Brown arrest points to MPD problem

It shouldn’t require getting caught red-handed for someone to apologize and do the right thing. It shouldn’t take the involvement of a celebrity to get people to sit up and take notice when something goes wrong.

But if body cameras and a prominent athlete are what it takes to enact real change within the Milwaukee Police Department, so be it.

Sterling Brown’s case is about as cut and dried as they come in regards to police mistreatment of black men. Brown was not aggressive or armed, the cause of the police stop was a minor parking infraction, and the police response was grossly overblown.

The Milwaukee Bucks basketball player was confronted by an officer outside of a Walgreens in the early morning hours of Jan. 26 for illegally parking across two handicap spots. As Brown himself admits, the infraction deserved a ticket and fine, but nothing more. Instead of handling the situation with a conversation, body camera footage show that the officer was almost immediately aggressive. Brown himself was calm and polite.

Much of what’s seen in the footage contradicts the police report filed by officers after the incident. Especially egregious is the use of a taser on Brown, who was already on the ground with his hands behind his back when officers fired the weapon at him.

Understandably, Brown is just happy to be alive, instead of another addition to the alarming statistics for unarmed African Americans killed by police.

Meanwhile, the officers responsible for the attack were essentially punished with a slap on the wrist: three officers received unpaid suspensions, and those officers and five others are to receive “policy review instruction and remedial training in professional communications.”

I’m sure there will still be people who doggedly cling to defending officers no matter what: “If you just obey orders, you don’t have anything to worry about” (except Brown did just that, and was still thrown to the ground and tased), or “If you didn’t do anything wrong, you’ll be fine” (except that Brown’s parking violation hardly merited the treatment he received).

Sadly, I’ve realized there’s no convincing folks who’ve already made up their minds about stories like this. What we do have to work with is the growing body of evidence of the massive disparities in how police treat people of color in this country, and how often they’re let almost entirely off the hook for it. That’s largely thanks to the increased availability of video footage.

Body cameras are imperfect and controversial, though. There’s a real fear, and some evidence, that community policing is made more difficult when officers wear cameras, because people who would normally open up and chat with them are reluctant to be filmed. Some states have strict rules about where and how you can film someone without their permission. Police retain ownership of the video and may withhold all or some of the footage. Very real privacy concerns exist, and early studies have shown no real difference in use-of-force incidents for officers with and without body cams.

It shouldn’t take getting caught out on video to force people to do the right thing, especially the folks who are supposed to be specifically trained for it.

There’s a desperate need for a balancing of the scales of justice, and to create institutions that don’t blindly protect their own, even when their own have so clearly strayed from the mission.

It should tell us something that, even in a high profile case like Brown’s, the only real result so far has been greater public attention that forced an apology. Real accountability has yet to come, and people are dying as a result.