By John G. Peters, Jr., Ph.D. and John Black, D.B.A.
Copyright 2026. A.R.R.
Video can persuade, but it cannot capture everything. Technical limits, perception gaps and framing effects make camera evidence far less objective than many people assume.
“Video doesn’t lie.”
“You can’t cross‑examine a camera.”
These claims still echo through courtrooms, police briefings and public debate, even though they sometimes collapse under scientific scrutiny. Peer‑reviewed research has repeatedly shown that such confidence is misplaced, yet the myths endure, an expression of what scholars call the God’s‑eye Fallacy. It is the belief that video offers an all‑knowing, perfectly objective view of events.
This myth traces back to ancient philosophy’s notion of a perfect, disembodied vantage point; in short, one which exists outside human perception. Obviously, no such viewpoint exists. Even in a world flooded with video, many people, including investigators, lawyers and jurors, still treat recordings as if they reveal the full truth, often overlooking the limits of what a camera can actually capture.
The consequences are real: wrongful convictions, unjust acquittals and the systemic erosion of the standards of evidence which protect the innocent. In short, the assumption that video is truth is one of the most dangerous in the justice system.
Objective Truth Fallacy
Historically, the expectation that cameras of any kind provide objective truth is not new. Alphonse Bertillon, the originator of the modern crime scene photograph, sought to achieve such objectivity by positioning the camera at the center of a room, looking straight down onto the scene thus creating what became known as the “God’s-eye view” photograph. Even this ingenious technique was imperfect and was never universally adopted because the camera’s fixed position alone could not eliminate all distortion or blind spots.
Per Axon (2024), video evidence is collected in approximately 85% of all criminal investigations and 94% of investigators report challenges caused by the digitization of that data. The increased adoption of body-worn and surveillance cameras has paradoxically made this fallacy worse because the more video people see, the more natural it feels to trust it.
Technical Realities: Undermining Objectivity
There is a formidable list of technical limitations which affect every video recording which is ignored by the God’s-eye Fallacy. These scientific limitations include:
- Compression and Lost Information;
- Camera Angle and Perspective Distortion;
- Frame Rate and Temporal Gaps; and
- Lighting, Resolution and Identification Failures.
Compression is a process which removes high-frequency detail so the viewers can get a reasonable picture of events, but, often, critical details are lost. In addition to removing information, compression can actively change how the event looks to the viewer. For example, in a correctional environment when an inmate and an officer are seen facing one another, a punch thrown by one of them may disappear between two recorded frames, making the other person’s response look sudden and unjustified. Compression may also blur a smaller object such as a phone or a wallet so it resembles something else. This distortion can create ambiguity which can become important when a jury is deciding an officer’s response to what (s)he perceived at the time force was used.
Video camera lenses are often wide-angle and, because they are usually not mounted at an officer’s eye level, but on the chest area, they can distort distances because they are using a fixed, wide-angle lens. Hence, what appears to be 20 feet away on the video footage may in fact be less than ten feet away. This perception challenge can have a huge outcome on disciplinary proceedings, criminal prosecutions and/or civil proceedings.
Remember: One camera only tells one story and it may not include what the officer saw or physically felt in the form of subject resistance. Like people, different perspectives can tell different stories about the same event.
Frame rate and temporal gaps are important variables for investigators, jurors and others to consider. For example, if a video camera is recording at ten frames per second, that amounts to one image every one-tenth of a second. There are gaps between the recordings and important actions or objects may not be seen on the raw recording. Video cameras can vary in frame rate specifications (e.g., dashcams, body-worn cameras, smartphones), with each one creating its own recording gaps. Recall the North Charleston shooting of a driver by an officer who said they struggled over the officer’s TASER® before the man ran away and the officer shot him in the back. Initial smartphone video footage did not show the struggle, but after forensic video enhancement, the struggle was captured and proved that it did occur.
In Cunningham v. Shelby County (2021), the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the use of frame-by-frame “screen shots” to judge an officer’s use of deadly force. The court recognized that dissecting a high-speed encounter through leisurely, stop-action viewing creates an “artificial clarity” which the officer on the street never had. By banning this practice, the court sent a clear message: Officers must be judged by what they faced in real time, not by the 20/20 hindsight of a paused video.
Dilan Seckiner and her colleagues (2018) observed that low resolution, poor lighting, shadows, glare, and digital noise can obscure critical details. Sometimes, video enhancement can recover details, but it cannot create information which was never recorded.
Humans Often Misread What They See
The God’s-eye Fallacy operates not just at the level of the camera, but at the level of the viewer’s brain. Even when the footage is technically sound, human interpretation introduces its own layer of error. In a landmark study by Granot, Balcetis, Feigenson, and Tyler (2018), they argue that both law and legal understandings of video as “objective” constitute a fundamental misapprehension. Drawing on contemporary research on visual attention and perception, they demonstrate that people over believe video – assuming their interpretations are more accurate and complete than they are and failing to discriminate inaccurate from accurate interpretations.
This study introduced the concept of naive realism as applied to video evidence. In short, one’s own subjective experience of watching a video mirrors the objective reality it depicts. A viewer’s perceptions (which includes you and us) may be biased which impacts objectivity and may make it more difficult to acknowledge or resolve disagreements about what took place. Bias is not limited to humans.
Camera perspective bias is also a reality. A foundational study by Lassiter and Irvine (1986) demonstrated that viewers of a mock videotaped interrogation judged the subject’s confession as significantly coerced when the camera focuses on the subject, rather than equally on both the subject and the interrogator, even though the conditions remained the same in both recordings. Lassiter and colleagues (2009) confirmed that camera perspective bias is not a limited laboratory phenomenon. It is found in authentic, real-world videotaped interrogations.
When you have a low-resolution video, the danger isn’t that the software is maliciously making things up; the danger is a jury believing that zooming in magically uncovers hidden details. Standard resizing tools mathematically guess and insert new pixels to make the image bigger – a process called interpolation. This exact issue exploded in the State of Wisconsin v. Kyle H. Rittenhouse (2021) trial, where the defense successfully stopped the prosecutor from using an iPad®’s “pinch-to-zoom” feature. Because the prosecutor couldn’t explain to the jury how the Apple® software was actively adding pixels to the footage, the judge shut it down.
Verbal Framing Corrupts Visual Interpretation
A 2024 study looked at the effect of a prosecutor’s and defense counsel’s opening statements on mock jurors’ interpretation of identical body-worn camera footage. Those jurors, who were told the civilian held a weapon, rated the officers’ actions as significantly more appropriate than those who were told the civilian was holding a cell phone or nothing at all. Everyone watched the exact same footage. Park and his colleagues’ study found that video recordings may be used to build consensus, but deeper cognitive biases must also be overcome.
Having BWC footage doesn’t mean viewers are immune to bad information. In fact, what people read before they watch a video can literally change what they think they see. Jones, Crozier and Strange (2017) found when participants read a false police report claiming a suspect had a knife and attacked an officer, and then watched BWC footage which showed absolutely no such thing, amazingly, many viewers allowed the false report to override their own eyes, incorporating the “ghost” knife and attack into their memory of the video. This proves that external context and framing can hijack the objective reality of the screen.
Video Lowers the Burden of Proof
In a classic mock jury study, Kassin and Garfield (1991) found that a graphic crime scene video only lowered the jurors’ standard of proof if it specifically depicted the exact crime on trial. When jurors watched a violent, but unrelated, video, their standards didn’t drop. In short, just tossing a video on the screen isn’t enough to bias a jury on its own; the context matters.
A Landmark Study
Nicholas P. Murray, a professor in the Department of Kinesiology at East Carolina University, along with his colleagues (2024) studied 44 active duty police officers, each of whom wore a chest-mounted GoPro camera and a pair of eye tracking glasses which recorded precisely where the officers’ eyes were focused at every moment of a simulated use-of-force scenario. The officers dealt with 80.5% of all predetermined critical incidents in the scenario, but the body-worn cameras only captured 66.2% of those same incidents.
Most compelling was that officers saw the suspect get a weapon approximately 75% of the time, but the body-worn camera only recorded it approximately 49% of the time. Similarly, officers saw the suspect first approximately 80% of the time, but the body-worn camera only captured the shooting 46% of the time.
The study concluded that body-worn camera footage may give people, including jurors, an inaccurate understanding of the information an officer considered when taking action. This discrepancy is not deception, but rather structural features of today’s technology.
Summary
The God’s-eye Fallacy is not abstract – it shapes how officers, administrators, the public, judges, and jurors interpret events. Lawson et al. (2019) found that video recordings ranked as the fourth most influential form of evidence, outranking bodily fluids, gunshot residue, forensic expert testimony, and even traditional eyewitness accounts. That reliance is troubling given the well‑documented limits of video. Jurors’ expectations may also be distorted by the “CSI Effect” which fuels an unrealistic belief in forensic certainty. In some cases, no video exists at all, yet one advocacy group has argued that absent footage, an officer should automatically be disbelieved or convicted. While early cases like Scott v. Harris (2007) suggested courts placed near blind faith in video, judges are increasingly recognizing the scientific realities behind what cameras can – and cannot – show.
While space prohibits examining responsible forensic video protocols and procedures, Axon (2024) noted that 70% of sworn officers interact with video evidence and 47% have minimal to no training in its analysis. Interaction with video is growing because more body-worn, surveillance and smartphone video footage is recorded each day. It is interesting to note that the more video analysis training an investigator receives translates into his or her becoming more concerned about misinterpreting it. Be careful because the outcome can be career ending or worse.
John G. Peters, Jr., Ph.D., serves as president of the internationally recognized training firm, Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths, Inc., and has judicially qualified as an expert witness in international, federal and state courts. He is also a graduate of the Applied Generative AI program at Johns Hopkins University, AI Agentic at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, and Artificial Intelligence for Business, MIT Sloan School and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. A former police administrator, deputy sheriff and officer, he is a frequent contributor to Police and Security News.
John Black, D.B.A., is a retired command staff investigator and a retired Army Special Forces Command Sergeant Major. An experienced expert witness and forensic video analyst, he is a graduate of several systems thinking and artificial intelligence programs, including the MIT Sloan School.