Hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars have been spent on what was sold as a revolution in transparency and accountability. Instead, police departments routinely refuse to release footage — even when officers kill.
When Barbara and Belvett Richards learned that the police had killed their son, they couldn’t understand it. How, on that September day in 2017, did their youngest child come to be shot in his own apartment by officers from the New York Police Department?
Miguel Richards, who was 31, grew up in Jamaica and had moved to New York about a year earlier after coming to the United States through a work-study program. His father’s friend gave him a job doing office work, and he rented a room in the Bronx. But he started to struggle, becoming reclusive and skipping days of work. His mother, with whom he was particularly close, pleaded with him to return to Jamaica. “It’s as if I sensed something was going to happen,” she says. “I was calling him, calling him, calling him: ‘Miguel, come home. Come home.’”
His parents knew he had never been violent, had never been arrested and had never had any issues with the police. What details they managed to gather came from the Bronx district attorney: Richards’ landlord, who hadn’t seen him for weeks, asked the police to check on him. The officers who responded found Richards standing still in his own bedroom, holding a small folding knife. And 15 minutes later, they shot him.
Body cameras don’t matter when the system protects cops regardless of the evidence.
Here’s a thought. Qualified immunity goes bye bye every time they have an oopsie with their body cams. Suddenly no more oopsies!
Oh wait, that will never ever happen.
Imagine a country where the police union wasn’t the only union the government ever got behind.
First I would have to imagine a police force that didn’t start primarily as slave catchers. Or state funded union busters.
Qualified Immunity is illegal to begin with according to the original text of Section 1983 of the federal code. 16 words were edited out when someone “copied” the law into the Federal Register. The Congressional Record still has the original wording.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/15/us/politics/qualified-immunity-supreme-court.html
Harlow V Fitzgerald should have gone the other way.
Edit: the next time SCOTUS hears any immunity related cases, we should flood them with amicus briefs about this.
Some localities allow ballot initiatives that all legislation to be enacted by referendum. See if there are any ballot initiative petitions for that in your locality and sign them. If not, start one.
Be the change you want to see.
The problem was allowing the police to manage the footage. There should be a federal, not state, archive that police body can footage is backed up to so they can’t just say,“it malfunctioned”.
For a snapshot of disclosure practices across the country, we conducted a review of civilians killed by police officers in June 2022, roughly a decade after the first body cameras were rolled out. We counted 79 killings in which there was body-worn-camera footage. A year and a half later, the police have released footage in just 33 cases — or about 42%.
You can always tell when they screwed up. If they shot an armed person who was actually threatening them, the footage is released that day. But when they’ve shot a 12 year old kid in a park, or a woman sleeping in her house, well suddenly we can’t release the footage.
It’s not just refusal to release footage. You also get cameras that police ‘forget’ to turn on, cameras that mysteriously ‘break’ or malfunction, storage servers that ‘accidentally’ delete data. My favorite was some footage I saw during the George Floyd protests, where the camera-wearing cop had obviously thought about and practiced his maneuver because during the entire incident his hands were always somehow just ever-so-conveniently blocking the camera in various ways.
