While I’m still fuming, does anybody seriously think that Michael Brown would still be alive if the police officer who shot him had been wearing a body camera? I wish they would submit their evidence. Or is it that the think that their lust for vengeance would have a better chance of being slaked if he had worn a camera? I think that’s far-fetched, too.
Actually, I don’t have any opposition to police officers being required to wear body cameras. I just don’t think it would have made a difference in this particular case. That’s something that gripes me. Have you noticed this pattern? Something bad happens. A solution is proposed. The solution would not have prevented the bad thing from happening. I see that pattern repeating with dreary monotony.
Here’s a modest proposal: why not require all of us to wear body cameras. Lord knows that Instagram is testimony that we’re halfway to that point as it is.
Well, with a body camera there would be much less ambiguity about what happened.
I would like to see some examples of what this would look like, but I suspect a cop camera will tend to support the cop’s point of view. Some people complain that the process is already too much about the killer (what about Michael Brown’s due process?), and not the victim. But the killer is the one being judged, and in the case of self-defense or official authorization, it’s based upon a reasonable person standard, not one of perfection or beyond errors. A herky-jerky video from the cop’s p.o.v. would probably add to the sense of confusion and disorder, probably more so than the actual experience inside his head.
Wearing a body camera is simply giving third parties a visual of events as they happened. It would not necessarily save lives, but would add clarity to the actions taken in these confrontations with police.
Anyone know if someone has committed journalism by seeing how difficult it is to lean into a car and take a holstered weapon. Seems pretty difficult to me. Hit the gas or close the power window and seems like that stops real fast.
Steve
Steve, the forensic evidence, eyewitness testimony from Wilson, eyewitness testimony from Brown’s partner in crime, and others all have confirmed that Brown was struggling with Wilson thru the window of his vehicle. Three options exist for how that happened: Wilson pulled Brown into the vehicle* (highly unlikely), Brown fell in (unlikely), or Brown leaned in. That last seems pretty stupid, but nothing that Brown had done in the last hour of his life comes across as terribly intelligent.
* I had originally thought Wilson was driving a sedan. He was actually in an SUV of some sort. Even withbthe increased height, I’m not seeing how he pulls a 290 lb man into the vehicle with one arm, which is all he’d have to use, effectively. I’m also not seeing why he’d want to pull a man that size on top of himself. It’s not like Wilson’s Frank Mir pulling guard in the middle of the ring to get an arm bar or a kimura. This is a man constrained in the driver’s seat of a vehicle, and typically cop cars have even more crap in them, making the space tighter, especially given that Wilson is reported to be 6′ 4″ and 210 himself.