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Tag: body cameras
Clinton Calls For End To ‘Mass Incarceration’ As Riots Become Campaign Issue

Clinton Calls For End To ‘Mass Incarceration’ As Riots Become Campaign Issue

By Evan Halper, Tribune Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton focused her presidential campaign Wednesday on the unrest in Baltimore, vowing to work to upend the criminal justice system by ending the “era of mass incarceration” and equipping every police officer on the street with a body camera.

Her speech at Columbia University in New York City marked the unveiling of Clinton’s first major policy proposal as a presidential hopeful, coming as candidates are under pressure to confront racial disparities in the criminal justice system highlighted by the violence in Baltimore.

“What we have seen in Baltimore should, and I think does, tear at our soul,” Clinton said. “The patterns have become unmistakable and undeniable….We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America.”

Baltimore erupted in rioting Monday night, following the funeral of Freddie Gray, an African American man who was mortally injured while in police custody.

Clinton’s plan also stems from the “listening tour” she has been on since launching her campaign this month. In round-table meetings with residents in the early ­voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, the issue of drug abusers whose troubles were compounded by mental health problems played prominently.

“Our prisons and our jails are now our mental health institutions,” Clinton said. “I was somewhat surprised in both Iowa and New Hampshire to be asked so many questions about mental health.”

Clinton is joining a chorus of politicians demanding that police officers everywhere be equipped with body cameras.

“For every tragedy caught on tape, there surely have been many more that remained invisible,” she said. “This is a common-sense step.”

The sentencing reforms Clinton will champion focus on nonviolent offenders. She said they will include shifting people found guilty of such drug crimes from lockups to treatment and rehabilitation programs. Other alternative punishments would also be explored for low-level offenders, particularly minors, a Clinton campaign aide said.

Sentencing reform has broader political appeal than it once did. Tea party Republicans concerned about government overreach have joined Democrats in raising concern about inequities in the criminal justice system. Sen. Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican running for president, is among those pushing for sentencing reform. Paul, whose ideology leans libertarian, argues the United States locks up too many people for minor offenses for too long a time.

Clinton alluded to the idea’s inter-party appeal in her speech Wednesday.

“There seems to be a growing bipartisan movement for common-sense reform,” she said. “Without the mass incarceration that we currently practice, millions of fewer people would be living in poverty.”

Clinton repeatedly returned to what she says is racial injustice at the core of the existing policies, citing statistics that highlight how much harder the criminal justice system is on blacks than whites.

“We have allowed our criminal justice system to get out of balance,” she said. “These recent tragedies should galvanize us to come together as a nation to find our balance again.”

Photo: Utility, Inc. via Flickr

Police Shooting Shows Need For Major Changes, Advocates Say

Police Shooting Shows Need For Major Changes, Advocates Say

By John Monk, The State (Columbia, S.C.) (TNS)

COLUMBIA, S.C. — There would have been no charges filed against a North Charleston, S.C., police officer this week without a video shot by a witness, many, including the mayor of North Charleston, are saying.

Video brings more accountability, and that’s why some South Carolina state lawmakers will be pushing hard next week to pass a bill requiring all law enforcement officers to wear body cameras.

But proposals beyond the body cameras are needed to ensure police accountability, some say. They say:

  • State law should require that the State Law Enforcement Division, as an outside agency, investigate each time an officer fires a weapon in South Carolina.
  • All police agencies should be required by law to collect racial profiling data and turn that over to SLED, as a previous state law intended.

The body camera bill will get a hearing in the state Senate as soon as next week and quickly move on from there, a key senator said Wednesday.

The bill, introduced in December by Senator Gerald Malloy (D-Darlington), already has had three hearings this year in a Senate Judiciary Committee subcommittee chaired by Senator Brad Hutto (D-Orangeburg).

Hutto said he hopes his committee soon will pass the bill out to the full Judiciary Committee, which could consider it later this month.

In his subcommittee’s three hearings on body cameras, Hutto said, most witnesses -– including many from the state’s law enforcement community -– expressed overwhelming support for using cameras.

Concerns, raised by victims advocate groups and others, include privacy and Freedom of Information request issues, as well as costs of the cameras and data storage, Hutto said.

A revenue impact study done for Malloy’s bill estimates it would cost some $21 million to equip most state and local law officers with body cameras the first year, and $12 million per year after that.

Malloy said any costs of body cameras should be balanced with the costs of unnecessary police shootings, follow-up investigations and bad publicity for South Carolina –- such as Wednesday’s New York Times front-page photographs from the video of a North Charleston officer shooting a man in the back as he runs away.

Body cameras will act as a deterrent and might well have prevented the North Charleston shooting, Malloy said. “If that officer in North Charleston had been wearing a body camera, I don’t think he draws the weapon,” he said.

“We know that body cameras work. Good police officers don’t really mind,” Malloy said. “Complaints go down from citizens, and officers can use the videos for training.”

Hutto is enthusiastic. Law officers who testified “before our committee thought it was a great idea. It helps gather evidence, it’s great for community relations, it’s good for officer safety, and it acts as a deterrent to bad conduct on the part of both officers and citizens alike,” he said.

Hutto downplayed the initial multimillion-dollar costs. After all, when the idea of police car video cameras were introduced years ago, many people said they would cost too much, Hutto said. But the state decided to pay most of the costs by enacting a one hudred dollar fee on people convicted of DUI, and that fee has substantially helped pay for police car videos –- which nearly everyone now agrees are a great asset, he said.

“Over the years, we’ve collected millions of dollars,” Hutto said. “The vast majority of the cars on the streets now, when the blue lights go on, the camera goes on.”

Senator Marlon Kimpson, whose district includes North Charleston, where the latest shooting took place, is a co-sponsor of Malloy’s body camera bill.

University of South Carolina School of Law professor Colin Miller said Wednesday he shows law students in his criminal law and evidence classes many videos of officer-involved shootings, but all up to now raise at least some possibility the officer had justification for shooting.

“As far as video clips I’ve seen, this (North Charleston clip) is probably the most compelling,” Miller said. “Based on what’s shown in the video, it looks a lot like a homicide.”

Meanwhile, Representative Joe Neal (D-Richland), a leader in the Legislative black caucus, said he is introducing legislation that would require an outside law agency to investigate any officer-involved shooting.

“That will help ensure some level of objectivity and fairness,” Neal said. “There are some departments that now insist they can do an in-house investigation. I don’t think any law agency should investigate itself.”

USC’s Miller said he strongly supports independent, outside investigations of officers involved in shootings.

Now, SLED investigates only at the invitation of local or other state police agencies.

SLED has no authority to take over an investigation, and local police are not required by law to report such shootings.

While all agencies can opt not to invite SLED in, the Richland County Sheriff’s Department routinely does not turn over investigations of its officer-involved shootings to SLED or another outside agency.

Sheriff Leon Lott said he turned to in-house probes starting in 2014 because he feels his department has the investigative expertise, a competent crime lab, and the public trust to conduct proper investigations of its own deputies.

Police face tough decisions and, often, heavily armed and dangerous criminals.

So it’s right that they are given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to spilt-second decisions, experts say.

Even so, charging, and convicting, an officer of mishandling a shooting incident is rare in South Carolina, experts say.

Police in South Carolina have fired their weapons at 209 suspects in the past five years, and a handful of officers have been accused of pulling the trigger illegally –- but none has been convicted, according to an analysis of five years’s worth of data by The State newspaper.

The solicitor for Charleston and Berkeley counties, Scarlett Wilson, has not brought charges against an officer in at least the past five years.

During that time, there have been 23 police-involved shootings there, 17 of them in Charleston County, according to SLED data from 2010-15 examined by The State.

With SLED investigating, there’s not only a better chance at accountability, experts say. There’s a better chance for better data collection and analysis.

With one agency in charge, there would be a central location for collecting information and, presumably, more consistency and better chances to spot a trend –- good or bad.

Because SLED’s data now comes in from the various agencies and often does not contain the race of the officers, for example, which makes trends or possible racial profiling difficult to detect.

Data collection matters, Neal said, whether from shootings or from traffic stops, for seat-belt violations or other reasons.

“There needs to be come teeth in the law,” said Neal, noting there is already a law but that it only applies to non-ticketed police encounters and has no penalty in it for agencies who do not report the data to SLED.

In 2005, Neal was part of an effort to include a provision mandating the collection of racial profiling data in a pending mandatory seat belt bill.

Although many white lawmakers objected, Neal and others supported a long-stalled bill mandating seat belt use after a provision stipulating law agencies must collect race data on encounters between police and citizens.

That provision required all state and local law enforcement agencies to complete a form listing the race of the driver in traffic stops in which a citation is not issued. Police already collect race and other data in most other stops involving a ticket.

But Neal said Wednesday the racial profiling measure in the seat belt isn’t working because only a minority of law agencies report that data to SLED as required by law.

During the past 15 years, there have been some 550 reported police shootings in South Carolina, SLED’s records indicate. That’s an annual average of 36 shootings.

Other information is more difficult to come by, gleaned only by digging through SLED’s voluminous files.

Last month, a University of South Carolina professor told The State that it is embarrassing that no one knows exactly how often police fire at or kill suspects in the United States or South Carolina, and that lack of sufficient information makes it harder to grapple with the controversial issue, a criminal justice professor said.

“The government is very aggressive about giving us numbers to protect us from the free market,” the University of South Carolina’s Geoff Alpert, a nationally recognized expert on police use of force issues, said in an interview. “But not much when it comes to our civil liberties.”

Malloy said he plans to introduce another bill next week in the Senate.

It will prevent police from charging bystanders with a crime if they are videotaping a police encounter with a citizen.

“It will allow our citizens to go on and break out their cameras,” Malloy said.

“Pictures are worth a thousand words,” the senator said. “And thank goodness for this picture.”

Photo: City of North Charleston – City Hall via Flickr

In Response To Ferguson, Black Caucus Backing Obama’s Call For Police Body Cameras

In Response To Ferguson, Black Caucus Backing Obama’s Call For Police Body Cameras

By Hannah Hess, CQ Roll Call (TNS)

WASHINGTON — Members of the Congressional Black Caucus are backing the White House’s request for a $263 million spending package to expand the use of body cameras for police, hammering the point in a series of passionate floor speeches Monday night regarding the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.

In addition to praising President Barack Obama for taking the lead on body cameras, Rep. Al Green called on Congress to follow Obama’s lead on the issue by holding a hearing on the Texas Democrat’s own Transparency in Policing Act to expand use of the technology to all police departments that receive federal dollars.

“We shouldn’t get it right after the fact. This is what is happening in Ferguson,”Green said, suggesting a legislative response that is widely supported by the caucus. In Washington, the Metropolitan Police Departmentrolled outa pilot body camera program on Oct. 1, and cities around the country are launching similar programs.

“We don’t need to have an injustice take place before we move to a just circumstance and incorporate these body cameras,” he said.

Though Obama mostly avoided using his bully pulpit to talk about a Missouri grand jury’s decision not to indict the white police officer who killed the unarmed teenager Brown, the CBC began planning to shine a light on Ferguson when the House returned from its Thanksgiving break in the immediate wake of the decision. The lawmakers have demanded a more aggressive approach to the case, without previously offering a specific proposal for Congress.

“Mr. Speaker, we are running out of patience,” said CBC leader Marcia Fudge (D-OH) during her turn at the microphone. She repeated her blunt assertion that the decision not to indict was “yet another slap in our face.” Fudge also thanked Obama for “putting a focus on the need for community policing in our country.”

Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-NY) said a “cancer” of racial injustice has infected the country. “What has to be is that we cut this poison out of the system of this great country and openly say that we have this problem, and then, as the parents of Mr. Brown would want, that death would have been just another sacrifice that one of us has made to wake up this wonderful country to do what has to be done.”

Since the Nov. 24 announcement of the grand jury’s decision, Ferguson protesters in D.C. have visited the Capitol grounds, the Supreme Court and the Justice Department. This week, demonstrators stalled traffic in the District, shutting down the 14th Street Bridge during the Monday morning commute and a portion of Interstate 395 on Sunday.

“These demonstrations show that issues of detention and stopping of black men, especially black men in the streets, has been simmering below the surface until this tragedy became a way for it to find an outlet,” Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, (D-DC) said Monday night. She praised Attorney General Eric Holder, former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, for ending “provocative stops in the street” of the nation’s capital.

Norton also offered her support for body cameras, saying they protect the police as well as the public. She emphasized the focus needed to be “big picture … in essence, sending a message to police departments all over the United States.”

AFP Photo/Brendan Smialowski

NYPD Officers To Begin Wearing Body Cameras As Part Of Settlement

NYPD Officers To Begin Wearing Body Cameras As Part Of Settlement

By James Queally, Los Angeles Times

Sixty New York City police officers will wear body cameras as part of a pilot program in the wake of a federal lawsuit challenging the department’s controversial stop-and-frisk tactics and the recent death of Eric Garner during an arrest, city officials said.

Police Commissioner William Bratton announced the program Thursday, saying officers in at least one precinct in each of New York City’s five boroughs will begin wearing the surveillance devices.

Implementing the program was part of a settlement reached last year after a federal judge put a stop to the New York Police Department’s controversial stop-and-frisk tactics, which many said unfairly targeted black men while doing little to reduce crime.

“The NYPD is committed to embracing new and emerging technology in order to continue to keep New York City safe,” Bratton said. “Having patrol officers wear body cameras during this pilot demonstrates our commitment to transparency while it will also allow us to review its effectiveness with the intention of expanding the program.”

The department will use two camera models: the Axon Flex developed by stun-gun magnate TASER, and the LE3 made by Vievu. Bratton said the department chose the models after meetings with police officials in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Oakland, California.

Bratton said officers will begin wearing the devices in the fall.

“This pilot program will provide transparency, accountability, and protection for both the police officers and those they serve, while reducing financial losses for the city,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement. “New York City will do everything it takes to stay the safest big city in the nation. This means testing new methods and staying ahead of the curve on emerging technologies like body cameras.”

Six command areas, those with the highest number of stop-and-frisk encounters in 2012, were chosen for the pilot program.

Those commands include the 120th precinct on Staten Island, which patrols the neighborhood where Garner died on July 17 after he was placed in a chokehold by officers trying to arrest him in the sale of untaxed cigarettes.

Garner’s death, which led to a citywide backlash and fiery criticism of the department’s tactics, was later ruled a homicide. Two police officers remain under an internal investigation, and the Richmond County district attorney has convened a grand jury to weigh criminal charges in the matter.

In the aftermath of Garner’s death, Bratton sent a contingent of city officers to Los Angeles for additional training.

The Los Angeles Police Department launched a similar body camera pilot program earlier this year, with 30 officers who patrol the city’s downtown area. The department expects to buy 600 of the devices for more widespread use.

Cmdr. Andy Smith, chief spokesman for the LAPD, said NYPD officials reviewed both camera models currently being field tested by LAPD officers during their meetings in Los Angeles.

Patrick Lynch, president of New York City’s largest police union, seemed to cautiously embrace the program in a statement issued late Thursday.

“A body camera pilot program is part of our challenge to Judge (Shira) Scheindlin’s decision on stop, question, and frisk,” he said. “Police officers have nothing to hide, but there are many unanswered questions as to how this will work practically. We await the answers.”

A series of recent questionable deaths after clashes between police officers and suspects have raised the national discussion on police accountability measures. Police in Ferguson, Missouri, began wearing body cameras in recent days, a little over a month after the shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed young black man, sparked weeks of unrest in the St. Louis suburb.

Earlier Thursday, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced a federal civil rights investigation into the Ferguson Police Department’s practices.

AFP Photo/John Moore

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