasing. Large entities feeling they have something to protect continue to erect more cameras. It has come to the point that certain cities like London or neighborhoods like Morningside Heights, rarely have any street corners that aren’t under observation. Today, crimes occurring on a street corner like Broadway and W112th St might be captured by six or more cameras from Chase Bank, Citibank, both bank’s ATMs, Columbia University, and Duane Reade. The limited nature of my simplistic analysis leaves me unable to ascertain whether the aggregation of the data in all six video feeds would produce some semblance of the Truth that could be claimed to be objective. What I can claim is that the more cameras added, the closer the composite observations approach the Truth and that the number of cameras is increasing over time.

Simultaneously there is a rapid proliferation of cellphone cameras, which have turned pedestrians into walking camcorders. On Saint Patrick’s Day, only a couple dozen feet in front of my former apartment in Baltimore, a man was brutally beaten, stripped naked in the street, and robbed. (Source). Numerous independently recorded videos of the event taken by cellphone cameras were posted to the web. Because some videos were taken at poor angles, poor resolution, turned on halfway through, or turned off halfway in, each individual video failed to capture all of the elements of the crime. However, aggregation of all of the myriad videos shed light upon the commencement of the crime, its aftermath, and even provided clear captures of the faces of the perpetrators in the act. These videos allowed the authorities to capture the perpetrator and bring charges for a crime that would have otherwise been very unlikely to have reached a courtroom because the perpetrators were only caught after social media users identified their faces by comparing posted videos to their profiles.

I cannot address how to deal with the fact that the human actors recording videos might intentionally manipulate them to skew the depicted events. Nevertheless, as long as the number of manipulated videos is small compared to the total number of videos, then introduced bias ought to remain relatively slight. When Hitchcock showed me a shower scene in “Psycho,” I thought that I had seen Janet Leigh naked. I hadn’t. I had been duped. Perhaps someone manipulating my gaze in another way could have similarly duped me even if I had been standing in a bathroom in the Bates Motel. However, if there were numerous security and mobile phone cameras in the room, each independently capturing the event, I don’t think that such chicanery would be possible.

-- By KieranCoe - 22 Apr 2012