Body cameras don't matter when the system protects cops regardless of the evidence.
this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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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.
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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.
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".
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.