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March 29, 2024

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Cop cams: A good tool, not a cure

As the tragic chokehold case of Eric Garner illustrates, police body cameras are not the solution to all police brutality complaints. But they can bring a much-needed clarity to what we’re arguing about.

Unlike the recent death by police shooting of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., the police assault on unarmed Eric Garner, an asthmatic and diabetic, had a single narrative provided by the video.

“The grand jury kept interviewing witnesses, but you didn’t need witnesses,” Garner’s widow said of the video to the New York Daily News. “You can be a witness for yourself.

But when a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict police officer Daniel Pantaleo in Garner’s death, the strength of that video sparked national outrage that crossed racial and political lines.

You don’t have to be a liberal to be outraged by the sight of a half-dozen of New York’s Finest holding a large, handcuffed man down on pavement while he gasps, “I can’t breathe,” over and over again before he passes out.

Cause of death, according to the autopsy: He couldn’t breathe.

Syndicated conservative columnist and Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer called the grand jury’s decision “incomprehensible” for failing to see at least involuntary manslaughter or reckless endangerment in the video.

“The guy actually said, ‘I can’t breathe,’ which ought to be a signal if the guy was unarmed,” Krauthammer said on Fox, “and the crime was as petty as they come.”

Indeed, police were arresting Garner for selling “loosies,” single cigarettes, without paying New York’s $5.85-a-pack tax on cigarettes, which invites black-market evasions.

That inspired libertarian Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., to put part of the blame for the death on New York lawmakers.

“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 Barack 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 yearlong study that 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.

Clarence Page is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.

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