Also, has there been some outcry for body cams from this segment of the population? Otherwise, the idea of telling a segment of the adult population: “We’ve decided what’s best for you. Here.” seems kind of patronizing and paternalistic.
Yes, and I’m going to repeat myself as it seems my point above got missed:
Most people already have video cameras with them at all times (cellphones) and that’s why we already have footage of police brutality. Police brutality / unlawful killings are not bigfoot; it’s not something we can seriously dispute happens at least some of the time.
If the OP wants to handwave legitimate protests, how about say the NFL players should work part-time as bodyguards for black men, otherwise they’s be hypocrites.
That isn’t enough - people with cell phones don’t often start recording videos until well into the encounter, and then it’s often at a distance or at a bad angle. Police body cams suffer none of those deficiencies.
But you’re certainly right that they prove these things happen with some frequency, and probably much more frequently than we have proof of.
Police bodycams, right, but in the OP’s suggestion it’s every black man carrying one of these cameras. And for me, imagining not only that, but all of these cameras are ON all of the time, and positioned correctly for filming, is a credulity stretch too far.
That’s why I likened it to the absurdity of NFL players operating as free bodyguards during their downtime (though this of course more feasible).
Sorry for leaving the thread so long. Been busy. Anyway, it seems my idea hasn’t gone over too well, but I think there are some ways to improve it. First of all, just to respond to some people:
For what it’s worth, I’d gladly donate a month’s salary if I thought the money would go toward a scheme that would fix the problem. I wouldn’t even think twice about it. Of course, a month of my salary wouldn’t make any difference to anything, but if everyone else was doing it I’d be thrilled to chip in.
That’s actually a very good point. I hadn’t considered cloud storage costs. Anyone got any idea how much that would cost?
I addressed this in my OP. I completely agree that young black men shouldn’t have to take measures to protect themselves from racist cops. Unfortunately, they do. That’s just the fact of the matter. What we’re talking about is a social ill. Laying the blame (rightly) with racist cops and the system which protects them is just a diagnosis, and a diagnosis without treatment is useless. And there are only two ways to treat a social ill caused by a corrupt system. The first is to change it from within, the second is to change it from without. The NFL players are trying to change it from within. The point of the protest is to put pressure on the people inside the system so that they’ll change it. The problem with this method is that it’s slow. Michael Brown died over three years ago. What’s really changed? Some cops have started wearing body cameras which have a peculiar habit of malfunctioning at inopportune times. What else? Anything?
What I’m talking about, is changing the system from without. The advantage of this is that it’s much faster. If I could wave a magic wand and give every black man a body camera today, the mindset of every racist cop in America will have changed by tomorrow morning. They’d still be racists, of course, but they’d be less likely to act violently on that racism, and that’s really the only thing that counts. (Just to clarify, I’m well aware most cops aren’t racist, I’m just talking about the few who are.)
I just don’t see it as putting the responsibility on them. I see it as giving them an opportunity (which, obviously, they are free to refuse) to take advantage of an extra means of protecting themselves free of charge.
The harm caused by wrongful police shootings isn’t just limited to the black men who get killed. Every time someone like Walter Scott or Philando Castile is murdered by a cop it has a measurably harmful effect on all black Americans. I know black people who’ve never so much as returned a library book late, but they’re fucking terrified of the cops. One advantage of offering free body cameras is that it’ll help law abiding black folks feel less threatened by the police, because the police will know they’re being watched and, if shit does go bad, they won’t be able to hide behind the thin blue line.
I agree with the sentiment, but in practise that’s a much, much harder problem to fix. Far better to just force the system to change by empowering the people.
I disagree. I think these protests are, if anything, damaging to the players’ cause. That’s not to say I disagree with the players’ motivations. I’m just talking about the practical effects. I follow a lot of people on Facebook and Twitter and my feeds have been inundated with people saying stuff like “I work sixty hours a week at a job I hate to support my bitch ex-wife and ungrateful children and now, when I go to the bar to watch football, one of the few genuine pleasures I have left, what do I get? Fucking politics! Politics from a bunch of superstar athletes with mansions and Ferraris and more money than God. Well, fuck them.”
And let’s not kid ourselves that they’re actually raising awareness. The entire country has been talking about this issue since the Ferguson riots. When it comes to the problem of racist cops shooting young black men, we’ve been at maximum awareness for years. And you can only raise awareness for so long before people get sick of the sound of your voice.
Bottom line, from where I’m sitting, the thing the protests have been most successful in raising is resentment. We don’t need more celebrities raising awareness. We need concrete measures that will make a measurable differencequickly.
That’s true, but it’s also true that some protests really are counterproductive, and those protests need to be called out. I happen to believe the NFL protest falls into that category. Many disagree, and that’s fine. But a recent Reuters poll found that 72% of Americans think the protests are unpatriotic. White people only make up around 76% of the US population, so statistically that 72% must - even if we assume for the sake of argument that 95% of white people oppose the protests, which we know ain’t so - also include quite a few people of colour, who you’d think (generally speaking, of course) would be inclined to be supportive of any anti-racist, equal rights protest. For the sake of fairness, it should also be noted that the vast majority of Americans also think the players have the right to protest. It’s just they don’t like how they’re protesting.
Since the vast majority of Americans think the protest is unpatriotic, I think the protestors should reconsider their tactics. What percentage of Americans do you think would consider a mass body camera scheme unpatriotic? I’m biased, of course, but I think the number would be close to zero. Indeed, I reckon most people would respect the players for putting their money where their mouths are.
I agree 100% about the officer training. The problem is that changing mindsets takes a very, very long time. If at risk black men started wearing body cams then things would change much more quickly.
Also, it’s not good enough that people carry cell phones with them. Take the Walter Scott case, for example. It was only dumb luck that his murder was caught on camera. If there hadn’t been a kid with a phone on that particular street at that particular moment, the cop would have almost certainly gotten away with it. If the cop knew Scott might be wearing a body cam which uploaded directly to the cloud, he would probably have approached the entire interaction differently.
I agree that it’s somewhat arbitrary, but I needed a cut-off point. There’s no point giving toddlers and housebound octogenarians body cams. I just figured focussing on the most at risk group gave the best cost to benefit ratio.
Is it, though? Let’s assume a best case scenario in which body cams put an end to police shootings of unarmed black men. The average age of a black American man is 30. The average life expectancy is 69 and 4 months (so let’s say 70). An actuarial study by economists at Stanford University estimated that the cost of one year of human life was $129,000.00.
129,000 x 40 x 16 = 82,560,000.
Now let’s say a well maintained body camera lasts about 3 years. That means the dollar value of human life years saved over that period is $247,680,000.00, which is obviously less than the initial expenditure, but not by a huge amount. And when you take into account the incalculable value of improved race relations that would inevitably result from a sharp drop in police shootings of unarmed black men, I’d consider it a pretty wise investment.
Well, aside from the fact that pretty much everything pisses off Trump, he’d have a much harder time using a mass body cam scheme as a political wedge issue. This would go double if the scheme was funded by the very NFL players he’s spent the last two weeks attacking on Twitter.
This is a very good point, and it’s one which actually strengthens my argument. My calculations were based on buying every black man in America between 18 and 45 a body cam. Of those people, many simply won’t want one, and others will, as you rightly point out, just buy one themselves. That means the money raised would go much further and the residual could be put toward cloud storage costs for the people who do want a free one.
I don’t think that’s fair. I’m not accusing the players of hypocrisy. I’m just saying that I don’t think their protest is very effective, and it’s easily within their means to set up a mass body cam scheme which (in my opinion) would actually accomplish their goals far more quickly. It’s about getting them what they want. My scheme would be faster and, I imagine, much more popular with regular people than what they’re actually doing. Even if the gesture ends up being purely symbolic it would probably have a beneficial effect on race relations, especially since most of the players who would end up donating would be white.
The data is for ‘legal interventions’ - so illegal interventions wouldn’t be counted. So a police officer shooting an innocent, unarmed black man wouldn’t be in the data set. Also note that “percentage breakdown by race computed from pooled 2005, 2008 and 2011 PPCS surveys due to small case counts”.
This study screams observer effect.
The study relied on reports filled out by the police officers themselves and relied on police departments willing to share those reports. Self-selection bias.
Why do you limit the graph to only people arrested? That’s not what the graph is showing. The graph is looking at those targeted as criminal shooting suspects, firearm arrestees and those fired upon or struck by police gunfire. Blacks make up barely 20% of the population yet account for almost 70% of firearm arrestees and those targeted as criminal shooting suspects, and 40-50% of those fired upon or struck by police gunfire. That’s the key point.
Sounds like you agree that cameras have good effects.
What do you think of the fact that blacks are twice as likely to be shot by police and three times as likely to be poor. Is the police brutality class based more than color based? Do poor white men get shot as frequently as poor black men?
Wearing a body camera is not going to keep a police from shooting you ! Once you’re dead the police can remove the body camera and destroy it and say they never found a camera on the body .
That is a valid concern. However, if it were possible to upload data to the Cloud, that would negate this risk. Even if such a thing wasn’t possible, if a cop is wearing a body camera (and I believe in most states it’s mandatory now), it would, more likely than not, show the victim wearing his. The cop have to disable his own body cam as well. It’d be tough enough for the cop to explain away the lack of footage from his own camera, but if the victim was known by his friends and family to have a camera as well, and if that were to also disappear…well, it wouldn’t look good for the cop, and it’d be even harder for the system to protect him.
Is it 100% foolproof? Probably not. But then again, nothing is. Better training, and better screening of recruits to exclude those with a racial bias is a very good idea, but it certainly wouldn’t be 100% foolproof either. That’s no reason not to try. Furthermore, when a cop shoots an unarmed black man, it’s virtually always an act of impulse. If cops were to go into such situations knowing in advance that the people they’re dealing with might well be wearing body cameras, it should (and, I believe, almost always would) change how they approach the entire situation. That in turn, would force them to moderate their behaviour because, after all, they’re not going into the situation planning to shoot anyone.
Not even close to the same thing.
I do think all cops should wear body cameras that are always on and can’t be erased for accountability purposes - but as we’ve seen, in far too many real-life cases, cops can kill unarmed people for no reason and not be held accountable.
Mildly off-topic charity stuff addressing the OP’s offer for a donation:
May I recommend the AMF? If we’re talking about charitable giving to help black people, you really can’t do better. If we’re talking about charitable giving to help people, period, you still really can’t do better.
Yes, this has little to do with police violence, but I guarantee it’ll help a hell of a lot more - taking a depoliticized issue where the primary problem is getting enough infrastructure and materials in place to do what needs to be done is usually going to work better than throwing money at a political football (pun not intentional). A month of your salary, if you’re in a position where giving away a month of your salary, doesn’t actually hurt you that much, could very well save a life.
I don’t think asking everyone to wear body cameras is a good idea. A better solution would be getting body cameras for the people who really need them - the cops. There’s pretty extensive research that body cams are good for cops and civilians. Meanwhile, demanding that civilians wear them at all times seems like a pretty significant infringement on civil liberties, and smacks distinctly of victim-blaming.
Also, there’s a huge gap between “I’m going to take a symbolic gesture” and “I’m going to give a ton of money to solve a problem”. Celebrities using their platforms to raise awareness of an issue are mostly the former; implying that they would automatically move to the latter is kind of silly.
Also, a practical concern for this scheme: many states have laws in place that determine who, what, when, and how you can record video or audio. In 11 states, recording a phone call or conversation without the consent of both parties is illegal, which, to my limited knowledge, makes the recording inadmissable as evidence in court (IANAL, if I’m wrong please correct me; there are some exceptions, like in california if you believe the conversation will provide evidence of a serious crime; this is all terribly complicated). This may become a problem.
The NFL players are trying to raise awareness of an issue and show that they too feel strongly.
That’s not the same thing as the NFL now being obliged to fix the problem itself.
And you still missed the point that this kind of video exists already, and the officers involved usually are not charged and no changes are made to officer training.
So in a hypothetical world where your plan plays out, we collect more examples…then what? Does that mean protests don’t need to happen any more?
Also, making all black guys do X is not going to play out well. For example, if I’m a black guy who doesn’t wear a body cam, is that like some admission of guilt? Because as a law-abiding black man I’m supposed to [del]use the correct water fountain[/del] always wear a body cam?
If you say it’s not about some accusation of hypocrisy on the part of the players, that’s fine, but you should know that’s the kind of interpretation and audience where such an idea would gain traction, and nowhere else.
If you go suggest it on some Crowder or Shapiro talk page, you’ll get plenty of agreement from people who want to ignore the subject of the protests and/or talk about “black privilege”.
It’s been a while since I visited here, and I’m sure it’s still a great forum, I’m reading an OP that took some effort to type - I assume they intended to present a good point? This would be a great solution to fight police brutality against blacks. now tell me we’ll to do prevent white people who get shot by the police. did you not think that happens? The police have a tough job and I’ve seen videos where situations go to hell for them in seconds, but they obviously need help, review of procedure, and any other method that might help to maintain control of the suspects, and also don’t shoot people because they’re running away from you.
do I need to find a list of videos of whites getting shot by cops when they’re unarmed?
I didn’t mean to suggest they had any sort of obligation to fix the problem. I’m merely suggesting an alternative which is both within their means and (I hope) solves the problem in a more practical way.
All of which is, of course, appalling. To me, however, this simply demonstrates the inefficiency of trying to put pressure on a corrupt system to change itself from within. Systems have internal mechanisms which help them to resist top-down change. The biggest example of this is the so-called “Thin Blue Line”. All the training in the world isn’t going to change the fact that many of the people who are charged with prosecuting crooked cops also work closely with the cops. It seems to me that the only way to override this kind of internal systemic resistance is to empower the people so that, when these sorts of cases go to court, the weight of evidence against the cops is so great that the system cannot withstand it.
For example, imagine a situation in which a bystander uses his phone to film a cop shooting an unarmed black man as he was running away, but the bystander was filming from a distance so the sound quality is poor. The case goes to court and the cop makes some bullshit self-defence argument. The system, being biased in favour of the cop, makes it easy for this defence to fly. The defence argues that the bystander only saw the shooting, not what led up to it. The footage is out of context etc… Sure, it’s kinda suspicious that the cop’s own body cam malfunctioned but hey, that’s technology for you. The cop goes free.
Now imagine the same scenario, but the victim was wearing a body cam which uploaded directly to the cloud and, when that footage is retrieved, it shows the cop muttering the N word just before pulling the trigger.
Now that cop’s going to jail.
Admittedly, it’s an extreme example, but the Walter Scott case shows that it’s certainly not beyond the realms of possibility.
Absolutely not. My gripe is with this particular protest, and is based solely on the belief that it’s counter-productive, and doesn’t help the players and the people who support them (myself included) get what they want. In fact, I wouldn’t even call it a gripe. It’s more of a difference of opinion over tactics. None of these objections apply to college campus protests or street protests.
This is actually an extremely good point, and I must confess it’s one that I hadn’t properly considered. Obviously, I personally don’t consider the choice to refuse a body cam to be a tacit admission of guilt, but you’re right that some people will take it that way. I don’t really have an answer to this objection. It may well prove fatal to my idea. My only defence is that I believe giving black people the opportunity to avail themselves of free body cams will force a change in the cops’ mindsets so that, before such altercations even begin, they’re psychologically primed to be more cautious and therefore less likely to pull the trigger unless they’re genuinely in danger. I’ll have to give it some thought.
That’s probably true, but there really isn’t anything much I can do about that. Besides, assholes like Crowder will spin anything, and even if they succeed in imputing dishonest motives to the scheme, that doesn’t mean the scheme itself isn’t worth trying.
