Lessons From Video and Body Cameras

Criminal justice in the United States has been changed forever. The first reason for that involves the video cameras that are being used by civilians who are recording police actions when they are stopping, questioning and sometimes caught shooting and killing innocent people. The second reason involves the body cameras being worn by the police officer themselves. What could never be determined was what actually happened in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin who was shot and killed by Geeorge Zimmerman. That was not the case with the shooting deaths by the police against unarmed black people in Cleveland, Ohio; North Charleston, South Carolina and in Cincinatti, Ohio. Body cameras worn by the police and cameras used by civilians also recorded the arrest that resulted in a man being killed in police custody in Baltimore and the traffic stop in Texas that resulted in a black woman allegedly hanging herself in her jail cell. In every case, the absence of those cameras carried by civilians and worn by police would have resulted in deaths that would have been explained away solely by police officers whose word would have been accepted because there was no way to refute their report. We now know that in Cincinatti, Cleveland and North Charleston the police had attempted to give false information about their use of deadly force. If it had not been for the cameras the public would not have known the truth about what actually happened. This makes me wonder how many other tragic deaths could have been explained differently if cameras could have been available. What really happened in the brutal murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955? What really happened to the three civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi in 1964? What was the involvement of law enforcement officers in the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson in Selma, Alabama in 1965? Moreover, what really happened with the more than 3500 known instances of lynch mob justice that saw black men, women and children being hung and burned alive between 1895-1935? Since the only report offered and accepted in every case was from the killers and not the victims the truth will never be known. Ida B. Wells Barnett spent more than twenty years of her life trying to persuade the U.S. Congress to pass an anti-lynching bill. It never happened because so many people argued that such things never happened or that black people must have done something to bring that treatment upon themselves. Now we know that the presence of a camera would probably have reported some very different stories from the point of view of all of those victims. All I can say is thank God for the cameras. They are already making a difference in the nation's pursuit of liberty and justice for all. Let's hope that more police wear body cameras and that more civilians record what they see on the streets of their cities when police arrests are underway. What do we have to lose? "The truth will set you free."