Cop Cams: A Good Tool, Not a Cure
"I do blame the politicians," he said on MSNBC. "We put our police in a dangerous situation with bad laws."
What a difference video makes. That's why, two days before the grand jury's decision, President Obama announced that he would seek funding to pay for 50,000 body cams for police officers across the country.
Yet, as Garner's case shows, even with video evidence it is nearly impossible to charge a police officer, let alone win a conviction, for killing unarmed citizens. That caused some of Obama's political allies to scoff at the ability of body cams to win justice. I disagree. While there is no single cure for questionable use of excessive force by police, cameras help us answer a lot of those questions, while also raising new ones.
For one, it is generally agreed that police behave better when they know the camera is on, even when the people they're arresting don't.
The most often-cited success example is Rialto, a Los Angeles suburb that found after a year-long study that the use of-force incidents dropped by almost 60 percent, along with complaints about alleged police misconduct.
Video also can protect the police. In Daytona Beach, for example, video of the controversial fatal police shooting of NFL athlete Jermaine Green last year showed Green was about to stab his girlfriend just before police opened fire.
As much as we talk about police profiling communities of color, it is just as destructive that those communities often profile police as brutal, corrupt and untrustworthy. A collapse of trust leads to a collapse of public safety and security for everybody. Video can help weed out members in both police and civilian communities whose behavior gives everybody else a bad name.
The Garner video, coming on the heels of the Ferguson grand jury's decision, is powerful enough to raise new questions about how police misconduct cases should be handled. Why, one wonders, was Pantaleo the only officer charged when his alleged "chokehold" actually appears to have obstructed Garner's breathing less than the weight of the other officers holding the suspect down?
In that sense, the video has raised new questions about the wisdom of using regular prosecutors, who work closely with police every day, to bring charges against police. Appointing an independent investigator would restore much of the trust in our justice system that the video age unfortunately has helped to unravel.
For now, pocket-sized video technology has helped many people across racial and political spectrums feel the anger and frustrations that members of low-income communities have been feeling for generations: the rage of being victimized by an unequal system.
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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.
(c) 2014 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
