Videos of police killing suspects are a thing

But we should recognize their limitations

Murderers don’t usually video themselves in the act.  Okay, it happens sometimes in Netflix series, usually when the cops are after a particularly nasty serial killer, and for some reason, they’re usually British.  But not in real life.  It’s just not prudent.  Murderers don’t want to A) be caught, and B) be convicted.  They also don’t commit murders out in the open where a passerby could capture them in the act.  Murder is usually a private thing.  Most murders are committed by a killer who knows his or her victim.  Many times, they’re related, either by marriage or by blood.  These murders may happen in living rooms or bedrooms or kitchens, away from prying eyes or cellphones.

But cops who shoot people often do it in public.  That’s why so many shootings by cops have been caught on tape recently.  There is Derek Chauvin, the police officer currently on trial for the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis last Spring.  The scene of Chauvin with his knee on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes was caught on multiple cameras, including police body cameras, and all of the videos are being used as evidence in the case against Chauvin.

Later in the summer, there was the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, which didn’t kill him, but left him paralyzed.  The police officer in that case, Rusten Sheskey, who shot Blake seven times in the back as Blake was getting into his car, was not charged in the shooting. Prosecutors claimed that it would be hard to disprove a claim by Shesky that he was trying to protect himself from Blake, who police claimed had a knife in his car.

Then there was the case of Garret Rolfe, the police officer in Atlanta, who shot Rayshard Brooks last summer in the process of trying to arrest him for driving under the influence.  That shooting, in the parking lot of a Wendy’s fast food restaurant, was caught on tape by a police car dashcam and nearby CCTV and is being used in evidence against Rolfe, who has been charged with murder in the case.  

That was just last summer.  There will be more cases of police shooting suspects or killing them using choke holds or other compressions of their airways, and many of them will be caught on tape by witnesses using cellphones or CCTV or police dashcams or bodycams.  We got a good look at the limitations of such video evidence in the case of the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha.  The officer who shot Blake wasn’t charged because while the video showed him shooting Blake seven times in the back, it didn’t show what Blake was doing.  Thus the police were able to claim Blake was either reaching for or holding a knife that the police officer thought was going to be used against him.

Something of the same thing is being attempted by the defense in the case against Derek Chauvin.  The defense is essentially making two claims:  A) that the use of force was justified because Floyd was a large man on drugs struggling against the arresting officers, and B) that the use of force wasn’t what killed him – it was the drugs.

While the video evidence is enormously compelling – it’s hard to argue with film showing all nine minutes that Chauvin had his knee on Floyd’s neck and appears to show Floyd stopping breathing – just as powerful has been the testimony of the witnesses, several of whom have broken down and cried as they testified.  Reporters present in the court have reported that the jury reacted just as strongly to the emotion shown by the human beings who witnessed the killing as they did to the videos showing the incident itself.  It appears that old fashioned testimony may be as important to the prosecution’s case as the video evidence.

It’s something that municipalities should learn from this trial.  There will be cases, like the shooting of Jacob Blake, when video evidence of police use of force or violence against suspects is inconclusive.  There will be police shootings or use of force when video evidence isn’t available because the cops turn off their dashcams and bodycams, or claim they malfunctioned.  And there will be cases when video evidence from witnesses to the incident is countered by police testimony because the cops get together and fix their stories and lie on the stand. 

We’ll probably see more limitations of video evidence when the insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol start to come to trial.  We should expect identifications of the suspects to be challenged, as well as challenges to the evidence of what they actually did at the Capitol.  There will probably be “chain of evidence” defense used against some of the videos, essentially claiming that the video tapes could have been altered somewhere along the way because they weren’t taken by law enforcement and had not been in the hands of law enforcement all the time since the attack on the Capitol happened.  

Ironies will abound.  The defense of the insurrectionists will be damned if you did, damned if you didn’t:  If video is used against them from official sources, such as Capitol CCTV, they’ll challenge it as taken without warrants by the “police state”.  If the video was taken by the insurrectionists themselves, it will be challenged as unreliable because they are unreliable.  It will be like the claims being made by Sidney Powell that anything she said about Dominion Voting Systems shouldn’t be believed because she is an obvious loon, so how could she slander them?  

That’s not even to mention defenses that might be made that videos presented in evidence have employed “deep fake” manipulation against police charged with using excessive force against suspects or even killing them. 

You can expect the cops to come up with as many defenses against video evidence as there are videos.  The one thing you shouldn’t expect, however, is for cops to stop doing what they’ve been doing, especially to people of color, just because there’s a chance somebody might catch them in the act with a cellphone.  The videos might be new, but the police behavior isn’t.

All you have to do is look at Derek Chauvin’s face in the videos shown in his trial.  He doesn’t care that people are standing there with their cellphones.  He’s convinced he’s doing the right thing because George Floyd is black, and because he’s having so much fun doing it.  His attitude, and the attitude of the other cops present, is we’re in charge, we’ve got the power, we’re the police, so fuck you. And so far, in the trial of Chauvin, they’re counting on at least one of the jurors to agree with them.