Police cameras are important, but they’re useless when used by racist cops [white supremacy/racism is the problem not cameras]

WashingtonPost

There’s no question that, had the Ferguson, Mo., Police Department mandated that its officers wear body cameras, use dashboard cameras or both, there would be far fewer mysteries about the events leading up to the shooting of Michael Brown. The department apparently had these cameras; it just hadn’t gotten around to using them. 

But simply mandating that the cameras be used isn’t enough, as City Lab reports from San Diego:

Here in San Diego, our scandal-plagued police department has begun outfitting some officers with body cameras, and the City Council has approved a plan to roll out hundreds more.

Officers wearing the cameras were present during at least two shootings earlier this year. Yet we’re still not any closer to knowing what happened in those chaotic moments — whether the perpetrators can be easily identified, what kind of interactions the officers had with those present, nothing.

That’s because the department claims the footage, which is captured by devices financed by city taxpayers and worn by officers on the public payroll, aren’t public records. Our newsroom’s request for footage from the shootings under the California Public Records Act was denied.

Once footage becomes part of an investigation, the department says it doesn’t have to release them. SDPD also said during the pilot phase of the camera program that it doesn’t even have to release footage from the cameras after an investigation wraps.

I called the department Friday to see whether it’s updated any policies surrounding the cameras now that more are being doled out and the program is kicking into full swing.

“We have had very positive feedback from the officers who are using them in the field” but “there are no policy changes to the releasing of evidence from body cameras,” SDPD spokesman Kevin Mayer tells me in an email.

This is absurd. The police work for the public. The cameras were purchased with public funds. Government employees are answerable to the public, especially those who have the power to detail, arrest and kill. A police department that refuses to release dash-camera or lapel-camera footage to the public after a controversial incident is basically saying just trust us. But if the optimal goal is for the public to unquestioningly trust the police, there’s no reason to outfit cops with cameras in the first place. (It will be interesting to see if SDPD adopts the same policy when a video clearly exonerates a police officer of false allegations.)

But even when the video is considered public record — or at least is at least released to a criminal defense and attorneys filing civil rights claims during discovery — there is another problem. There have been too many examples in which an officer has “forgotten” to turn on a camera, a camera has coincidentally malfunctioned at a critical tim, or video has gone missing. I wrote about this problem in March.