Activists for police accountability, as well as analysts and experts on policing and regular old observers appear to agree: many of the high profile cases of police brutality we have heard about in the last few years are simply due to video evidence. More specifically, many of the cases of police officers being disciplined and/or charged criminally are due to video evidence. And that could be one of the reasons that South Carolina—similar to some other agencies across the country—is trying to tighten its grip on video footage involving its officers.
Radley Balko over at the Washington Post is working on a four-part series on law enforcement in South Carolina. Part two looks at the power of video and some of the missteps of the main agency responsible for investigating law enforcement in the state:
Video can also demonstrate the futility of the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED), the state police agency that investigates most officer-involved shootings. Critics say it isn’t necessarily the conclusions SLED investigators draw that are problematic, it’s that they often neglect to pursue inconsistencies between video and officer statements. Worse, each time a new video demonstrates one more of these problems, the state’s law enforcement officials seem to tighten their grip on how and when video gets released to the public — or attempt to prevent it from being released at all.
Lots of police agencies around the country have taken an unreasonable length of time to release dash camera footage to the public or keep it hidden, so South Carolina is not an anomaly on that issue.
Dash camera footage from vehicles is one thing. Body cameras worn by police is another. Despite some grumblings from law enforcement, body cameras have been touted as a panacea for the scourge of police brutality. Some activists believe the hype around the issue of body cameras keeps the public locked into the “either/or” position, whereas they advocate “neither.” Mariame Kaba can be considered one of those. Writing for Truthout in December 2014, Kaba put forth a set of criteria to “oppose police reforms” whenever they are put forth (but especially if they are touted as a panacea):
Are the proposed reforms primarily technology-focused? If yes, then you should oppose them because:
a. It means more money to the police.
b. Said technology is more likely to be turned against the public than it is to be used against cops.
c. Police violence won’t end through technological advances (no matter what someone is selling you).
In Los Angeles a few years ago, the LAPD’s own investigators found that police had tampered with the antennas on cars that made it possible to record audio of the cops from their vehicles. The LAPD, not some outside agency, discovered that. In Chicago, graphic video of the October 2014 murder of Laquan McDonald was missing audio. Audio was also missing from the cameras of four other squad cars on the scene at the time of the McDonald shooting. The lack of audio from five vehicles at the same time has yet to be adequately explained by Chicago officials. It was however, adequately explained by outsiders to the Chicago police department:
“When you've got a standup cop with nothing to hide, the dash-cam is his friend," said Gregg Stutchman, who has specialized in video forensics in California for 23 years. "But for cops who aren't quite as standup, it would make sense that they wouldn't want things recorded."
Several experts on the type of equipment commonly installed in police vehicles told The Associated Press that it's plausible for a single squad car to have a glitch preventing sound recording. But they could not imagine how an entire fleet of cars would ever lose audio at the same time and place by mere happenstance.
"I've never heard of it before," Stutchman said. "It raises a red flag." The more likely explanation is that audio was intentionally switched off, he said.
Monies geared toward technology for cops without a system of checks and balances for the cops who tamper with that technology is not reform or progress. It doesn’t matter if it’s 10 cops or 10,000: it is the same old-same old.
Haven’t we had enough of that?