There are a few recent news stories regarding police officers being charged with murder after their accounts, or their departments’ accounts, of events were contradicted by body cam video.
I can’t understand how this can happen. One example is an officer flat out shooting a guy sitting in a car, and then saying that the guy lunged at him. His account was confirmed by his department as well, until the video showed otherwise.
Do the officers, or their departments, forget about the body cam? Do they think that no one will ask to ever see it?
They’re, literally, used to being able to get away with murder. Once you learn that consequences don’t apply to you, it’s a very tough lesson to un-learn.
I think bodycams are catching two categories of bad cops, some who are bad in the sense that they are evil bullies, and some who are bad in the sense that they are incompetent and unfit for the job.
More with reference to the latter group… memory is extremely unreliable under stress. In some cases, I think it’s possible that they rationalize what happened to create a false memory to fit the narrative. They genuinely believe he must have lunged at them, because the idea that they just murdered someone is impossible to accept.
I remember seeing footage of this incident from a nearby surveillance camera, but I don’t remember seeing body camera footage. There was also the incident a few months ago in which a group of officers literally beat an innocent man to death, and that incident likewise was caught on a nearby surveillance camera. Even without body cameras, you would think more people would be careful about what they do in public because there are so many cameras all over the place these days.
I have no background in psychology but I once had an employee with a PhD in cognitive psychology. He explained that basically every time you retrieve a memory is an opportunity to change it. I think people here, but not necessarily the general public, understands that memory is not a video recorder. If you describe an event, altering in the telling what really happened, and you do it enough times, there is the possibility that you are also reprogramming your own memory of that event. IMHO opinion as a layperson, I think in a case like this the phrase “impossible to accept” would not mean that the person believes themselves morally incapable of such an act, but rather that they are acutely aware of the consequences and so they reinvent reality.
To fully answer the question, you have to understand the mindset of the typical law enforcement officer. Most are tyrants and bullies who have been told that they can get away with anything. The concept of “officer safety” and “qualified immunity” is drilled into them on a daily basis. And they couldn’t care less if there’s a complaint or investigation, because - surprise! - they investigate themselves, and conclude there was no wrong doing.
If you think I’m exaggerating about most being tyrants and bullies, watch some first amendment audit videos on YT.
A friend is a “good cop” (according to him, a minority). He has told me about situations where another cop who everyone knows is having problems at home, using anabolic steroids, whatever, freaks out and assaults someone.
That cop or another one at the scene will then go around to make sure everyone knows “the story”.
My friend will not lie, but usually he is searching the car’s trunk or interviewing a witness, avoiding being involved with whatever the problem cop is doing.
I think there’s a subtle difference at work. These bad cops are not used to getting away with murder. What they’ve gotten used to is getting away with lesser crimes. These lesser crimes didn’t rise to the level of an outside investigation and were handled by departmental investigators, who were biased in favor of their fellow cops. So these bad cops get used to facing cursory investigations.
Then they get involved in an incident which gets out of control and they shoot somebody. And a dead victim is going to produce a higher level of investigation by people outside of the police department. That’s when the bad cop finds that the biased process that he was used to isn’t universal and this investigation is going to look at all the evidence.
Yeah, I’m pretty firmly in the camp of Most Cops Are Bad, but YouTube videos like that aren’t much value as evidence (at least, not as concerns cops as a whole-- They’re obviously evidence concerning those specific individuals). They’re not going to post the boring videos online, and we have no way of knowing how many boring videos they throw out for each one they post that makes their point.
I’m very surprised at this take. Unless you define “bad” using a very high hurdle, I don’t believe this to be true. I’d say the majority of cops are good, and when there are millions of them, we’re bound to get some bad ones.
He knows that there is a problem and he deliberately tries to avoid actually witnessing it?
He is not a Good Cop.
He is a “good” cop, and through deliberate inaction/avoidance he is part of the problem.
When you get incidents where 20 cops are present while one of them murders someone, where are all of these supposedly-abundant “good cops”? Stopping someone from murdering people is literally supposed to be their job.
Having met a lot in my professional career, i can say “most” is a huge overstatement. And I dont think qualified immunity means what you think it does- all government employees have it.
And those anecdotes prove what? That there are a few? There are about 700,000 law enforcement officers in the USA. Before those vids prove anything, you’d have to come up with at least 7000 of them.
Hardly. There are by no means that many officer involved shootings and most of them are when the perp is shooting back.
Yeah, that was pretty bad. But if you want the vid, you can see the officer panicked, shot in fear. he likely actually thought that guy was a danger (he had a knife, sure, but was in a car). People dont think straight when they panic.
Yeah, I guess it’s hard to define when human psychology and sociology are involved. With respect to herd mentality, mob rule, family first, etc., is every single participant “bad”? Tough call, but that’s what I think basically is happening when 20 people conspire to cover up the bad actions of 1.