ProPublica editor-at-large Eric Umansky started investigating police oversight after an NYPD officer hit a teenager with a car in 2019. In the years since, he’s learned how police departments have undermined the promise of body-worn cameras.
I got my first real lesson in police accountability in 2019 on Halloween. My wife, Sara Pekow, and our daughter had watched an NYPD officer drive the wrong way up a Brooklyn street and hit a Black teenager. The police had been chasing him as a suspect in the theft of a cellphone. When the boy rolled off the car and ran away, the officers turned their attention to other nearby Black boys who seemed to be simply trick-or-treating. The police lined them against the wall of our neighborhood movie theater, cuffed them and took them away.
At the time, I was editing coverage of the Trump administration, not policing. But I was troubled and, frankly, curious. I ended up waiting outside the police precinct with the boys’ families. The boys were released hours later, with no explanation, no paperwork and no apology.
The next day I reached out to the NYPD’s press office and asked about what happened. Eventually, a spokesperson told me that nothing inappropriate had occurred. A police car hadn’t hit the kid, he said. The kid had run over the hood of the car.
I couldn’t get it out of my head. Not just what had happened, but the NYPD’s brazen denial of what my family and others had witnessed. Surely, I thought, that wouldn’t be the end of it.
I was wrong.
The Seattle Police Department posts bodycam footage after every time they shoot a person. The footage is carefully edited to make it look like the killing was justified. If they can’t do that, they “lose” the footage.
I promise you that if police were forced to release all footage, they would either never turn on body cams or turn on body cams all the time and release footage, unlabelled, with thousands of hours of other footage of cops just sitting in their cars talking about nothing.
Police are absolute experts at malicious compliance.
Which is why police should be abolished and replaced. We need SWAT and cops with guns sometimes, but we don’t need those people to be the primary mechanism and the primary decision makers.
What we consider police should be a small subsection of the public safety force that a modern society needs. Give us traffic monitors, mental health counselors, etc.