summitt wrote:
slowguy wrote:
It makes sense to hold the video of a killing until the details are in, and even afterward, I'm not sure I'd want it released. The worst moments of both the victims and probably the cops' lives on tape, maybe not something the entire world has some right to see.
Why do you feel this way? It seems like more transparency at this point might lower the tension within the community.
It's not the police department's job to lower tensions by caving in to the demands of an irrational mess of public perception. Their job right now is to conduct a thorough investigation, and to protect the rights of the deceased, his family, and the officers involved.
Calming the tensions of the community is the job of local leaders and politicians, who should be ashamed of themselves if they're not out on TV and in person urging people to calm down, protest non-violently, etc.
1. The video is potential evidence of a crime. It either shows the victim refusing to respond to police direction and holding a weapon, or it shows police shooting him in cold blood. It should be safeguarded as such.
2. The video presumably shows the violent death of one man, at the hands of others. That one man has family who I can't imagine want to see replays of their husband/dad being shot to death on TV and internet for the rest of their lives, and certainly not in the foreseeable future on a 24 hour loop. The officers also probably don't want to have to see, or have their families see, them shoot a man to death, over and over. Killing a man is one of the worst events in anyone's life, even if the killing was justified.
3. I have seen little evidence that seeing the truth (if it turns out that the police were justified) will have any calming effect on the people who are determined that the police are out to murder black men all over the country. The narrative will simply be shifted to where the weapon was pointed, or how he felt he needed the weapon to defend himself against the evil police, or some other such nonsense.
In the absence of any convincing reason to release the video, and in the spirit of the new law just passed in NC that requires a judge to rule on the release of police video, and in the spirit of being sensitive to the loss of the family and the rights of the officers, I don't see any compelling reason to release the video publicly.
I think it's a good idea to show the family, if they want to see it. I only hope that, if it exonerates the police, the family will step forward and say so.
Slowguy
(insert pithy phrase here...)