From the New York Times:
A Staten Island grand jury has voted not to bring criminal charges against the white New York City police officer at the center of the Eric Garner case, a person briefed on the matter said Wednesday…
The case exposed lapses in police tactics – chokeholds are banned by the Police Department’s own guidelines – and raised questions about the aggressive policing of minor offenses in a time of historically low crime. The officers, part of a plainclothes unit, suspected Mr. Garner of selling loose cigarettes on the street near the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, a complaint among local business owners.
Mr. Garner’s death hastened an effort to retrain all the department’s patrol officers and brought scrutiny on how officers who violate its rules are disciplined. Officer Pantaleo has been stripped of his gun and badge.
There’s been a great deal of talk lately about the use of body cameras as a way to document and prevent racist police brutality, particularly in the wake of Michael Brown’s murder in Ferguson. I do think that it is a good idea. There are many good ideas about how to prevent racist police brutality, in fact — training officers to rely on non-lethal force with unarmed civilians from the outset of their careers is another one.
But I don’t think it’s the solution, and I think it’s foolish to pretend that body cameras or extra Tasers will solve the problem. By this logic, Eric Garner died in the “right” way — his murder was filmed. So was Tamir Rice’s. The filmed evidence of their murders contradicted at several points claims made by the officers who killed them.
Eric Garner died unarmed. He died on the ground. He died because of an illegal chokehold. We saw it. The grand jury saw it.
They saw it, and we saw it, and collectively we said, “We didn’t see that. That didn’t happen.” And Daniel Panteleo won’t be arrested. He won’t be charged. We saw it happen, and we said that it didn’t happen, and until we solve that problem, body cameras won’t do a bit of good.
If a police officer doesn’t use a gun, he can use his hands to kill or injure someone. If he’s filmed while he does it, he knows the odds are excellent that he will never be charged with a crime (unless he’s black). White people are far less likely to be killed for jaywalking or “resisting arrest” or selling cigarettes or being the suspect in a non-violent crime than their black counterparts. A white man can wander through a public park a gun at passersby and still get taken in alive by police.
The police probably should wear body cameras. It should not be so difficult to get an indictment when an officer has killed someone who was unarmed. We white people, in general, regardless of our jobs, must not be so quick to pretend we are afraid when we are in fact the aggressors, to pretend we feared for our lives in situations where black and brown people lost theirs. Body cameras won’t make one bit of difference until we stop colluding — on every level of society — to protect white people when we kill black men and women. This country, as a whole, needs to do right by black people. We don’t do right. And we look away. And we say we didn’t see what we saw.
Tags: eric garner, news, police brutality, racism
I have been looking for the words for this. Thank you.
We white people, in general, regardless of our jobs, must not be so quick to pretend we are afraid when we are in fact the aggressors, to pretend we feared for our lives in situations where black and brown people lost theirs.
I want to go hug some people I love and whisper this in their ears, and then maybe shout it from somewhere up high.
As soon as I stop crying, I’m sharing it on my FB wall. Because it needs to end.
Thank you for posting this.
Not to mention training more cameras on communities where there are more police will likely result in footage that law enforcement would be eager to use to target and convict more black and brown bodies, often for dubious reasons. We can make strong protections for the footage and how it’s used, and should, but it’s hard to imagine there being more good than bad from that footage unless we’re really careful.
Until the racism underlying the law enforcement targeting of black people is ‘fixed,’ bandaid solutions have the potential for as much harm as help. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try them, but we need to be aware of the ramifications.
Not to mention training more cameras on communities where there are more police will likely result in footage that law enforcement would be eager to use to target and convict more black and brown bodies, often for dubious reasons. We can make strong protections for the footage and how it’s used, and should, but it’s hard to imagine there being more good than bad from that footage unless we’re really careful.
Yes. This is a point I haven’t heard in the common discourse, but is so, SO true.
Not to mention training more cameras on communities where there are more police will likely result in footage that law enforcement would be eager to use to target and convict more black and brown bodies, often for dubious reasons. We can make strong protections for the footage and how it’s used, and should, but it’s hard to imagine there being more good than bad from that footage unless we’re really careful.
I don’t know that I buy this as a disadvantage of police body-mounted cameras. The thing is that if a police officer has an interaction with you and ends up arresting you, s/he will have a story prepared about why s/he did that. That story, in the absence of absolutely unimpeachable evidence to the contrary–like video–will simply be accepted by the prosecutor, judge, and jury (if your case ever gets that far). Your saying “the officer planted those drugs in my car” or “they never found a gun on my person” just does not matter; conversely, a hypothetical video recording of the officer taking the gun from your pocket effectively has no additional evidentiary value in a system where police officer statements are always believed. It’s gravy.
Given that asymmetry in the way officer and civilian testimony is treated, I think body-mounted cameras will rarely-to-never cause any conviction. There may be the very occasional case where the camera picks up something that the officer missed in the moment, but it’s going to be a marginal phenomenon as compared to the cases in which footage either causes the cop to act more circumspectly or rebuts the officer’s lies about an interaction.
Oh yeah, I think they have that on lock. I’m more concerned about what’s recorded outside the arresting incidents, like if they’re just always on as they’re walking around. Footage from certain neighborhoods being rewatched for something they might have missed. Facial recognition (a tool more and more law enforcement agencies have) run to associate a low level drug offender with “bad associates.” Once law enforcement have data, they want to use it.
Basically, not worried about it for the arrests that are already happening; worried about it as a tool for more arrests and harsher convictions.
It’s possible, but any modern metropolitan police department already has more surveillance data than they can usefully handle, and if they’re hanging around a drug dealer on duty and geared up then their body cameras are the least of the concerns of anyone in the area.
To the extent that might be a relevant problem, and I’m not dismissing that it might be, that’s much more an issue of the need to end the drug war than to keep the biggest street gang in America running unsupervised for the sake of keeping the drug war sustainable, and if turning ’em into mobile security cameras helps to catch a real criminal like they go back and spot a murder the on-scene cop was too preoccupied with shooting at puppies to notice, so much the better.
I understand your position better now. I think that’s a legitimate concern. However, given the number of tools that are already at cops’ disposal to detect and prosecute street crime, it could still be worth it to do this–even if it equips the police with another marginal means to harass, arrest, and convict black people, the good it does in restraining cops’ most brutal conduct may outweigh that bad.
My concern would be camera footage used for reputation-smearing the way the footage of Michael Brown stealing some cigars was used to attempt to turn it from “police kill unarmed teenager” to “police kill fleeing criminal”. In that case, police probably would have found out about the cigars anyway and gotten the same result, but in a hypothetical case we could hear about how the victim was seen “loitering” (ie enjoying the neighbourhood park) for hours before the confrontation or were filmed “smoking an unidentified substance” (even if it was pretty obviously a cigarette) beforehand.
My feeling is still that cameras would be positive, if nothing else than because knowing a camera is on them might make police behave better regardless of the actual likelihood of consequences, the same way people behave better where there’s a drawing of an eye looking at them.
What is the most effective way to change the system? Besides lamenting and protesting, what practical measures will make a difference? Most of my (very modest) donations go to ACLU and The Southern Poverty Law Center, but if you (and by “you,” I mean any of the commenters) have suggestions of other effective groups or charities I should keep in mind, I’d love to hear them.
If you have suggestions for where — specifically, which political offices can effect change — to send my letters of protest and outrage, I would love that, too. Is police reform most effectively targeted at a local, state, or federal level? I’ve been trying to assess police-reform organizations myself, but it’s hard to tell what’s legitimate and what’s dodgy.
The constant wave of failures to indict and not-guilty verdicts send a very clear message that police — and even civilians — can kill black men, women, and children without consequence, and to remain silent in the face of that message is to condone it.
I think what you’re doing is a good idea, and it can also be helpful to look into police accountability organizations specific to your area — this is a national problem, but so much of the work that can be done happens on a state/local level because of how police departments are governed.
If the results from Richmond, CA are any indication the best way to make a change is to start with a change in leadership: Use of deadly force by police disappears on Richmond streets.
Thanks for that article.
Local and state level, probably half the people out marching or issuing concerned comments right now don’t even know when their county elections are and if they did they’d goddamn steamroll them. Bob McCulloch kept running for reelection unopposed cause pre-Ferguson nobody really gave a shit, just picture how many lives that creeper you saw doin’ his little baiting Galt speech managed to quietly fuck up over a decade in office before the whole nation learned his name. Police unions are pretty entrenched in the cities but they won’t get any less so from Federal action unless Obama suddenly becomes a progressive and RICOs em
body cameras are such a red herring, deployed by people who don’t want to actually talk about racism.
They can be deployed that way, as a rhetorical dodge, but that’s not their only function. Full-time monitoring of on-duty police officers is a good thing for any society that entrusts police with so much power. It’s obviously not a panacea given that white grand jurors just don’t think that killing black people is a crime pretty much regardless of the circumstances, but cop body cameras would be one small step in the right direction.
they are definitely not going to solve police brutality. I do wonder if the horrified reactions from conservatives http://www.vox.com/2014/12/3/7328051/conservative… are because of the video. And hopefully if enough conservatives are outraged, things can actually change.
that’s a big hope, but it’s something.
I’ll believe it when I see it. There were some encouraging noises from certain precincts of the right in the wake of Michael Brown’s death, but they faded pretty quickly as they settled back into their comfortable role of portraying all black people as dangerous criminals.
I will say this: it’s worth knowing. Whether it moves people who often act as if they have stones for hearts or not, it is worth knowing certainly and precisely how Eric Garner was killed and seeing such a vivid demonstration of the incredible danger that black people face from the police.
skepticism is warranted and obviously even that cross section is not all conservatives. We shall see.
It’s literally been tested and found to reduce police brutality reports. Anyone shitting on police surveillance policies because they won’t End Sadness Forever has a fuckload of work to do to make their position sound intelligent, supportable, or humane.
Emphasis on talking is a dodge employed by people who don’t want to truck in the scary work of actual policies and political action. Belling the cat won’t make it go away, but it’s actual progress for once.
I think the applicable Biblical verse here is “Jesus wept.”
I’m going to put here what I just said on Twitter, because I think this might be a better format for discussion.
I try, really hard, not to be racist. I do not always succeed, because I am a white woman who was raised in a racist society, in a predominately white town. I have had a lot of really great Black colleagues and classmates and friends who have been really generous in sharing their lives and experiences with me in a way that has opened my eyes to the ways that racism functions, both casually and not-so-casually. Some of them have been blunt with me, which I appreciate, others just talked and I listened and I learned.
Most of my friends are not casually racist. They probably have some racist moments, because again, racist society, but in the circles I mostly travel in, racism and misogyny get called out. I think this is good and right – we should call our friends out when they say or do things that aren’t okay, and we should thank our friends for pointing out when we say and do things that aren’t okay.
But clearly, obviously, indisbutably, there are plenty of white folks out there who think that it is 100% reasonable for a white cop to be afraid of a Black man, regardless of the facts of the case. And those folks don’t think “well, possibly the officer was afraid, because he is a product of a racist culture that taught him to see all Black men as physically powerful and potentially violent”, they think his fear was justified, because they, too, are products of the same culture.
Studies have shown that despite all of the ways we have of connecting to each other, we mostly use those tools to connect to people who agree with us, who amplify our opinions and world views back to us. In a culture that is increasingly polarized and insular, how do we break through to the folks who need to hear us?
Your second-to-last paragraph really echoed my conversations with relatives over Thanksgiving. These are people who are largely conservative (though socially liberal on issues like gay marriage and abortion) but who live in white enclaves and practice a sort of “colorblind non-racism” which of course translates to racism, like, a lot. And our conversations about Ferguson really came down to them saying, “Yeah, but Black men are scary.” They weren’t shy about this opinion! It’s not like it’s hidden or secret.
I’ve learned from experience that flat-out arguing gets nowhere, and I spent my time in these conversations trying to gently redirect from “Michael Brown was a thug!” to “Let’s talk about the larger community issues at play here,” but I honestly don’t think I made much of a difference, so I don’t know the answer.
This just such a shit sandwich of a day. This news about Eric Garner and then this,
“Officer who fatally shot Tamir Rice judged unfit for duty by police in 2012”
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/03/of…
I’ve really appreciated everything you’ve written around these two horrifying grand jury judgments. I thought that “white defensiveness — which is power masquerading as fear — kills people” was the perfect articulation of a painful truth. Anyways, thanks for being so incisive and honest.
White people who defended Officer Wilson are falling all over themselves to point out that they’re not racist because in this case, they agree that the police were clearly wrong.
Yeah – in this case, the police can’t spin their side to the media because we can all see what happened with our own eyes. And if we couldn’t? If there hadn’t been cellphones on hand to record it, what do you think we’d be reading about in the news right now? His height, his weight, his resistance to arrest, his history of petty crime… oh wait.
‘How dare you call me racist, I have black friends can think of a black person whose death I didn’t cheer”
UGH is that a new low? I think thats a new low.
As a woman of color, *crying*.
Why can’t everyone read this (and then not leave stupid arguments)?
Why can’t people just have empathy for others?
*cries some more*
I live on Staten Island. I don’t know if I’m more sad or enraged right now. Just as in Ferguson, I don’t for a minute believe that DA Donovan ever wanted this prosecuted. But even if he did present a weak case, it shouldn’t have mattered because Eric Garner’s murder was videotaped. The best possible evidence that you can have in a case like this, and it’s still not enough. I feel like nothing will ever be enough.
The news broke at the end of the school day, and there was some concerns about the students who take public transportation in the direction of where protests are expected. Some of my kids (high schoolers) were making comments about how “people are rioting already” (not true) and “I don’t understand why people have to riot.” We had a conversation about rioting vs. protesting. Some got it; others still persisted. They’re overwhelmingly good, bright kids. They loved reading “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” But I still see the same old ideas about race creeping into some of them.
They saw it, and we saw it, and collectively we said, “We didn’t see that. That didn’t happen.” And Daniel Panteleo won’t be arrested. He won’t be charged. We saw it happen, and we said that it didn’t happen, and until we solve that problem, body cameras won’t do a bit of good.
this gets right to the insanity of it all, exactly, mallory. thanks for writing this.
They saw it, and we saw it, and collectively we said, “We didn’t see that. That didn’t happen.” And Daniel Panteleo won’t be arrested. He won’t be charged. We saw it happen, and we said that it didn’t happen, and until we solve that problem, body cameras won’t do a bit of good.
this gets right to the insanity of it all, exactly, mallory. thanks for writing this.
Honestly, it’s so much worse than that. We saw it happen, and we didn’t say it didn’t happen, we said *who cares if it happened?* Everyone knows Panteleo choked someone to death. But that someone is someone we won’t miss, so fuck it. Mallory’s right that body cameras aren’t a sufficient solution, for that very reason: they only answer the question “what happened?” Once you decide that it really just doesn’t matter to you what happened, then — I don’t even know where we go from that point.
The failures to indict are heart-breaking. 9-12 people, in multiple cases, have not decided “[Officer X] is not guilty of murder;” they’ve decided “we literally don’t think this is worth the time and energy it would take to send this situation through the courts.” It’s not “this didn’t happen,” it’s “this happened, but we don’t consider it remarkable or disturbing.” They’re shutting down an analysis of the evidence before it can begin, because we’ve decided as a society that we’ll witness violence against black and brown bodies, we’ll wring our hands and demand more cameras and paperwork, but we’re ultimately unwilling to view the destruction of a Black life as deserving of the time we would need to take to dispense actual justice.
This was earlier in the week, but charges were also dropped for the officer who shot 7 year old Aiyana Stanley-Jones http://countercurrentnews.com/2014/11/aiyana-stan…
What, was she a terrifying aggressor too?
No, in that case they tried to claim her grandmother was the terrifying aggressor (alleging the grandma was grabbing for the officer's gun and that's why he fired).