Police

Film Everything

 
    With another death of an unarmed black man at the hands of a white police officer roiling the nation this week, the continuation of the well-established and long-running pattern of police abuse in America is starting to seem depressingly inevitable. Based on recent history, it seems a safe bet that we will see another such killing in a few more months. And a few months after that. And a few months after that.

    While the evidence against North Charleston Officer Michael Slager in the shooting death of Walter Scott seems unambiguous, there’s no way to know what the next such incident will look like. We can’t predict who will witness the next assault, how clear-cut the evidence will be, how open and clean the investigation will be, or how the justice system’s known bias in favor of law enforcement will play out. But in the past year, we’ve seen enough scenarios to learn that one factor can make all the difference in whether the victim and his family have a chance at justice.

    Many people this week have noted that if it weren’t for the video clearly showing Scott being shot several times in the back, Slager probably would have evaded a murder charge. When officers are involved in shootings, they get to tell their own version of events, and the dead victims don’t. An investigation may or may not turn up accounts from credible witnesses. In some instances, having multiple eyewitnesses can even muddle an investigation, as was the case in the Ferguson shooting death of Michael Brown, which produced contradictory eyewitness accounts. When that happens, extra weight often seems to be given to the officer’s account by default.

    But in cases in which video has been able to provide an indisputable version of events, ambiguity has often been eliminated and justice has appeared a bit more likely. The fatal shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice last year was caught on surveillance video and was ruled a homicide; Cleveland Officer Timothy Loehmann is the focus of a deadly-force investigation that will present its findings to a grand jury. Without video, the world would not know that Loehmann shot Rice after just a few seconds, and public pressure to act would be less. (We don’t yet know what will happen to Loehmann, but the video appeared to contradict his story that he warned Rice three times before shooting.) South Carolina State Trooper Sean Groubert was videotaped by his cruiser’s dashboard camera when he shot motorist Levar Jones as Jones reached for his driver’s license; Groubert was fired from the force and is facing an aggravated assault charge. (Jones survived his wounds.)

    While criminal justice reform and structural change should remain the ultimate goals of anyone seeking a more just American justice system, the legacy of centuries of white supremacy is not disappearing overnight. In the meantime, concerned citizens should consider it their civic duty to take out their phones and start filming when a police encounter seems to be getting out of hand.

    Obviously, videotaping police doesn’t always result in the right outcome. Eric Garner’s choking death was captured on video, yet that wasn’t enough for a grand jury to indict New York City Officer Daniel Pantaleo. Apparently the video didn’t prove the officer’s intent was to kill, and therefore he was allowed to go free. The fatal shootings by police of John Crawford III at an Ohio Walmart and Kajieme Powell on a St. Louis sidewalk were also caught on video, but police justified their actions by saying the men were armed (one with an airsoft rifle, the other with a knife), so the footage didn’t lead to criminal prosecutions. Even when video recordings haven’t resulted in prosecutions or convictions of police officers, though, the outrage they generate has created pressure for police reforms.

    This isn't enough. All fifty states and the federal government need to make it a felony for a police officer to intimidate or otherwise interfere with a citizen's attempt to peacefully record his/her actions on video and audio.

    Such outcries last year led lawmakers and activists nationwide to call for laws requiring officers to wear body cameras. That’s one way of getting some useful video footage, but that solution comes with major shortcomings and many police departments are resisting such measures.

    So we have to find another, more immediate solution. The most effective thing ordinary Americans can do to stop these shootings and the most effective way to make police departments accountable right now is to take more video of police confrontations. We’ve reached the point where this is the socially responsible thing to do, right up there with reporting child neglect and spousal abuse. (Keep your distance and don’t interfere when taping, of course, and be aware that exercising your right could come with risks: Police might try to seize your camera, detain you, or worse.)

    The anonymous person who recorded Walter Scott’s slaying has been hailed as a hero. You can be a hero too. If you see something, film something.

NY Times

  • Nothing has done more to fuel the national debate over police tactics than the dramatic, sometimes grisly videos: A man gasping “I can’t breathe” through a police chokehold on Staten Island, a 12-year-old boy shot dead in a park in Cleveland. And now, perhaps the starkest video yet, showing a South Carolina police officer shooting a fleeing man in the back.

    The videos have spurred calls from statehouses to the White House for more officers to attach cameras to their uniforms. While cameras frequently exonerate officers in shootings, the recent spate of videos has raised uncomfortable questions about how much the American criminal justice system can rely on the accounts of police officers when the cameras are not rolling.

    “Everyone in this business knows that cops have been given the benefit of the doubt,” said Hugh F. Keefe, a Connecticut lawyer who has defended several police officers accused of misconduct. “They’re always assumed to be telling the truth, unless there’s tangible evidence otherwise.”

    In the South Carolina fatal shooting, the most compelling evidence, provided by a bystander with a camera phone, was shaky and at times unfocused. But the video clearly showed the officer, Michael T. Slager, firing eight times as Walter L. Scott, 50, tried to flee after a traffic stop. The officer had said that he fired amid a scuffle, when Mr. Scott seized his stun gun and the officer feared for his safety.

    “Without the video, we wouldn’t know what we know,” said Matthew R. Rabo, a college student who joined a demonstration on Wednesday outside City Hall in North Charleston, S.C., where Officer Slager now faces a murder charge. “And what we know here is really significant: It’s the difference between an officer doing his job and an officer killing a man in cold blood.”

    Many cities have installed cameras in their police cruisers for years, and some — an estimated 25 percent of departments that responded to a 2013 survey — require so-called body cameras. Those numbers are dwarfed by the millions of Americans who carry camera-equipped cellphones. As cameras become ubiquitous, the digital video is likely to become a go-to source of impartial evidence in much the same way that DNA did in the 1990s.

    Video evidence is not new, of course; the tape of officers beating Rodney King in 1991 helped ignite the Los Angeles riots after the officers were acquitted. When departments began installing dashboard cameras in the 1990s, many officers opposed it. But they quickly concluded that the recordings often cleared them of wrongdoing after citizen complaints. “For the most part, unless you are behaving badly, those things are going to back you up,” said David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor who studies police practices.

    Many officers similarly opposed efforts to videotape confessions, but that resistance has been fading in recent years. Police organizations have endorsed the practice and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., recently required the F.B.I. to start taping interviews.

    But cellphone videos taken by bystanders tend to make many police officers uncomfortable, because they have no control over the setting and often are not even aware they are being filmed until later. Though the courts have held that people have a constitutional right to record the police, those who do are frequently challenged by officers.

    As an example, a Justice Department report cited a traffic stop in which a Ferguson officer told the driver’s 16-year-old son not to videotape him. The confrontation escalated, the officer wrestled the phone away from the teenager, and everyone in the car was arrested “under disputed circumstances that could have been clarified by a video recording,” the report said.

    Cellphone videos have captured police officers pushing and slapping a homeless man in Florida and shooting a man who threw rocks at officers in Washington State. In February, two Pelham, N.Y., officers retired after a video contradicted their account of an arrest of a black man.

    “The ability to record has gotten so prevalent that police can no longer count on their account to be the truth,” Mr. Harris, the Pittsburgh professor, said.

    The increase in cellphone cameras is one reason many police unions do not oppose requirements that officers carry body cameras, said Chuck Wexler, the head of the Police Executive Research Forum in Washington. “The big push for body cameras has been driven in part by the sense that citizens have their phones and can record, and it was only part of the whole story,” he said.

    “We are very used to being videotaped,” said Lt. Mark Wood, the executive officer in the operations division of the Indianapolis Police Department, where the department is testing body cameras. “We are under the impression that we are always being videotaped because we probably are.”

    Data is still spotty, but an early study in Rialto, Calif., suggests that when officers carry body cameras, they are less likely to use force. Similar studies in Mesa, Ariz., and in Britain showed that citizen complaints also decreased.

    North Charleston, a city of about 100,000 people, has ordered about 100 body cameras but its officers are not yet using them. Mayor R. Keith Summey said Wednesday that he had ordered 150 more “so that every officer that’s on the street in uniform will have a body camera.”

    Marlon E. Kimpson, a South Carolina state senator who represents North Charleston and helped push for financing for the cameras, said he hoped they would help calm tensions between residents and officers. He said he believed a body camera would have prevented Saturday’s shooting. “I don’t believe the officer would have behaved the way he did had he been wearing a body camera,” he said.

    Even without the video, it is likely that other forensic evidence would have raised questions about Officer Slager’s account. The coroner found that Mr. Scott was shot several times in the back, and forensic examiners can typically tell whether someone was shot at close range in a scuffle or from a distance.

Daily Beast

  • Is there anyone still against videotaping police? Not really - but check the fine print.

    After yet another horrifying, videotaped police killing of an unarmed black man, it’s increasingly hard to find anyone who doesn’t want more video recording of police activity. As politics generally does, this cause has brought strange bedfellows together: libertarians, liberals, conservative bloggers and pundits—and even many police unions.

    The question is where law and policy are headed next. And the answer is: just about everywhere. States and municipalities are acting, as they often do, as laboratories for social policy. This is the case both for citizen recordings and for police-worn body cameras.

    First, regarding citizen recordings, the state of the current law is relatively clear. Private citizens have the constitutional right to videotape police, while police retain the right to order them to move back if they are interfering with police work in any way. This was the unanimous appeals court holding in the 2011 First Circuit case of Glik v. Cunniffe and it has been applauded by everyone from the ACLU to Breitbart.

    States have gone in both directions on citizen recordings. Legislators in the state of Colorado recently proposed making it a crime for police to stop citizens from filming, which, despite its unconstitutionality, happens all the time (here’s one such video).

    At the other end of the spectrum, one Texas lawmaker has introduced a bill making it a crime to film police within 25 feet of an ongoing investigation. Exceptions would be made for official news media, but not individual citizens like Feidin Santana, who filmed the killing of Walter Scott. The bill’s sponsor says this is merely to stop interference, although 25 feet sure is a large buffer zone and would render it impossible for the subject of the arrest to record anything at all. Not surprisingly, the bill has been extremely unpopular, seems unlikely to pass, and would probably be found unconstitutional anyway.

    In the meantime, technology continues to advance. As The New York Times reported in the wake of the Walter Scott shooting, there are already apps for that. Apps with names like “Cop Watch,” “I’m Getting Arrested,” and “Stop and Frisk Watch” all feature instant, easy recording and upload capabilities so you don’t have to fumble around with your device, which might provide probable cause for lethal force.

    Of course, just reaching for your phone (or your wallet—remember Amadou Diallo?) might get you shot as well. Just ask Levar Jones, who was shot by a cop while retrieving his wallet—an incident recorded on the cop’s dashboard camera.

    There are strong strong public safety concerns about the mistrust between cops and communities, and strong justice concerns about innocent people gunned down for Running Away While Black.

    Regarding body cameras—“on-officer recording systems,” in official jargon—the official U.S. government data (PDF) reveals that about 25 percent of police agencies already use them to some extent, with 80 percent evaluating their use. Indeed, in the wake of the killing of Walter Scott, North Charleston just ordered 150 more of the them. (In a nice irony, one of the leading manufacturers of police body cameras is, in fact, Taser.)

    Perhaps surprisingly, police unions have generally not opposed body cameras. Good cops have pointed out that body cameras help defend against unfounded citizen complaints. Body cameras may well end up exonerating more police officers than convicting them.

    And with the rise of smartphones, recording is inevitable anyway; better to have a clear record in every case than rely on whether a passerby happens to be recording or not. Especially when the presence of those passersby can inflame tensions in a potentially volatile situation, and add to the risk of danger.

    Liberals, libertarians, and progressives likewise favor the use of body cameras, although with the cameras pointing outward from police officers, there are serious privacy concerns for the people being filmed. In an age in which elevator security camera footage ends up on YouTube (especially if you’re a celebrity athlete), it’s easy to imagine cop-cam footage leaking out as well.

    How to balance those concerns is often, itself, a matter of controversy. In Florida, for example, one version of a body-camera bill would prohibit the release of the footage whenever the video “is taken in a home; includes footage of someone under 14, or 18 if taken in a school; contains information obtained at emergency scenes; describes events on property used by medical or social service agencies; or is recorded anywhere there is an expectation of privacy.”

    These exceptions were so broad that the ACLU and other civil rights organizations ended up opposing the bill, urging lawmakers to adopt a different version instead. Such carve-outs are supposedly intended to protect privacy, but could end up protecting police misconduct.

    The ACLU, incidentally, has proposed a detailed set of policy proposals for body camera laws. One passage aptly captures the organization’s ambivalence: “Although we at the ACLU generally take a dim view of the proliferation of surveillance cameras in American life, police on-body cameras are different because of their potential to serve as a check against the abuse of power by police officers.”

    Worryingly, a recent survey showed that of the law enforcement agencies using body cameras, nearly a third had no written policy regarding the devices, the conditions for data retention, or privacy issues.

    There have been pockets of opposition.

    At the left-wing end of the spectrum, some progressive activists have argued that the focus on cameras misses the point of systemic problems in training and standard operating procedure, not to mention the persistence of racism. After all, the death of Eric Garner was videotaped, and look where that got us.

    There has also been opposition among police. One proposal, in Miami, was rejected by police officers because it required cops to manually activate the camera’s data storage. The police union said that “if an officer hesitates for even a second in a life-threatening situation, it can cost that officer his or her life.” Miami-Dade’s mayor said the cops were playing politics.

    Some police officers have worried that recording cameras will inhibit victims and witnesses from speaking freely to cops, particularly in cases of sexual abuse or assault. Just how confidential is that confidential information, when you can see it’s being recorded on a GoPro?

    More mundanely, cops have expressed concerns that the recordings will be used for nitpicking petty abuses like uniform code violations, rather than investigating serious abuses. They’ve also complained that the camera is supposed to be on all the times, including down time and trips to the john—but then, the alternative of switch-on/switch-off leads to the safety concerns.

    To be sure, much of this resistance is simply defensiveness—the head of Portland, Oregon’s police union, for example, put out a laundry list of complaints about body cameras that reads like a manifesto (“Body cams don’t substitute for officer’s reasonable beliefs and perceptions… Body cams shouldn’t be viewed as a measure of truth…”).

    But much of the resistance is exactly what should happen in a public policy debate shaped by new technology. On the anti-camera side, there are strong conservative concerns about interfering with legitimate police work, and strong liberal concerns about invading people’s privacy. And on the pro-camera side, there are strong public safety concerns about the mistrust between cops and communities, and strong justice concerns about innocent people gunned down for Running Away While Black.

    It’s not as simple, then, as Left vs. Right, since each side’s core values come down on both sides of the recording debate. The result is messy. As it should be.


Some suggestions from Fark

  • Here's the plan. Cameras for all cops that uploads to a server and let them think they can turn them off and on at will but can't really. Have it make a note of the time on the file when ever an attempt to turn it off is made. Save all the videos at a secure site that the department in question can't access. Have feds investigate police shootings and feds prosecute the cases. Internal investigation is obscene.

    Just spitballing not like it matters much to those in power. If it did our country would actually have a data base of all the deaths by police that police departments had to file reports with on a mandatory basis.

    /Too much money required.
    //To much hassle to root out corruption.
    ///No one really cares about shiat unless it affects them personally.

    If we got automatic body cams for every police officer in the country, not only could we provide better accountability and transparency on their actions, we could also vastly simplify the loads of paperwork involved in an arrest. Rather than writing down everything that happened in an encounter, the officer could merely tag the appropriate segment of video and annotate things the camera doesn't show (stuff that happened off to the side, thoughts, impressions).

    I'm starting to think that maybe, just maybe, the farking police are out of control. If I was a black guy, I'd be really paranoid about getting shot for no particular reason. Paranoid isn't the right word. Paranoia is an unjustified fear of something or other. The fear of being shot if you're a black guy seems to be entirely justified. Plus, you can't believe anything the Police say anymore. Particularly when it comes to explaining what happened in a Police use of force situation.

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