Sometimes the world changes around us so rapidly that there's a sense of chaos, until understanding and what passes for equilibrium have been reestablished.

Such is the case with videos of law enforcement's interactions with the public, especially videos captured by members of the public and then subsequently made available publicly on YouTube and via other Internet platforms.

One thing is abundantly obvious -- many police departments and individual police officers still do not understand that the rules of the "game" under which they operate have been irrevocably altered.

Police videos generally fall into two broad categories -- videos shot by police themselves, and videos shot by members of the public.

The former include dashcams and increasingly body cameras. The latter is potentially the domain of pretty much everyone with a smartphone these days.

Generally speaking, police officers have been warming up to video that they themselves photograph -- especially when they can control when the cameras are running -- which opens up a rather significant can of worms indeed.

And while police departments would love to hold onto body camera footage (often taken inside people's homes at times of their greatest distress) for future investigative purposes, they must also face the complexities and expense of redacting videos for public record requests, to quite appropriately protect innocent parties from public abuse and exploitation.

Overall though, police are typically pretty eager to trot out the videos when they appear to support officers' accounts of events -- just today a video was released that appears to show that a police shooting of a terrorism-related suspect was seemingly much more aligned with officer statements than with some completely contradictory "witness" statements being promulgated by cable news.

The situation tends to be very different with videos of police confrontations photographed by the public, often rapidly posted to YouTube.

We seem to be bombarded with an almost daily menu of "cops behaving badly" videos that cover the entire range from somewhat comical, through utterly bizarre, to downright horrifying.

To be sure, these videos are self-selected by their uploaders, and there isn't much attention paid to the majority of cops who are well behaved -- and so aren't the subject of many videos overall. Naturally enough, it's the bad eggs and nasty confrontations that are going to get the attention when it comes to videos.

But much of what we see in these negative cases is indeed utterly chilling. Cops shooting down unarmed persons, groups of officers beating already compliant suspects to a pulp -- all manner of situations that previously would have had no visual or audio record for review.

A new example currently receiving a lot of attention over this last weekend is of a Texas cop running around like a crazed dog, pointing his gun at half-naked teenagers from a pool party, and even tackling an obviously unarmed girl in a bikini to the ground. He appeared to be utterly out of control and his fellow officers seemed to just stand there watching in amusement. The racial aspects of the situation -- the cop was white, most of his targets black -- are difficult to ignore.

While apparently nobody was seriously hurt in this case, it's all the more upsetting for what could easily have happened if that gun had fired or that girl's neck had been broken.

None of these videos, whether photographed by police or the public, ever tell the whole story. Many police departments allow officers to control when their cameras are running. Videos photographed by the public typically don't show events leading up to a confrontation that attracted attention. Individual cameras only show one point of view. And so on. Such videos are clearly not definitive.

It's also clear that many cops still haven't gotten the message made explicit by numerous courts, that the public has the right to capture such videos. We're still seeing officers snatching phones and cameras from people's hands, sometimes smashing the devices, sometimes smashing the face of the photographer, arresting them, pepper spraying them and the like, even though no interference with the police action was occurring. (In an attempt to keep the public's cameras away, some police departments are trying to establish likely illegal "exclusionary zones" around their officers, to discourage public photography of those officers in action).

We're also seeing attempts to remove many of these videos from public view -- though tracing who was responsible for such actions can be very difficult. For example, I shared a copy of the "pool party cop" YouTube video link yesterday on Google+. By this morning the video was gone, marked as spam, most likely through a malicious false takedown submission.

Of course, this was a failed attempt at information control -- many other copies of that video are now widely available on YouTube and other venues.

Perhaps what might seem most odd of all is how we see cops behave so badly even when they're aware that they're being photographed.

This makes sense though when you consider that officers are used to having their accounts of events being rarely questioned and almost always accepted.

It just hasn't fully penetrated yet that there are now recording eyes on the scene, and that an officer's own rendition of events is but one of the variables of the equation, and often by no means the most reliable of these.

Ubiquitous video cameras, smartphones, and YouTube have together fundamentally changed key aspects of law enforcement operations, and the ways in which both courts and the public will view them going forward.

There is no turning back. There is no possible return to the previous era of officer reports being accepted with nary a question or concern.

Police departments will ultimately learn to live with this.

And for the public at large, this is very good news indeed.

--Lauren--