A lot of
people (myself included) wonder why on earth the police departments of this
country would NOT want to use lapel cams or other means of filming each
encounter they have with an alleged criminal. It seems like it would put a halt
to all of this debate about whether or not people, especially black males, are
being 'profiled' or 'targeted', and we would no longer have these major
protests and demonstrations going on all over the country. Perhaps this is one
reason:
A New Mexico police officer was wearing a
lapel camera which was filming as the officer entered a vacant apartment on an
upper floor of the building. As he entered he appears to stumble, and as he
explains "I fell down, and I guess my trigger finger went down at the same
time." (NBC News Channel Video, 0:26 seconds in)
Back to my statement that perhaps this is one
reason why police departments are loathe to adopt personal cameras on their
uniforms, let's indulge in a moment of supposition. Two officers, partners, go
into an empty apartment ostensibly looking for someone they are chasing. One
officer stumbles, falls, gun goes off, shooting and killing someone in the
apartment downstairs who, coincidentally(?) happens to be a drug dealer in the
neighborhood that was suspected of killing a police officer, but has not been
charged because of the usual stuff, witnesses against him who either recant or
disappear, evidence in police custody which is somehow damaged or stolen, etc.
(If you've watched any of the crime shows on television in the last 10 years
you know exactly what I'm talking about! lol) Now, although to some that would
seem a wild and completely farfetched, out of the realm of possibility theory,
actually it isn't; after all, I came up with it, right? So these two cops (or
perhaps only one of them) go into the vacant apartment; through some means
(perhaps the second one is outside watching the windows) and he lets the first
one know where the occupant is in the apartment. The officer inside then shoots
down through the floor into the apartment below, hopefully hitting the
occupant. Even if he doesn't kill him though, it could be made to seem a
warning by the police to the dealer. It could be explained away as the accidental
discharge of a firearm, case closed. With a lapel cam however, it would be a
little more difficult to successfully pull it off, since the lapel cam could
not only show the movements of the officer, it could tell what was said at the
time. In this video you've got him talking on his radio to other officers,
asking about the outcome of the shot; I'm sure the conversation would have gone
quite differently if the situation was as I've theorized! This is perhaps
one of the things that police departments are considering when they debate the
issue of lapel cams.
Now I'm not saying that all police departments are
harboring 'bad' cops in their midst who might be subject to go off in a fit of
rage and beat someone to death while wearing the cam; what I am saying is that
cops stick together. They stick up for one another, they 'cover each other's
backs', they protect their 'brothers'. If there is any possibility of an
officer losing his temper and perhaps bringing a subject 'down' a little too
forcefully, they do not want to take any chances that an incident will be
recorded, not by one of their own. So we get all these excuses and
justifications and rationales for why police departments should not be required
to use them, and we get more and more people brutally punched, kicked, beaten,
and killed, and more and more officers being acquitted by grand juries. It just
seems to me that it would be an easy way for officers to prove their own innocence
and their victim's guilt, IF that is the case.
As always, this post is strictly the opinion of the
author, and does not in any way represent Blogger.
