The video that emerged last week of a white police officer gunning down an unarmed African American man, Walter Scott, a 50-year-old father of four, is the latest in a horrific string of police killings caught on film. Within the past year, Americans have witnessed the deaths of Eric Garner in Staten Island, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, and John Crawford, III in Dayton, Ohio.
These videos have led to mixed results in criminal punishment — Michael Slager, the officer who killed Scott, has been charged with murder and is being held in jail without bail. However, the officer shown performing an illegal chokehold on Garner was not indicted by a New York grand jury. Those cases and others documented in cell phone videos have sparked a public debate around policing, race and the criminal justice system.
“The inherent flaw in our system is that if you are an officer, your version of the story carries more weight than the person who is deceased,” says Michael Curry, president of the Boston branch of the NAACP. “With the introduction of body cams, citizen videos and cruiser cams, it now gives us an opportunity to get a narrative that’s closer to the truth.”
The shooting of Scott in South Carolina is a case in point, says Curry. Although Slager claimed that he feared for his life, and that Scott had reached for his Taser, the cell phone video shows otherwise: Slager fired eight bullets into Scott’s back as he slowly ran away, and planted his Taser next to Scott’s body after he died.
For African Americans, these videos of police violence confirm what they’ve known all along, says Curry.
“I think that many African Americans knew this was going on for generations,” he says. “It’s not news to us, but it’s conspiracy theory. So unless you have proof — like a video — it’s your gut against law enforcement.”
Seth Stoughton, assistant professor of law at the University of South Carolina, says that these videos are showing the broader American public — especially whites — what blacks have seen for decades.
“They’re forcing us to pay attention,” he says. “It’s also becoming impossible to deny that there’s a problem. They might still say that there’s no widespread problem, that there are some individual problems, but no one’s saying, ‘Yeah, that’s not happening.’ And the videos are the reason they can’t say that anymore.”
Even though it’s clear that recent videos of police violence have led to a ‘consciousness-raising,’ says Phillip Atiba Goff, co-founder and president of the Center for Policing Equity at the University of California, Los Angeles, it’s hard to quantify exactly how public opinion is shifting. And this is part of the problem.
“Unlike everything else in this country, we don’t do public opinion attitudes towards law enforcement,” he says. “We have absolutely no national-level data on police behavior. We don’t know how many people are stopped by the police, how many people have force used against them, how many of them are sent to the hospital. We know what happens from arrest onwards, but the front-end of the criminal justice system is a massive black box.”
Because bystander videos have been instrumental in getting to the truth of many deadly police encounters with civilians, many groups such as the NAACP are calling for mandatory police body cameras. The Massachusetts legislature is considering such a bill this year.
Stoughton, who previously served as an officer with the Tallahassee Police Department in Florida, says that police body cameras can be helpful in clarifying whose version of events—the police officer’s or the suspect’s—is closer to the truth.
“It’s even more important in a lethal force situation,” Stoughton explains. “Body cameras are a critical way of getting more information out of a situation when you have only one person describing what happened.”
Stoughton cautions against an over-reliance on body cameras as a cure-all for police abuse.
“What worries me is that we’re going to put so much emphasis on them that we ignore the other important aspects of the solution,” he says, including changing police culture, training and accountability.
For instance, Stoughton says that 98 police academies offer an average of 160 hours of force training — how to use weapons. Eighty eight percent of academies teach conflict resolution, but for an average of just eight hours.
“We need to teach de-escalation in the same way that we teach them to use a baton or pepper spray,” he comments. “It needs to be part of their weapons belt.”
Still, Curry says that videos are critical for enacting broader social change.
“When I talk to folks in the community, they often say, ‘We don’t even get justice when there is a video,’” he says. “Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, those cases didn’t have an outcome the community felt was just. What I say is that the video gives us public support, because if you want to change laws, hold systems and people accountable, you have to have a critical mass of public support.”
He adds: “In all these cases, although they may not provide justice for the individual and their family, they may result in a seismic shift in how we do criminal justice in this country.”
