Its not just the racism that disturbs me. The assholes say he got what he deserved are completely bereft of any empathy whatsoever. It disturbs me that people can watch a man's life end on video and not be moved at all.

Screens often let people become the shits they really are inside, even if they pretend they are trolling. It doesn't sound good for Officer Pophappy based on this article, what with standing around near a dead body you put in cuffs and it being reported like you heroically tried to save his life, but I'll wait for the official verdict before I form an opinion.

Got it wrong. It was the victim who was a Coastie, not the cop.

I can't possibly see a valid reason why it would be considered ok to outlaw filming public servants in a public place. What's the rational there?

The rationale is "how can we have a police state when everyone has a camera?" I agree with ROUS wholeheartedly. And 5 for evil.

Yeah, it's like they were talking about bodycams, but I haven't really seen it in action yet. It's like, "oh yeah.. we'll get around to that.. figure out the budget.. hold on I think it's UPS at the door, I gotta go sign for this police tank, call you back?" And for your other statement, how can filming a crime be illegal? Obviously the person filming something like this isn't expecting any violence, or if they are thinking something might go down, they're certainly not expecting an outcome like this. Filming something as a witness simply gets rid of the doubt that verbal testimony can likely result. And states want to say that these are illegal?!?

What about Ramsey Orta? He's the guy who filmed the Eric Garner video, he got arrested for weapons charges, but a lot of people think he was targeted for shooting the video.

"Filming something as a witness simply gets rid of the doubt that verbal testimony can likely result. And states want to say that these are illegal?!?"

You kinda answered your own question there. If trigger-happy cops appreciate anything, it's a lack of evidence against their own wrongdoing, and the paid vacations that result. PDs and the legislators that love them will fight body cameras tooth and nail (or at least until they figure out how to game the new measures before they even roll out), because transparency is death.

While I'm sympathetic to the body-cams argument, I'm not sure the Panopticon is the solution we're looking for. Are we really willing to be surveilled even more than we already are, for 'our protection'?

I get that this argument sounds a little right-wing conspiracy-esque, but I think the question bears asking. Maybe the trade off is worth it, but we need to really interrogate the issue, its risks, its rewards, and whether there is a better to reduce police violence.

In some ways, the call for body cams is just a band-aid fix. The problem is the attitude and culture of our police forces. Employing body cameras isn't trying to change to that attitude and culture, but rather create a cost-benefit situation where the costs outweigh the benefit.

Ideally, wouldn't it be better to change the attitudes and culture of police without having to allow ourselves to be surveilled even more? One has to figure if body cams were ubiquitous at some point that footage will start being scanned with facial recognition software and other such technologies. Why even go down that road?

How would the costs outweigh the benefits? Think about the reduction in court costs when you can see exactly what happened, and in 3 different angles? This is why I want to get a dashcam and an internal cam for my car, just in case I happen to be pulled over by some of the bullyboys of the local state troopers.

SpikeJonez, you've missed read my point on cost benefit. I said:

"Employing body cameras isn't trying to change to that attitude and culture, but rather create a cost-benefit situation where the costs outweigh the benefit."

Here employing body cameras is creating a cost-benefit scenario for the police officers whereby they have to weigh their desire (benefit) to act how they do, using excessive force and asking question later with the cost of potentially being punished for the use of force after the fact.

In such a scenario, we are not alleviating the underlying cause of police excessive force, which I've couched in the cultural attitudes of police communities, rather we've attempted to mitigate the effects of the cultural attitudes (read: excessive force).

Why is this a problem? For one, we are treating symptoms of an underlying problem, not the problem itself. I submit this is faulty ipso facto. The risk is that cultural attitudes of police, which let's just say are attitudes of violence, may simply manifest in other ways. This leaves public policy in a game of whack-a-mole, constantly trying to catch up with the latest version of police violence.

For two, body cameras may not work in preventing police violence. For instance, there are plenty of videos online taken from Police Department/Jail security cameras where cops are beating the shit out of someone _despite_ being surveilled.

And for three, as a society, we are being asked to give up a form of privacy en masse to prevent or stop the actions of the few. According to the wiki article there were ~120,000 full-time police officers in US in 2008 that could arrest people. This is only 0.0004% of the population. But let us double that 120k figure to account for part-time cops. So we are talking about subjecting the population to government surveillance in public for the acts of 0.0008% of the population in the worst case. These numbers are not persuasive, particularly given points one and two.

Police overreach and excessive violence is a problem and the behavior of police is something that must be addressed in the US. As a society we should want and demand a better living and working relationship with the police. Nevertheless, it is not clear that body cameras will achieve this end nor achieve it in an sensible way.

Even the notion of being watched/recorded would be a deterrent in my mind. I've worked enough jobs with manual cash boxes or wooden cash drawers that don't require a sale to open. So.. print out a duplicate pair of tickets for the previous movie, at 10 dollars a piece, pocket the 20 bucks. Not that I did it, but I assume people did. But when's the last time you hear about a bank teller doing that? It's because they know that there's cameras that capture nearly every angle. I'm sure there's more sophisticated methods for theft, but I doubt if you'll ever see a teller just slip a couple of hundreds into his or her pocket the way you can at many other jobs. And I know it's just a show, but plenty of cop shows show the protagonist walking right into the evidence room and taking a brick of coke and replacing it with baking soda, things like that, with nobody else around and no cameras.

Obviously, petty theft has nothing on potential homicide, and if I was a cop I'd feel kinda weird about having to take a leak and knowing that someone could see (and and potentially leak) my junk, but I'd also think twice about not just shooting someone, but think twice about what I did or said, including unnecessary police brutality, which probably occurs a lot more than we think.

I know people who bitch about their call center jobs because they go to work, have to turn in their cellphones so they can't play games or text all day, and their calls are being monitored. And that's for some shitty 10/hr job. Cops A.) make a lot more $ than that, and B.) have, I don't know, a pass to use lethal force. If Mr. call-center can't have his privacy, then why should shooty McGee?

I had the same feeling while watching it. It looked like a badly-acted student film or something.

And yet, that was a video of somebody dying. I can't quite reconcile my impressions with the reality.

A lot of people I've talked to about this don't even care about what happened before the video.

They think the guy deserved to be shot in the back just for running away from a cop.

there is a misconception that resisting arrest by running away means you can get popped at will. I used to think this was the case before I came to the USA.

I blame cop shows.