Well, well, well. WELL.
That whole “protests made cops feel bad so they all quit” narrative?
Looks like it was mostly myth.
Excited to read this paper by Ben Grunwald, who compiled a huge dataset on post-2020 police employment.
Agg decline was 1%… and bigger local declines not tied to protests.
if body cams actually worked, we'd probably have gotten at least a small wave of the most corrupt and abusive cops quitting now that they couldn't keep on getting away with it quite so easily
(body cams don't seem to work for their supposed purpose at all, though)
Yeah, I was skeptical about “wear body cams” as a proposal when the police who murdered Laquan McDonald in Chicago destroyed their dash cams to hide the evidence. The cop who pulled the trigger was convicted (amazingly) but the accomplices were acquitted.
Feel like an easy fix would be passing a law saying "no arrest can be made if the body cams aren't working during it" suddenly a lot of technical issues would resolve themselves.
Delaware a few years ago amended its statute about the use of witnesses’ voluntary statements to police as trial evidence to specifically instruct the court to consider the failure to record the statement when determining whether the statement was truly voluntary.
Reminds me of the cops who planted drugs, then “turned on”the body cams, but didn’t know “turn on” means “save the video its been recording starting from X minutes ago”
"If your body cam isn't working, then any actions you take are immediately rendered non-official. You don't get to arrest anyone, you don't get a PBA lawyer for the civil rights suit, you don't get to wear your uniform on the stand. Take your chances with the justice system you're a part of."
"Oh, but what if it breaks in the middle of--"
"Well, that's why we have trials. Present your side of the story to a jury and see what happens. Also, do your fuckin' maintenance. Treat it like your gun... except don't leave it in a school bathroom."
What a great idea. Public oversight, surveillance, and scrutiny, 24/7, or they cannot operate.
It would never be legislated because authoritarians resist regulating their fellows.