Chicago's Mayor Promises New Era Of Transparency After Shooting Video Forced Out Of City's Hands By Court

from the [airquote]-REFORM-[/airquote] dept

A Chicago police officer shot Laquan McDonald as he walked away from him, carrying a knife. Officer Jason Van Dyke emptied his service weapon in McDonald's direction less than 30 seconds after his vehicle arrived on scene. McDonald was hit 16 times, with a majority of those coming after he was already laying on the ground.

The dashcam video -- buried by the city for 13 months as it fought Uber-driving citizen journalist Brandon Smith's FOIA lawsuit -- directly contradicted reports written by multiple officers.

The report quotes Van Dyke saying: “(Laquan), raised knife across chest over shoulder, pointed knife at (me)…(I) believed (Laquan) was trying to kill (me).”

Van Dyke’s partner and driver, Officer Joe Walsh, raced around the car, pointed his weapon but didn’t shoot. He told an investigator he: “believed (Laquan) was attacking Van Dyke with knife attempting to kill (him).”

In the video released two weeks ago, Van Dyke and Walsh are seen driving up, as McDonald walks down the centerline of Pulaski Road, the officers getting out of their SUV and Van Dyke almost immediately opening fire on McDonald as he angled away from them.

Officer Dora Fontaine said:”(Laquan) raised (his) right arm toward (Van Dyke) as if attacking (him).”

The dashcam video was buried so the official narrative could take hold: a threatened officer killed a man in self-defense. To aid in this, a nearby Burger King was raided by officers to confiscate footage caught by its CCTV cameras.


This footage was eventually released as well, but every recording from every Burger King camera included an 80-minute gap covering the time the shooting took place.

The released dashcam video flipped the narrative. It was no longer Officer Van Dyke defending himself from a dangerous suspect. It was Officer Van Dyke dumping 16 bullets into a person walking away from him. Van Dyke was charged with murder shortly before the video was released. Had the court not ordered the release of the video, it's very likely Van Dyke would still be employed by the Chicago PD and not facing any criminal charges.

The mayor's office immediately went into damage control mode, immediately throwing Police Superintendent Gerry McCarthy under the nearest bus. Notably, Mayor Rahm Emanuel claimed McCarthy was a "distraction," rather than the failed "leader" of a police force that ran its own "black site" and has been synonymous with abuse and corruption for years.

Critics also noted Emanuel had fought the release of this video for months, dating back to his re-election run where he claimed its release would "taint" a federal investigation.

Rahm Emanuel wants to have it both ways: defend his city's frequently horrendous police force and be the bold reformer who will finally clean up the cesspool it's become under his (and his predecessors') watch. Consequently, he's failing at both.

The police already see Emanuel as a fair-weather tool of the media and general public -- much like most politicians. The public's view of Emanuel is nearly identical, even if it's more concerned about the city's cops, rather than for them.

His apparent complicity in the recording's cover-up make his new claims of unprecedented transparency very suspect. So do his actions.

Brandon Smith, who forced the video out of the city's hands, wasn't notified by the city that the video was being released. He ended up locked out of the press conference announcing the release because he had no press credentials. Officials issuing statements on the release never mentioned his name.

This doesn't sync up with the mayor's public statements:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel proclaimed the arrival of a fresh new era of sincerity and openness concerning policing in Chicago. "I know that personally, I have a lot of work to do to win back the public’s trust, and that words are not enough," the mayor told the City Council.

Referring to the video of the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald by Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke, Emanuel said: "Every day that we held onto the video contributed to the public’s distrust. And that needs to change."

And he wasn't content to wait for change, he made clear: "It starts today. It starts now."

"Now" is a meaningless word in Mayor Emanuel's mouth, as Steve Bogira of the Chicago Reader points out.

The mayor fought for months to suppress the video showing the slaying of the 17-year-old McDonald. And now he's continuing to fight to suppress videos of the fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Cedrick Chatman almost three years ago.

The video Bogira is seeking involves Officer Kevin Fry, who has a history of shooting unarmed citizens and being named in civil rights lawsuits. Chatman was carrying an iPhone box. In 2007, he shot an unarmed 17-year-old because he believed he was reaching for a gun. It turned out to be the teenager's belt buckle. In that case, the teen who was shot received a $99,000 settlement.

Emanuel's new transparency apparently hasn't filtered down to the PD. Bogira notes its FOIA denial tactics remain largely unchanged.

The police department is on even shakier ground in withholding the Chatman videos. There is no ongoing criminal investigation: the state's attorney's office in May 2013 declined to prosecute Fry, citing "insufficient evidence of criminal intent." Nor is there a pending disciplinary investigation: in June, IPRA closed its investigation of Fry, concluding that his shooting of Chatman was justified.

Bogira may be expecting a bit too much from a PD likely besieged by FOIA requests, but he's not wrong to call out the mayor for talking big about reform while doing nothing to ensure his works are followed by meaningful actions. The new transparency will likely last only as long as it has to -- until the furor dies down, the DOJ packs up and heads back to Washington, and everyone can go back to pretending gunning down citizens is just the natural side effect of everyday police work.

Filed Under: chicago, foia, gerry mccarthy, jason van dyke, laquan mcdonald, police cameras, rahm emanuel, transparency

Police Cameras Are Valuable... But Not If They Can Alter The Videos

from the trust-goes-out-the-window dept

We've talked plenty about the value of body cameras and dashcams for police -- in acting as a deterrent to bad behavior by police while supposedly acting as public servants. Of course, that only works if people trust the video not to be edited and doctored. This week there are all sorts of questions being raised about the arrest and hanging death of activist Sandra Bland in Texas. There are plenty of questions about why she was even arrested in the first place, and then plenty more about why she died (the police called it a suicide, which many who knew Bland find highly questionable).

In response to some of these concerns, the police released a 52 minute version of the dashcam video of her arrest -- though for some reason, the YouTube version has since been taken down. Perhaps it's because people watching the whole thing noticed a bunch of really sketchy problems with it that suggested the video had been edited, while the audio remained in tact. Ben Norton first posted the details of these, highlighting a bunch of weird artifacts like disappearing cars that magically reappear seconds later: Or the tow truck driver who gets out of his truck, walks behind the car and out of frame... and then suddenly gets out of the truck again: You can skip your "glitch in the Matrix" jokes. They've already been made. Plus, this is about someone who died.

The Texas Dept. of Public Safety said it would look into the video problems, and officials have denied any edits and have said that they will re-upload the video (which likely explains why the original has now gone missing). It also seems worth noting that the timing of the edits doesn't make it look like anything important was edited out (it all happens after the arrest itself).

It's possible that there was just some sort of weird glitch with this footage, but it's a reminder that anything that calls into question the credibility and accuracy of these kinds of videos will only undermine the purpose of these videos. We've heard too many stories about how some of these cameras can be "turned off" or that police would have access to the coverage before it's released to the public. If officials want these systems to actually work, they have to be trustworthy on their own. While this is likely just going to turn out to be some sort of technical problem that will be fixed, with nothing nefarious at all, it still acts as a strong reminder for the need to make sure that this kind of footage is stored and released in a way that doesn't raise such questions.

Filed Under: accountability, dashcams, edits, police, police cameras, sandra bland, texas

State Legislators Pushing Bills To Shield Police Officers From Their Own Body Camera Recordings

from the cameras-could-make-things-better-but-let's-just-keep-everything-the-same dept

Police accountability remains a major concern. Lawsuits alleging improper police conduct are filed seemingly nonstop. The Department of Justice continues to investigate police department after police department for a variety of civil rights violations. More and more police departments are equipping body cameras on their officers in hopes of trimming down the number of complaints and lawsuits filed against them.

Meanwhile, the public has taken police accountability into its own hands, thanks to the steady march of technology -- which has put a portable phone in almost every person's hands, and put a camera inside most of those phones.

So, we have two entities viewing accountability from seemingly opposite directions. Over the years, many officers have made it clear through their actions that being filmed isn't something they're comfortable with. This has resulted in additional misconduct and abuse of existing laws to shut down recordings. But what are these officers going to do when a city council -- or worse, a Memorandum of Understanding with the Justice Department -- directs them to start generating their own recordings?

One answer has already been presented by the Denver Police Department. They simply won't activate the cameras.

During a six-month trial run for body cameras in the Denver Police Department, only about one out of every four use-of-force incidents involving officers was recorded.

Cases where officers punched people, used pepper spray or Tasers, or struck people with batons were not recorded because officers failed to turn on cameras, technical malfunctions occurred or because the cameras were not distributed to enough people, according to a report released Tuesday by Denver's independent monitor Nick Mitchell.

This is a case-by-case "solution," self-applied as needed by certain officers. For other departments, it appears the imposition of recording devices will be greeted by legislation. Legislators cite "privacy concerns" but their bills do little more than hand law enforcement agencies full control over body camera recordings.

Lawmakers in at least 15 states have introduced bills to exempt video recordings of police encounters with citizens from state public records laws, or to limit what can be made public.

Their stated motive: preserving the privacy of people being videotaped, and saving considerable time and money that would need to be spent on public information requests as the technology quickly becomes widely used.

A small amount of redaction (face-blurring, etc.) would address the privacy concerns. After all, reality TV pioneer COPS has run for years with minimal privacy complaints and that's all it's ever used. As for the latter concern -- expenses related to open records requests -- there are ways to address this that won't cede complete control to law enforcement agencies. Seattle's Police Department worked with a local activist to find a solution that would provide footage, protect privacy and stay ahead of voluminous public records requests. Unfortunately, the result of these efforts has produced nothing more than extremely blurry footage in which everything is "redacted" by default.

Justifications offered by legislators try desperately to skew law enforcement's total control of body camera footage as some sort of win for the general public.

"Public safety trumps transparency," said Kansas state Sen. Greg Smith, a Republican. "It's not trying to hide something. It's making sure we're not releasing information that's going to get other people hurt."

The problem is that if it's the public being abused in these videos, there are very few options available to obtain recordings of misconduct.

The Kansas Senate voted 40-0 last month to exempt the recordings from the state's open records act. Police would only have to release them to people who are the subject of the recordings and their representatives, and could charge them a viewing fee. Kansas police also would be able to release videos at their own discretion.

The "fix" for possibly overbroad public records requests includes a) making acquiring a recording unaffordable, even for the person on the receiving end of alleged abuse and b) allowing the Kansas police to push out a steady stream of exculpatory video. The latter of the two is perfectly acceptable, but only if it's balanced by the public's ability to obtain less-than-flattering video of interactions with police officers. Nothing about this bill makes the public any "safer," no matter what Sen. Greg Smith says.

The potential for abuse of laws like these is so obvious even the cops can see it.

"I think it's a fair concern and a fair criticism that people might cherry pick and release only the ones that show them in a favorable light," said former Charlotte, North Carolina, police chief Darrel Stephens, executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association.

Arizona's legislation goes even further than its Midwestern counterpart.

The bill declares that body camera recordings are not public records, and as such can be released only if the public interest "outweighs the interests of privacy or confidentiality or the best interests of the state."

Not even the subject of the footage can demand a copy of the recording without somehow talking a judge into issuing an order for its release. Washington's proposed legislation similarly exempts all body camera video from public examination and routes footage requests through the courts. In both cases, bill sponsors claim publicly-released video could be used for "criminal purposes," but have yet to explain how a properly-redacted video would become a tool for "extortion" by "unscrupulous website owners."

The attendant irony hypocrisy, of course, is that law enforcement agencies and local governments have declared arrest mugshots to be public records and have allowed "unscrupulous website owners" to post the shots and demand payment for their removal. But mugshots only involve members of the public, making them of lesser concern than footage that will also contain police officers. This sort of legislation is nothing more than the codification of a double standard, if that's the motivation behind it.

On the other hand, some states are at least moving to ensure the general public can continue their unpaid police accountability efforts.

The Colorado bill, which you can read here, states that if a cop seizes a camera from a citizen without permission or a warrant or deliberately interferes with a citizen’s right to record by intimidation or destruction of the camera, the citizen is entitled to $15,000 in civil fees in addition to attorney fees.

This bill will help ensure at least one recording of an officer-involved incident remains intact, seeing as Denver police officers aren't all that into capturing their end of these interactions.

Another bill in Texas which has not gotten nearly as much publicity comes from democratic representative Eric Johnson, which seeks to protect citizens from bullying officers as well as criminalize cops who confiscate cameras, only to destroy footage.

This pushes back against Texas Congressman Jason Villalba's recently-introduced bill, which hopes to add a 25-foot no-recording "halo" around police officers at all times -- stretching to 100 feet if the camera operator happens to be armed. Villalba has openly stated that "officer safety" is a greater concern than violated First Amendment rights, which would actually be criminalized if his bill passes.

California has also introduced a bill involving citizen recordings -- one that will make an incredibly obvious statement into law… presumably because that's the only way the state will get law enforcement to respect it.

In California, Senate Bill 411 would amend the state's penal code to say that simply filming or taking a photograph of an officer performing his duty in a public place does not automatically amount to interference.

"Filming isn't interference" would seem to be something that shouldn't need to be inserted as an amendment to criminal statutes. As would the following, which is perhaps even more infuriatingly obvious than the sentence above:

Supporters say it protects the First Amendment and clarifies that filming alone does not give police officers probable cause to search or confiscate an individual's property.

Undoubtedly, there will be law enforcement pushback against the proposed legislation, which should be referenced in the future as the "We Shouldn't Even Need to Be Telling You This" Act, with "SMDH" as the short title.

Both sets of cameras will help increase law enforcement accountability, but one set is receiving the majority of proposed legislative protections. Shielding body camera recordings from the public eye limits their effectiveness as misconduct deterrents -- the very reason they've been instituted.

Filed Under: police cameras, transparency