CAMERA CRUSADE
5,000 cops to wear them Public keeps watch on NYPD, too
CAMERAS CAUGHT a cop choking Eric Garner to death on Staten Island, an officer shooting Walter Scott in the back in South Carolina and police dragging Freddie Gray into a van in Baltimore.
Amateur filmmakers have been cataloguing police activity across the country, bringing light to events that likely would have stayed in the shadows and forcing departments — including the NYPD — to make changes.
“The more videos expose police officers, the more it empowers people within these communities to take it upon themselves to record,” said Jose LaSalle, who created a group called the Copwatch Patrol Unit in the South Bronx.
“That is one of the reasons why there are so many reforms on the table,” said LaSalle, 46. “These videos are making problems for them because they just keep popping up.”
But Police Commissioner Bill Bratton (right) has been critical of cell phone-sporting citizen-journalists and said sometimes they are “agitating the situations.”
“The cameras are everywhere, but when they start literally getting in your face, interrupting arrests, it starts to become problematic,” Bratton said.
The NYPD had no choice but to outfit cops with cameras after Manhattan Federal Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled in 2013 that its stop-and-frisk tactics violated the constitutional rights of minority-group members in the city.
The department outfitted 60 officers with body cameras on her orders in the program that began in December and is on the verge of buying 5,000 more, officials said.
It’s inevitable that all cops will eventually be armed with cameras the same way they are with guns and flashlights, said Eugene O’Donnell, a former city cop and a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
“You’re at a point now where many of these events are going to be on camera anyway,” said O’Donnell. “It’s hard to counter the argument that if people are doing nothing wrong they shouldn’t mind being on camera.”
LaSalle’s group has grown from two members to 50 since 2011. He filed a $500,000 lawsuit against the NYPD last year, claiming
cops roughed him up for exercising
his right to videotape.
Some cops in the 120th Precinct, where Garner, 43, was killed nearly a year ago, are already wearing the cameras. Garner could be heard in the video of his fatal clash with cops saying 11 times, “I can’t breathe.”
Since then, the words have been written on placards and shouted at anti-police brutality demonstrations — many of them decrying racism — across the country.
Garner was black and Daniel Pantaleo, the cop who administered the fatal chokehold, is white.
Scott, 50, was shot April 4 in South Carolina as he ran away from Officer Michael Slager.
Slager, who was with the North Charleston police department, claimed he feared for his life because Scott took his stun gun in a scuffle after a traffic stop.
Video of the incident showed Slager, who is white, shooting Scott, who was black, in the back and then placing something, apparently the stun gun, near his body. Slager was indicted for murder last month.
Freddie Gray, 25, died April 19 after suffering a fatal spinal injury while in police custody a week earlier. Six cops were charged with his death after video caught some of them dragging him to a police van.
Prosecutors say Gray was killed in the van while he was being transported and they cited the cops’ failure to put a seat belt on him as a critical factor.
The push for more cameras has also been intensified by cases that didn’t get caught on film, like those of Michael Brown, 18, in Ferguson, Mo., and Akai Gurley, 28, in Brooklyn.
Brown, who was black, was unarmed when Officer Darren Wilson, who is white, shot and killed him Aug. 9, 2014. Wilson claimed the hulking teen clocked him as they struggled for the officer’s gun in the police cruiser. He said he fired at Brown again when they moved away from the car and the teen charged at him.
Officer Peter Liang, who is Asian, accidentally fired his weapon as he and his partner entered an eighth-floor stairwell in Brooklyn’s Pink Houses in November while doing vertical patrols. Gurley, who was black, was one floor down when he was hit by a single bullet. Liang was charged with manslaughter and pleaded not guilty.
Some cops in the East New York development are now wearing cameras hanging from their necks as part of the pilot program. Pink Houses resident Mike Davis, 26, thinks that’s a good thing.
“With cameras, at least they can’t say that it’s just dark in the staircase anymore,” Davis said. “If that cop had a camera, you would have seen what actually happened. Now, no one prevents them from killing.”