Over the past decade, taxpayers have invested millions of dollars to equip police officers nationwide with body-worn cameras, promising a new era of transparency and accountability. A ProPublica article looks into the reality of this new era – where even when civilians are harmed by police, the public rarely gains access to the recorded footage.
In a recent investigation into police body-worn cameras, ProPublica highlights how police departments have been able to selectively release footage to support their narrative, while often hiding images that might be embarrassing or worse.
“Law enforcement has the power of credibility on their side,” said Dawn Blagrove, “…Even though time and time again they are proved to be uncredible or unreliable, people still are disposed to believing whatever narrative law enforcement puts out.”
The ProPublica article cites Emancipate NC’s work in Raleigh, NC, to change the narrative after the Raleigh Police killed Daniel Turcios. The police released an edited video to make it look like he was intoxicated and threatening police with a knife. With deliberate interventions by Emancipate NC to reveal the truth, the public discovered that Mr. Turcios was actually a family man with a clean toxicology screen who was disoriented from a serious traffic accident. Police chased him down and shot him needlessly in front of his wife and children.
Continuing this work to make body camera footage transparent, last month Team Emancipate’s Elizabeth Simpson and her UNC Law School clinic students, Morgan Schriner and Jack Salt, filed a lawsuit in Wake County Superior Court on behalf of the Abboud Family, The Assembly, and The INDY Week. The lawsuit seeks general public release of body camera footage showing a wrongful police invasion into the Abboud family home. Due to sloppy police work and racial profiling, RPD had mistaken Mr. Abboud for a neighbor of Arab descent. So far, RPD has refused to release this footage to the public, however. Read the complaint here.