The System Which Is Under Scrutiny Gets To Set The Parameters For That Scrutiny.…

The Police work for you .
You pay their salaries. You provide the pension plans and health-care for them and their families.
You pay for the precinct houses from which they operate. You pay for the cars they drive. You pay for the dashcam videos in cases where they are provided them.
Yet even though you pay for all of it, you are not entitled to see what is on the video when the videos have information which will show police officers doing what they shouldn’t be doing to citizens like you if North Carolina Republican legislators and Governor Pat McCrory have their way.

The unlaw­ful killing and abuse of black cit­i­zens by some police offi­cers have been a sore issue for­ev­er . Despite the protes­ta­tions of black and brown peo­ple, white peo­ple who con­trol pow­er have large­ly ignored their cries for jus­tice or have sim­ply remained silent.
Some have argued that whites large­ly remain silent because of racist ten­den­cies, also that they are served by the sta­tus quo. Others have argued that whites see police in a dif­fer­ent light because they are policed dif­fer­ent­ly and most cops are white,.
The lat­ter view tends to sup­port the argu­ments of peo­ple of col­or, that there are two sep­a­rate jus­tice sys­tems , one for whites and anoth­er for every­one else.

Taxpayers invest­ment in body and dash­cams were sup­posed to either hold police account­able or exon­er­ate them when they act appro­pri­ate­ly. What the police are now doing through their unions and politi­cians behold­en to them, is to make a deter­mi­na­tion when or if the footage is released at all.
That means the very unjust sys­tem which is under scruti­ny gets to set the para­me­ters for that scrutiny.
For those of us who believed that equip­ping police cruis­ers with dash­cams and offi­cers with body cam­eras would go a long way in remov­ing most of the ambi­gu­i­ty from cas­es where police ver­sion of events dif­fer from that of the pub­lic, we may need to rethink those beliefs.
What both­ers me is why on earth would police depart­men­t’s push for mea­sures which invari­ably will lead to more con­flict with the pub­lic they serve.

Republican gov­er­nor Pat McCrory said the law will strike a bal­ance between improv­ing pub­lic trust in the police and respect­ing the rights of officers.
Respecting the rights of officers?
Officers oper­ate in pub­lic spaces sup­pos­ed­ly on behalf of the pub­lic. What con­ceiv­able right could police have abridged by the release of videos of their actions ?
The answer is none !
It is a red her­ring designed to give police one more lay­er of cov­er to con­tin­ue to bru­tal­ize and kill peo­ple of col­or with­out being held accountable.
If this is allowed to stand the next step will be to make it a crime to film ille­gal behav­ior of police.
More and more states will fol­low North Carolina’s lead in mak­ing it impos­si­ble for police crimes to be uncov­ered when police get to deter­mine whether the pub­lic have a right to see whether they broke the law.
This only makes sense in a par­al­lel uni­verse. The longer police agen­cies get to hold video footage , the more like­ly it is that the pub­lic trust what they even­tu­al­ly release. The more that hap­pens the less trust and con­fi­dence large sawths of the pub­lic have in the police. The longer the police hold video footage the more like­ly it is that those footage will be tam­pered with and altered to sup­port the police ver­sion of events. There is noth­ing demo­c­ra­t­ic or trans­par­ent about this. It is a slow steady march toward a police state in which the pub­lic has no say.

As a for­mer police offi­cer I am not naïve to the claims that releas­ing videos to the pub­lic may com­pro­mise aspects of an inves­ti­ga­tion. I am also mind­ful that evi­dence in cer­tain video record­ings may inflame pas­sions and lead to vio­lence or more vio­lence in cas­es where vio­lent protest has already occurred.
Nevertheless when the total­i­ty of the dis­trust of police is tak­en into con­sid­er­a­tion, the police make a crit­i­cal tac­ti­cal mis­take in not appear­ing to be transparent.
I have long main­tained that demon­strat­ing against police is counter pro­duc­tive. Cops do not make laws , going into the streets may have some emo­tion­al val­ue but beyond that it yields pre­cious lit­tle substantively.
The fact is that a large sec­tion of the pop­u­la­tion care expo­nen­tial­ly more about bro­ken glass than it does bul­let rid­dled bod­ies. On that basis march­ing and protest­ing has zero effect in chang­ing attitudes.
If march­ing and singing was going to change cir­cum­stances they would have changed in the over half a cen­tu­ry since the begin­ning of the civ­il rights movement.
The sem­i­nal issue affect­ing the African-American Community when Dr King lived was police abuse. Over the half a cen­tu­ry since Dr King was mur­dered the sem­i­nal issue affect­ing African-Americans is not pover­ty , or lack of jobs as some so called black lead­ers would have you believe, it is police abuse.

There is a rea­son black and brown peo­ple do not trust the police , there are decades and decades of rea­sons for them not to.
When police get to decide whether video footages are released to the pub­lic which pays them, and pay for the video it reveals an intrin­sic sick sys­tem of the tail wag­ging the Dog.
♦Laquan Mcdonald was killed walk­ing away from Chicago police, the police refused to release the footage until they were forced to. The even­tu­al release of the video showed that Mcdonald was sum­mar­i­ly exe­cut­ed as he walked away , nev­er­the­less cops on the scene lied that he posed a threat which neces­si­tat­ed them using dead­ly force.
It was basi­cal­ly an assassination.
♦Walter Scott was sum­mar­i­ly exe­cut­ed In North Charleston, South Carolina as he ran away from a police offi­cer, a civil­ian video revealed that the cop placed a taser beside the body of mis­ter Scott with the intend­ed val­ue of argu­ing Scott attempt­ed to use it on him.
♦ Samuel Dubose was mur­dered in Cincinnati Ohio . The police con­tend­ed that mis­ter Dubose attempt­ed to run him over with his car. Video evi­dence how­ev­er showed that the offi­cer lied that Dubose posed a threat . Importantly as well , oth­er offi­cers on scene cor­rob­o­rat­ed the lie of the cop who mur­dered mis­ter Dubose,
So much for only a few bad apples.
♦Donald Andrews who oper­at­ed a smoke shop in Schenectady New York became a tar­get of police in that city for no rea­son but that he was a black man oper­at­ing a smoke shop.
Police rou­tine­ly staked out his store and would rou­tine­ly enter the store as part of their sur­veil­lance. On one occa­sion one of the offi­cers was cap­tured on mis­ter Andrews sur­veil­lance video, plant­i­ng crack cocaine on the counter. Not only was that offi­cer crim­i­nal he was stu­pid, it defies log­ic that any­one would believe that a per­son sell­ing crack cocaine would have it on the counter like candy.
According to experts mis­ter Andrews could have received four years for that bit of crack cocaine.

Dr. Boyce Watkins, Syracuse University Professor and founder of the Your Black World Coalition at the time said that this case is reflec­tive of the slip­pery slope that exists for black men when it comes to the crim­i­nal jus­tice system.

“If this is the case where the offi­cer got caught plant­i­ng the drugs, what about all the thou­sands of oth­er cas­es where the offi­cer wasn’t stu­pid enough to do it in a room full of cam­eras,” says Dr. Watkins. “The truth is that these inci­dents are not anom­alies, and are reflec­tive of the cor­rup­tion that exists in a sys­tem that has found black men to be lucra­tive com­modi­ties for the prison indus­tri­al com­plex. It has destroyed our fam­i­lies and must be con­front­ed in its entire­ty.” If police tes­ti­mo­ny is always val­ued above and beyond the defen­dan­t’s, how often do you think this hap­pens? With black men being arrest­ed for drug dis­tri­b­u­tion more than any oth­er group of peo­ple, it prob­a­bly hap­pens more than you know.

For years peo­ple of col­or in city after city across America have com­plained about police fram­ing them and fal­si­fy­ing reports send­ing inno­cent peo­ple away for years on end some­times for life.
The inno­cence project found­ed in 1992 by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, mis­sion state­ment says it is a nation­al lit­i­ga­tion and pub­lic pol­i­cy orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cat­ed to exon­er­at­ing wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed indi­vid­u­als through DNA test­ing and reform­ing the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem to pre­vent future injustice.
Through Messers Scheck and Neufeld and their team’s effort to date 344 inno­cent indi­vid­u­als have been exon­er­at­ed after serv­ing lengthy peri­ods of time in prison for crimes they did not commit.
In some cas­es indi­vid­u­als have served over three decades in prison, as you may well imag­ine the bulk of those are peo­ple of color.
The work of the inno­cence project is mon­u­men­tal when con­sid­ered against the dif­fi­cult and next to impos­si­ble prospect to get the sys­tem to say it was wrong or even to open up to a sec­ond look after con­vict­ing some­one for a crime they did not commit.