I don't think Obama's intentions are very honorable here. In proposing to spend $20 million to "help" (force?) local police departments to buy body cameras to be worn by officers, he's playing to the dishonest narrative that police brutality is out of control and every move cops make have to be watched so we can catch them beating the innocent citizens. That is a load of crap. But ironically, I think that if they actually do this, the reason this load of crap has come to be so widely believed might be neutralized.
Demand for the cameras, which clip onto officers' uniforms to record interactions with citizens, has risen amid a series of deadly altercations between police and unarmed black men, followed by protests in several American cities.
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said last week that she would launch a body-camera pilot program after a black man died from a spinal injury while in police custody.
Some critics have accused Obama of doing too little to respond to the shootings. Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton said on Wednesday that the United States should make sure every police department has body cameras.
The cameras are expensive for police departments still struggling to regain pre-recession funding levels.
Los Angeles, which plans to deploy 860 cameras this summer, will spend $1.5 million in the first year to cover equipment, maintenance and storage.
The American Civil Liberties Union has warned that body camera use must be governed by standards that protect the privacy of those being recorded.
The ACLU is always good for a little entertainment. They're all over it when a citizen records the cops using force to arrest someone, but let the cops do the recording at the behest of the ACLU's allies in the White House, and suddenly they're concerned about the privacy rights of the criminals.
Anyway, I think this move could have unintended consequences for those pushing the cops-are-racist-brutes narrative. First of all, the supposed incidents of police brutality in Ferguson and Baltimore were not video-recorded at all. The storiers were all based on hearsay. We now know that Darren Wilson did nothing wrong in shooting Michael Brown. We still don't know how Freddie Gray died, but as of yet there is no evidence that police brutality was involved.
If there had been cameras recording either or both of these situations, we might have known the truth a lot more quickly, and the cops might have been exonerated more quickly.
Another advantage would be that random people could not give edited video to media who are eager to provoke racial riots, at least not without the police responding with the release of full videos that show the context of the situation. You usually see the arrest itself, and if the suspect has fled or resisted, the result is usually that the officers use some degree of force in making the arrest. Outside the context of the full incident, that can look unnecessary. But when you see everything from start to finish, you often get a different perspective.
And if a cop really does use unnecessary and excessive force on a suspect - regardless of the racial composition of the parties involved - then we should see that.
I believe that the vast majority of the time, a full unedited video of rough arrests will show that the cops had to do what they did. It will also show that many of these "victims" are a lot more reckless and aggressive than the media and politicians (and apparently the ACLU as well) would have you believe.
I don't like the fact that we're viewing police as suspects, and that this proposal is gaining traction because of that sentiment. But the police-hating left might want to be careful what it wishes for. If they think these body cameras are going to catch the cops in widespread acts of police brutality, I think they're in for a surprise. I think they're going to show that the cops are almost always the good guys. And that might even be worth the $20 million.
