Why we need body cameras now more than ever

Today’s decision by a Staten Island grand jury not to indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo for having killed Eric Garner using a chokehold during an arrest for selling untaxed cigarettes has sparked enormous outcry and frustration. Garner’s killing was captured on video and has been viewed by millions. Does that mean that video doesn’t matter? That getting police to wear body cameras won’t help hold officers accountable?

Not a bit. The fact that video evidence didn’t lead to an indictment doesn’t suggest a problem with video, but a problem with grand juries. In the wake of last week’s decision of a grand jury not to indict police officer Darren Wilson for killing 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, as well as today’s decision in the Garner killing, there’s been a lot written about how seldom grand juries hold police officer accountable for killing civilians, and I won’t repeat that here. But despite the grand jury decision, having video footage in incidents like this one matters a lot.

Video evidence gives the grand jury important evidence about what happened when an officer kills a civilian. The Ferguson grand jury decided not to indict Wilson in part because of conflicting accounts of what happened — who grabbed who first, who acted as the aggressor. The grand jury appeared to discount the testimony of some eyewitnesses, including Brown’s friend who was with him at the time of the shooting, in favor of the account by the officer who pulled the trigger. Video evidence helps resolve those conflicts, so that juries or investigators don’t just defer to officers’ testimony.

Video might not resolve every dispute, it might not guarantee indictments or discipline in every case where they’re deserved — but the chances of justice without it seem much less.

Video evidence also provides the public with crucial information about how police operate. It’s in large part because of the video footage that the nation is so outraged at Garner’s killing. We know what happened — we may not have all the evidence the grand jury had, but we know a lot more than if no video existed. We know what Garner said, what he did and we can judge for ourselves how threatening he seemed, or didn’t. We can judge for ourselves whether we want officers who act in our name should to act as Officer Pantaleo did, or not.

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More importantly, when we can judge for ourselves when officers act wrongly, we can also judge when the systems to hold officers accountable are failing. If a grand jury fails to return an indictment in a controversial incident, or if a department says a killing was within policy, video makes it harder to say that the public doesn’t really know the full story. When you say the system’s broken, it’s harder to say you’ve got your facts wrong if there’s video evidence.

Video footage might not have meant an indictment for the killing of Eric Garner, but it means that many more people are demanding that the system must give him justice or the system must change. That’s a step toward accountability, and one we think body cameras will help provide.

Peter Bibring is director of police practices for the ACLU of California. Follow ACLU_SoCal.
 

When Vickie Mena heard that her hometown of Adelanto, CA was considering plans to build yet another prison, she decided to express her concerns through a most time-honored American tradition: she organized a protest on the City Hall lawn. But the Adelanto officials had other ideas.

In July, in conjunction with the Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC), Vickie planned the “Schools Not Jails” demonstration to protest the city’s plan to expand its prison facilities rather than focusing on its chronically underfunded schools. Vickie attempted to get a permit for the event by following city procedures, but city officials arbitrarily required the group to purchase a million dollar insurance policy for the small 25-person event. When Vickie and CIVIC refused to be deterred and proceeded with the protest, city officials charged Vickie with several misdemeanor violations for failure to obtain a permit.

Vickie now faces criminal charges for exercising her First Amendment rights. But the ACLU Foundation of Southern California (ACLU SoCal) is standing with Vickie and fighting to protect all Adelanto community members’ freedom of expression. Last week, ACLU SoCal sent a letter to the City of Adelanto demanding that it dismiss the charges against Vickie, and reform its permitting scheme to meet First Amendment requirements.

As ACLU SoCal explained in its letter, the First Amendment prohibits the government from arbitrarily restricting citizens from speaking out, particularly when it comes to core political speech like a protest directed at government officials. The city violated this critical protection by requiring Vickie and CIVIC to obtain a million dollar insurance policy that could not be justified given the size of the protest and that the group obviously could not afford. Worst still, the permitting scheme gave city officials unbridled discretion to impose conditions on permits, despite courts’ repeated warnings that such discretion must be constrained by discrete, objective criteria to ensure that permit restrictions are not used as means to chill free speech.

Disturbingly, it appears that the city may have abused its permit powers in just this manner. In response to a Public Records Act request submitted by ACLU SoCal the city disclosed an email exchange between city officials regarding Vickie’s application for a permit. In response to the question whether “you want to require any additional conditions (Insurance, etc) before approving the event,” the city manager responded: “does [Vickie] know the city has nothing to do with the schools?” Shortly thereafter, Vickie was informed of the city’s decision to require the group to purchase a million dollar insurance policy.

The email exchange raises the gravest of First Amendment concerns. Why is the city manager considering the content of the protestors’ message in evaluating their request for the permit? Did he attempt to silence the city’s critics by requiring them to purchase an excessive and unnecessary insurance policy that they could not afford?

The troubling questions raised by the city manager’s statements provide yet more reasons for the city officials to drop the unconstitutional charges against Vickie, and for Adelanto to reform its permitting scheme to prevent against any such abuse in the future.

Michael Kaufman is staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California. Follow @ACLU_SoCal.

It’s been two days since a grand jury decided not to indict Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown. In L.A., as elsewhere, many people have taken to the streets.

Here, at the ACLU of Southern California, we recognize that racial inequities in policing, criminal justice and society have persisted too long and extend far beyond Ferguson. We remain committed to the work on issues of race and use of force in policing, and to the work ahead that needs to be done.
 

We need meaningful, independent oversight of the police. If the reaction to the Ferguson grand jury shows us anything, it’s that people won’t accept the judgment of a process they don’t believe is fair. There’s lots of reasons to question the Ferguson grand jury result: the significant differences between Wilson’s testimony about Brown’s aggression and the descriptions of steady escalation by the closest witness, Brown’s friend Dorian Johnson; the very different way prosecutors proceeded for a police officer who shot a young black man than for other crimes, in a way that suggests a strategy to avoid an indictment. The fact is that grand juries almost always return an indictment in most crimes, but almost never indict a police officer in a shooting.

Though these concerns arise specifically in Ferguson, the lack of independent oversight is a systemic problem. People don’t trust police to police themselves, nor do they trust prosecutors to make objective judgments about whether officers should be held accountable for a shooting when they work closely with police in criminal prosecutions, day in and day out. Locally, we’re working to bring civilian oversight to the L.A. Sheriff’s Department and to ensure the new LASD Inspector General functions as an outside, independent monitor; we’ve promoted stronger civilian oversight in Orange County, Riverside and across Southern California; and we’ll keep fighting to ensure there are independent entities to hold police accountable for misconduct and civil rights violations.

We need more transparency in police use of force. Police must provide greater transparency for shootings and other serious uses of force. California laws are some of the most secretive in the country when it comes to police misconduct — it was only last spring that the California Supreme Court clarified that the names of officers involved in shootings could be released, but the details of investigations into shootings are often kept from the public. The Ferguson police waited a week to identify Darren Wilson as the officer who shot Michael Brown, but LAPD waited more than twice as long to release the names of officers who shot Ezell Ford. In Texas and Florida, where a police department has determined an officer violated policies or otherwise engaged in misconduct, records of the incident are public. That’s true in California for any government employee — except for police officers, for whom all personnel information is kept secret. Police officers have privacy rights, too, but that shouldn’t prevent the public from knowing the truth about misconduct or serious incidents like shootings.

We support use of cameras by police. Cameras don’t always end the debate over what actually happened, but they provide important evidence. Police should use body cameras for patrol officers in a way that allows officers to be held accountable for misconduct and to be exonerated from unfounded complaints. Departments must also work out policies that allow public access to video of important incidents while balancing privacy interests of officers and civilians in more routine encounters.

We need better data on uses of force and racial disparities in policing. Police should collect data and report data on uses of force and racial disparities. We live in an era of data-driven policing where law enforcement embrace Compstat, predictive policing, intelligence led-policing. But police departments aren’t required to track or report how many civilians are shot by officers, or any details of the shootings — the race and age of the person shot, the circumstances of the shooting, whether or not they were armed, whether they suffered from mental illness or other disability that might have played a role in the incident, whether the shooting was deemed in policy and, if not, what kind of corrective action was taken. If the lives of those civilians matter, police must be transparent about how they ended. If police were committed to eliminating biased policing, they would track and study racial disparities in their own actions as closely as they study crime trends.

We need to fix the whole system. Observers have noted how the problems of race and police violence have roots in much deeper problems. Police violence is only one facet of a criminal justice system permeated with racial disparities, and that criminal justice system too often serves as a substitute for failures in education or mental health treatment. That’s why we’ve been working to reduce mass incarceration through the passage of Prop. 47 and advocating sensible diversion and pretrial release policies here in LA, fighting the school-to-prison pipeline and unfair police presence on campus. We see even our work on meaningful access to education as part of the struggle to make sure that kids have the same opportunities, and that those from some neighborhoods and backgrounds don’t get tracked for jail instead of jobs.

Peter Bibring is director of police practices for the ACLU of California. Follow @ACLU_SoCal.