If cops don't have video recording of shootings they should be charged and convicted of murder
Photo by George Frey/Getty Images
The release this week of a
shocking video depicting police officer Michael Slager shooting Walter
Scott in the back, and then appearing to toss a Taser near his prone,
handcuffed body, reignited a national discussion about police
accountability and the reliability of officer narratives in
police-involved shootings.
In his initial radio call, Slager followed an
all-too-familiar script. It is a script carefully designed to mirror the
requirements of a self-defense exoneration, and its basic elements are
well-known to police across the country: He struggled/reached for my gun/Taser/weapon. I feared for my safety. I thought my life was in danger.
The video from North Charleston, South Carolina, clearly
shows an event inconsistent with Slager’s claims, and he was quickly
arrested and charged with murder. But there is a lesson in previous
cases of police brutality, such as the failure to prosecute the police
who were recorded asphyxiating Eric Garner and the initial acquittal of
the officers in the Rodney King beating: Even in the face of seemingly
incontrovertible video evidence, this blame-the-perpetrator defense
regularly works for police officers.
The difficulty in indicting and convicting police officers
illuminates an uncomfortable truth of the criminal justice system: There
is an enormous divide in the standards of justice we apply to cops as
opposed to all other citizens. To bridge that divide, and help bring
more accountability to the system, Police Chief Eddie Driggers of North
Charleston suggested the very solution a federal judge has demanded of
the New York Police Department, and that President Obama has committed
to spending a quarter-billion dollars on: body cameras.
The theory behind the use of body cameras is that video
evidence will provide us with some objective truth about what happens in
violent encounters between civilians and police. But that is the wrong
way to look at it. As the tapes of King’s beating and Garner’s death
make clear, video evidence can be very powerful but still not overcome
the vast structural advantages enjoyed by the police in the legal
system. The real value in body cameras is not what they show, but rather
what they don’t. That’s because the presence of cameras induces an
absence of violence.
The central study on the effectiveness of body cameras comes
from an experiment in Rialto, California. The results were dramatic:
After the wholesale adoption of body cameras, complaints against
officers dropped 88 percent and use-of-force reports fell by 60 percent.
In a randomly assigned pilot project in Mesa, Arizona, 75 percent fewer
use-of-force complaints were filed against officers who wore the
cameras than against those who did not.
The most important part of the research was the strong correlation between the decline in the use of force and the decline in complaints
about the use of force. This correlation makes it clear that people
aren’t complaining about police abuse at random; citizens aren’t just
making these grievances up. Thus for the first time, these numbers can
give us a sense of just how often citizen complaints are legitimate, and
they finally allow us to measure the effectiveness of our mechanisms
for police oversight and accountability.
The Mesa and Rialto studies suggest that when the police
don’t engage in abuse, citizens don’t in fact report it. That means it’s
reasonable to conclude that a substantial majority of the public’s
complaints about police brutality are legitimate, or at a very minimum
grounded in the kind of behavior that the police simply wouldn’t engage
in with body cameras present.
And if we can now say with some certainty that the bulk of
these citizen complaints are grounded in behavior the police would, if
watched, not engage in, then we finally have some yardstick by which to
measure the structural injustices of the system, or at least how often
the legitimate complaints of citizens are dismissed in favor of the
self-justification of the police.
In 2013 the Civilian Complaint Review Board in New York City
received more than 5,000 complaints of excessive use of force, totaling
11,334 allegations. (Sometimes multiple officers were involved). Of
those allegations, 189 were substantiated in a process that took an
average of 450 days to complete. Worse, the substantiation of a
complaint of excessive use of force did not by any means ensure that a
police officer would actually be punished. On the contrary, slightly
more than half of the police officers against whom cases were
substantiated were administratively charged, and a verbal reprimand was
the most common punishment. While the data from the body camera studies
suggests that a significant majority of police abuse complaints have
merit, the current system makes the chance that an officer will
experience any real repercussions from using excessive force against a
civilian less than one half of 1 percent.
So is it any wonder that Officer Slager, who had two prior
complaints against him, one alleging excessive force for unjustified
Tasing, was reportedly exonerated in the violent incident and still on
the force when he killed Walter Scott? Given the utter lack of
accountability, it is no wonder that police violence is endemic. But if
implemented properly, body cameras can change that, not so much through
recording bad behavior, but just by being present and thus preventing
it.
Unfortunately, there are major impediments to deploying body
cameras. In the wake of Garner’s death, Patrick Lynch, the head of New
York City’s Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, criticized the the man
who videotaped the incident, claiming he was “demonizing the good work of police officers.” So it is no surprise that Lynch has also insisted that “there is simply no need to equip patrol officers with body cams.” And in Miami, the police union claims
that the devices could place “the lives of the public and the officers
in danger” and “distract officers from their duties, and hamper their
ability to act and react in dangerous situations.” Across the country,
police unions have been the biggest obstacle to the deployment of body
cameras.
The upcoming Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic is the splashiest
dramatization of a Supreme Court justice in recent memory, but it’s
hardly the only one.
It’s pretty easy to understand why the police unions don’t
want their members watched: Between objective evidence of encounters
that do happen, and the huge decline in brutality that is deterred by
the very presence of cameras, all of a sudden, the system might just
become a lot more fair. And when you’re the party in power, and the
system is already stacked wildly in your favor, fairness may be the last
thing you want.
Nonetheless, as video after amateur video begins to
contradict law enforcement’s well-established get-out-out-jail-free
mantra, not only will citizens become more skeptical of officers’
stories, but the demand for real accountability will make the widespread
deployment of body cameras all but inevitable. The irony of course, is
that the most salutary effects of that deployment will never be caught
on tape.