Excellent points, I definitely need to read the whole piece. I think readers may be interested in this overview of Andre Gorz's idea of "non-reformist reforms". In which we have to think critically about how power dynamics will change with the reforms we are advocating for and if they are moving us in a system-reducing direction or if they are entrenching the same system we wish to remove. https://jacobin.com/2021/07/andre-gorz-non-reformist-reforms-revolution-political-theory
I read your law review article, in it’s entirety, and I have no idea how it was ever approved for publication. It is full of subjectivity, activist propaganda, and outright ignorance to the copious amount of objective evidence that exists completely debunking the false narrative of systemically racist policing, especially with regards to police involved shootings of minorities. The purpose of law review articles is for the author to take a position on unsettled legal concepts, or to thoroughly analyze complex laws. Regardless of which kind of law review article an author drafts, their position and/or analysis must be supported by objective facts and evidence, with the source of this objective support properly cited. There are completely false, wholly subjective affirmations of fact you use to support your position and that is entirely unacceptable from a professional standpoint. For example, you claim throughout your article that police departments actively coordinated with the manufacturers of body worn cameras to exploit mass support for criminal justice reforms. You claim their true intent for their support for reform was nefarious in nature. According to you, the corporations wanted the increase in law enforcement funding for the purchase of body cameras so they could enrich themselves, insinuating they didn’t care about actual “reform.” You might be right about this, but even if you are, the intent of the corporations is utterly irrelevant. Corporate executives owe a fiduciary duty to maximize profits and dividend payouts for shareholders, and capitalizing on mass public support for social reform has long been something corporations everywhere have used to maximize corporate revenue on behalf of shareholders. If this is improper and unethical then you might as well build a prison wall around the entire country because corporations of all shapes, sizes, industries, and partisan affiliations have been doing this ever since we implemented a strict capitalist free market economy.
The biggest issue I have with this is your insinuation that police exploited public support for reform in order to acquire technology that would make it easier and more efficient for them to obtain guilty pleas/verdicts against minority citizens for non-violent, low level crimes. There is absolutely ZERO support for your supposition here and it is beyond reckless for you to make such baseless claims in a supposed law review article. The mere fact that police departments sought funding to purchase body cameras before George Floyd’s death doesn’t support your false premise one bit. I know for a definitive fact that the prevailing reason why police & local officials supported the purchasing and use of body cameras long before the mass Post-Floyd movement for criminal justice reform was to protect officers from false claims of misconduct. The false narrative that a systemically racist police force is going around killing black and brown citizens en masse had already gained traction in the public conscious by then, and there were numerous instances where this false narrative resulted in ruined careers of ethical police officers and cost municipalities tens of millions of dollars in settlements in opportunist civil actions filed against police. Absent unequivocal, objective evidence disproving claims of police misconduct and use of excessive force, huckster lawyers and criminals would continue to enrich themselves at the expense of hardworking taxpayers unimpeded. The time, money and other public resources allocated to defending these civil suits, where the burden of proof is only 50% +1, resulted in most of these civil suits being settled with non-admission agreements that would pay the plaintiffs pennies on the dollar compared to their initial demand for damages. Ambulance chasers and pretend civil rights attorneys jumped on this legal trend knowing that absent unequivocal evidence disproving claims of excessive force/misconduct, they would be in line for a guaranteed payday through a settlement. Liability was never the goal of these grifter attorneys, and they used the media to pressure municipalities into prompt settlements by invoking race and racism from the very start. This was a very costly problem for local municipal leaders and they got behind law enforcement calls for body cameras under the premise that the footage from these cameras would provide them with the objective proof needed to successfully defend against these baseless, opportunistic, exploitive lawsuits.
There was also the added benefit of the footage from these cameras being used to successfully prosecute criminals. It wasn’t just black and brown criminals; it was all criminals. That includes officers who break the law. I know of a successful prosecution of a police officer who used to target likely illegal immigrant drivers in pre-textual traffic stops and would steal their money and other valuables while conducting an inherently illegal search of their vehicles. The prosecution was the result of the local laws surrounding police body cameras and the state AG’s authority to audit footage either randomly or in response to an alleged claim of misconduct. The officer had no recourse to prevent the footage from being turned over and the officer was recently sentenced to 12 years in prison for his brazen misconduct. The bottom line is that while the public may support less militarized, heavy handed policing, there is much greater support for safe and secure communities. That can only be achieved by arresting, prosecuting, and if warranted, incarcerating criminals pursuant to the penal laws on the books of each state. There is no room for subjectivity or restorative practices in criminal prosecutions. Arbitrary and subjectively selective enforcement of criminal statutes erode the public’s faith in the rule of law and embolden criminals to commit further crimes that victimize innocent citizens. These innocent victims are the people deserving of mass public support and empathy, not the criminals who knowingly or intentionally commit crimes. The priorities of supposedly well-meaning people such as yourself are completely fucking warped and I fear you’re beyond the point of honest discussions on this topic. It’s a shame because there are areas of policing and prosecutions that are in dire need of reform, but by constantly expressing sorrow for the plight of criminals and perversely injecting race into this important discussion, you turn off more than half the country from the start.
I’ve said it a million times and I’ll say it again: putting an end to the mass incarceration and disproportionate arrests of black and brown citizens can only be realized by identifying and addressing the cultural root causes that lead to disproportionately high criminality in predominant black and brown communities. I’m sure you’re going to say that such a statement is racist, but I couldn’t give a shit. You love to say that evidence of systemically racist policing is supported by the fact that black and brown citizens are 2.5x more likely to be injured or killed during interactions with police than are white citizens. Okay. Does that explain why police officers are 17x more likely to be shot when interacting with black and brown citizens than they are when interacting with white ones? No, it doesn’t. It proves that this is a two way street and that reforms are necessary on both sides in order for there to be substantive improvement. You want transformative reforms to the culture of policing in America, but unless this is met with matching cultural reforms in minority communities nothing substantive will transpire. Despite these one sided reforms, you’ll continue to see the same statistical data you saw before the one sided reforms were implemented, just as you are seeing now. The true intentions of these reformists is shown by what they do next. The well intentioned ones will start to realize there is a matching responsibility for reform that is needed and start devoting their focus, effort and resources to promoting change in minority communities. Grifters, such as yourself, will revise history and say that the one-sided reforms implemented were never going to be enough and that more are needed. There is greater accountability for police officers who commit crimes and abuse their authority today than ever before, but there is lesser accountability for citizens who commit crimes if they are black or brown. They are told to believe they are victims and their crimes are mere manifestations of their victimization. So, not only have you promoted continued one-sided reforms, you’ve also helped perpetuate a culture that promotes the lack of accountability on the other side through your divisive, elitist and arrogant rhetoric. People like you are the problem and every chance you get to perpetuate your complete nonsense and bullshit is nothing short of pure racial exploitation. If you truly cared about these things, and knew what you were even talking about in the first place, you’d do more than write books and give speeches. You’d be in the trenches, working as mentor to at risk you in minority communities, such as I do. You wouldn’t exploit your law degree to perpetuate and amplify partisan propaganda and advance the causes of special interests as you do. You would have spent some time working as a front line public defender in a minority jurisdiction and putting all the knowledge and tools you obtained in law school to use trying to help facilitate life saving changes in the lives of your clients, as I did for a year after finishing law school. So, please, go ahead and call me a racist so I can wear it as a badge of honor as I do each time a fucking grifter like you has called me one.
Just watched your interview with Brianha Joy Gray. I don't like surveillance at all, having grown up in a police state (an American client state). But I do police transcription and have done for quite a while now in a "liberal" city. This city has NEST and cameras all over. The police also are required by their "policies, procedures, bulletins" to wear a body-worn camera whenever they respond to a call that might result in in-person interaction with a member of the public. They have a 30-second buffer during which there is no sound so they are supposed to turn them on as (or before) they leave their vehicle. They rarely do this and in an incident that is moving quickly they often forget to turn them on at all. Also sometimes the cameras malfunction. Although you cannot see what the cop wearing the BWC is doing, you can hear him or her the most clearly and other cops at the incident are also wearing the BWC and those BWCs are filming the original cop. In fact, BWCs are always used in investigations of police-involved-shootings. And those usually involve either a homeless or mentally ill person brandishing a knife--sometimes a small pocket knife--or else carjacking a vehicle so they will have somewhere dry and somewhat private to spend the night. They are useful in investigations of police misbehavior when the citizen is complaining of attitude, and the use of profanity. The transcript itself will not indicate the attitude, often, but films sure do. Whether or not they are disciplined, probably not. If they use profanity, probably. They're not supposed to. Sometimes cops use the Use of Force policy as an excuse to use profanity. They call it verbal emphasis. Which leads me to my second point and that is training. The thing that most contributes to police violence is their TRAINING. For example, they are not trained to shoot at a hand that is holding a weapon. They are trained to shoot at the gut or the heart. The gut--well, you're probably going to bleed out. Same thing with the heart. For something like not dropping a small knife when told to. And also too many cops show up at an incident which should not result in violence of any sort. One case I worked on involved a man hiding in the trunk of a hatchback. He was shot with 97 bullets from a large number of responding units. Of course he did not survive. I don't even remember what the case was about. Maybe low-level theft?
And there's another point which is the fact that the law is written to protect property, not people. That is the core problem. I recently was pulled over by a young cop whose charge was fictitious and I knew it. He had no BWC. His squad car had no camera either. And there was a vehicle between me and him so he could not have seen what he said he witnessed. It was a case of he said/she said with physics on my side. I have worked on cases where the cops said the suspect was resisting and because there were multiple BWCs to check, it was clear he was handcuffed and on the ground and complying. He was making a lot of noise because he was mentally ill and he wanted the bystanders to pressure the cops, which they did. So cameras are not always in the cops' favor. And furthermore a lot of cops resist turning them on. In fact, when citizens complain about a specific cop, they will usually check that first (or their attorney will) and NOT having turned on the BWC is one thing cops are very often disciplined on. BWCs are easily countered with cellphone videos. In fact, the cellphone video has changed things a great deal, down to real time (or close to real time) witnessing of an on-going genocide. That is the only reason I carry a cellphone--to videotape police malfeasance--should I witness it. The police view it as a form of self-defense as well as surveilling the public. But the public is heavily surveilled without BWCs. And furthermore the first thing they take is the perp's cellphone which, if they are dumb enough to carry one, gives ample proof they were present at the scene of the crime. All the adjacent properties' security cams will back that up. As well as cold shows where bystanders identify the perp. I think you should talk to people who actually witness how they are used, including cops who don't like them. Not all cops are assholes, by the way. Some of them are pretty decent people, though most of those usually become detectives because dealing with the public as a patrol officer is really, really stressful. Cops are more scared of the public than the public is of them. FYI, I'm politically left, hate surveillance, don't like authoritarian control mechanisms, and in my youth was one of those people who referred to cops as "pigs". Those were the days! I appreciate what you are doing but BWCs do often help the citizen protect his or her own rights. The rich are most invested in property rights. That's a given. And that's a problem with our legal system. And the core problem there is capitalism. The poor don't care that much about property rights (except their personal items the cops take during the booking process) because their property is negligible.
Thank you so much for educating us, i would not know the details you provided your work is so important to expose this disgusting abuse on the populace
Beautifully argued article, as always. Thank you for what you are doing to educate the readers of your Substack and the public.
Excellent points, I definitely need to read the whole piece. I think readers may be interested in this overview of Andre Gorz's idea of "non-reformist reforms". In which we have to think critically about how power dynamics will change with the reforms we are advocating for and if they are moving us in a system-reducing direction or if they are entrenching the same system we wish to remove. https://jacobin.com/2021/07/andre-gorz-non-reformist-reforms-revolution-political-theory
I read your law review article, in it’s entirety, and I have no idea how it was ever approved for publication. It is full of subjectivity, activist propaganda, and outright ignorance to the copious amount of objective evidence that exists completely debunking the false narrative of systemically racist policing, especially with regards to police involved shootings of minorities. The purpose of law review articles is for the author to take a position on unsettled legal concepts, or to thoroughly analyze complex laws. Regardless of which kind of law review article an author drafts, their position and/or analysis must be supported by objective facts and evidence, with the source of this objective support properly cited. There are completely false, wholly subjective affirmations of fact you use to support your position and that is entirely unacceptable from a professional standpoint. For example, you claim throughout your article that police departments actively coordinated with the manufacturers of body worn cameras to exploit mass support for criminal justice reforms. You claim their true intent for their support for reform was nefarious in nature. According to you, the corporations wanted the increase in law enforcement funding for the purchase of body cameras so they could enrich themselves, insinuating they didn’t care about actual “reform.” You might be right about this, but even if you are, the intent of the corporations is utterly irrelevant. Corporate executives owe a fiduciary duty to maximize profits and dividend payouts for shareholders, and capitalizing on mass public support for social reform has long been something corporations everywhere have used to maximize corporate revenue on behalf of shareholders. If this is improper and unethical then you might as well build a prison wall around the entire country because corporations of all shapes, sizes, industries, and partisan affiliations have been doing this ever since we implemented a strict capitalist free market economy.
The biggest issue I have with this is your insinuation that police exploited public support for reform in order to acquire technology that would make it easier and more efficient for them to obtain guilty pleas/verdicts against minority citizens for non-violent, low level crimes. There is absolutely ZERO support for your supposition here and it is beyond reckless for you to make such baseless claims in a supposed law review article. The mere fact that police departments sought funding to purchase body cameras before George Floyd’s death doesn’t support your false premise one bit. I know for a definitive fact that the prevailing reason why police & local officials supported the purchasing and use of body cameras long before the mass Post-Floyd movement for criminal justice reform was to protect officers from false claims of misconduct. The false narrative that a systemically racist police force is going around killing black and brown citizens en masse had already gained traction in the public conscious by then, and there were numerous instances where this false narrative resulted in ruined careers of ethical police officers and cost municipalities tens of millions of dollars in settlements in opportunist civil actions filed against police. Absent unequivocal, objective evidence disproving claims of police misconduct and use of excessive force, huckster lawyers and criminals would continue to enrich themselves at the expense of hardworking taxpayers unimpeded. The time, money and other public resources allocated to defending these civil suits, where the burden of proof is only 50% +1, resulted in most of these civil suits being settled with non-admission agreements that would pay the plaintiffs pennies on the dollar compared to their initial demand for damages. Ambulance chasers and pretend civil rights attorneys jumped on this legal trend knowing that absent unequivocal evidence disproving claims of excessive force/misconduct, they would be in line for a guaranteed payday through a settlement. Liability was never the goal of these grifter attorneys, and they used the media to pressure municipalities into prompt settlements by invoking race and racism from the very start. This was a very costly problem for local municipal leaders and they got behind law enforcement calls for body cameras under the premise that the footage from these cameras would provide them with the objective proof needed to successfully defend against these baseless, opportunistic, exploitive lawsuits.
There was also the added benefit of the footage from these cameras being used to successfully prosecute criminals. It wasn’t just black and brown criminals; it was all criminals. That includes officers who break the law. I know of a successful prosecution of a police officer who used to target likely illegal immigrant drivers in pre-textual traffic stops and would steal their money and other valuables while conducting an inherently illegal search of their vehicles. The prosecution was the result of the local laws surrounding police body cameras and the state AG’s authority to audit footage either randomly or in response to an alleged claim of misconduct. The officer had no recourse to prevent the footage from being turned over and the officer was recently sentenced to 12 years in prison for his brazen misconduct. The bottom line is that while the public may support less militarized, heavy handed policing, there is much greater support for safe and secure communities. That can only be achieved by arresting, prosecuting, and if warranted, incarcerating criminals pursuant to the penal laws on the books of each state. There is no room for subjectivity or restorative practices in criminal prosecutions. Arbitrary and subjectively selective enforcement of criminal statutes erode the public’s faith in the rule of law and embolden criminals to commit further crimes that victimize innocent citizens. These innocent victims are the people deserving of mass public support and empathy, not the criminals who knowingly or intentionally commit crimes. The priorities of supposedly well-meaning people such as yourself are completely fucking warped and I fear you’re beyond the point of honest discussions on this topic. It’s a shame because there are areas of policing and prosecutions that are in dire need of reform, but by constantly expressing sorrow for the plight of criminals and perversely injecting race into this important discussion, you turn off more than half the country from the start.
I’ve said it a million times and I’ll say it again: putting an end to the mass incarceration and disproportionate arrests of black and brown citizens can only be realized by identifying and addressing the cultural root causes that lead to disproportionately high criminality in predominant black and brown communities. I’m sure you’re going to say that such a statement is racist, but I couldn’t give a shit. You love to say that evidence of systemically racist policing is supported by the fact that black and brown citizens are 2.5x more likely to be injured or killed during interactions with police than are white citizens. Okay. Does that explain why police officers are 17x more likely to be shot when interacting with black and brown citizens than they are when interacting with white ones? No, it doesn’t. It proves that this is a two way street and that reforms are necessary on both sides in order for there to be substantive improvement. You want transformative reforms to the culture of policing in America, but unless this is met with matching cultural reforms in minority communities nothing substantive will transpire. Despite these one sided reforms, you’ll continue to see the same statistical data you saw before the one sided reforms were implemented, just as you are seeing now. The true intentions of these reformists is shown by what they do next. The well intentioned ones will start to realize there is a matching responsibility for reform that is needed and start devoting their focus, effort and resources to promoting change in minority communities. Grifters, such as yourself, will revise history and say that the one-sided reforms implemented were never going to be enough and that more are needed. There is greater accountability for police officers who commit crimes and abuse their authority today than ever before, but there is lesser accountability for citizens who commit crimes if they are black or brown. They are told to believe they are victims and their crimes are mere manifestations of their victimization. So, not only have you promoted continued one-sided reforms, you’ve also helped perpetuate a culture that promotes the lack of accountability on the other side through your divisive, elitist and arrogant rhetoric. People like you are the problem and every chance you get to perpetuate your complete nonsense and bullshit is nothing short of pure racial exploitation. If you truly cared about these things, and knew what you were even talking about in the first place, you’d do more than write books and give speeches. You’d be in the trenches, working as mentor to at risk you in minority communities, such as I do. You wouldn’t exploit your law degree to perpetuate and amplify partisan propaganda and advance the causes of special interests as you do. You would have spent some time working as a front line public defender in a minority jurisdiction and putting all the knowledge and tools you obtained in law school to use trying to help facilitate life saving changes in the lives of your clients, as I did for a year after finishing law school. So, please, go ahead and call me a racist so I can wear it as a badge of honor as I do each time a fucking grifter like you has called me one.
Just watched your interview with Brianha Joy Gray. I don't like surveillance at all, having grown up in a police state (an American client state). But I do police transcription and have done for quite a while now in a "liberal" city. This city has NEST and cameras all over. The police also are required by their "policies, procedures, bulletins" to wear a body-worn camera whenever they respond to a call that might result in in-person interaction with a member of the public. They have a 30-second buffer during which there is no sound so they are supposed to turn them on as (or before) they leave their vehicle. They rarely do this and in an incident that is moving quickly they often forget to turn them on at all. Also sometimes the cameras malfunction. Although you cannot see what the cop wearing the BWC is doing, you can hear him or her the most clearly and other cops at the incident are also wearing the BWC and those BWCs are filming the original cop. In fact, BWCs are always used in investigations of police-involved-shootings. And those usually involve either a homeless or mentally ill person brandishing a knife--sometimes a small pocket knife--or else carjacking a vehicle so they will have somewhere dry and somewhat private to spend the night. They are useful in investigations of police misbehavior when the citizen is complaining of attitude, and the use of profanity. The transcript itself will not indicate the attitude, often, but films sure do. Whether or not they are disciplined, probably not. If they use profanity, probably. They're not supposed to. Sometimes cops use the Use of Force policy as an excuse to use profanity. They call it verbal emphasis. Which leads me to my second point and that is training. The thing that most contributes to police violence is their TRAINING. For example, they are not trained to shoot at a hand that is holding a weapon. They are trained to shoot at the gut or the heart. The gut--well, you're probably going to bleed out. Same thing with the heart. For something like not dropping a small knife when told to. And also too many cops show up at an incident which should not result in violence of any sort. One case I worked on involved a man hiding in the trunk of a hatchback. He was shot with 97 bullets from a large number of responding units. Of course he did not survive. I don't even remember what the case was about. Maybe low-level theft?
And there's another point which is the fact that the law is written to protect property, not people. That is the core problem. I recently was pulled over by a young cop whose charge was fictitious and I knew it. He had no BWC. His squad car had no camera either. And there was a vehicle between me and him so he could not have seen what he said he witnessed. It was a case of he said/she said with physics on my side. I have worked on cases where the cops said the suspect was resisting and because there were multiple BWCs to check, it was clear he was handcuffed and on the ground and complying. He was making a lot of noise because he was mentally ill and he wanted the bystanders to pressure the cops, which they did. So cameras are not always in the cops' favor. And furthermore a lot of cops resist turning them on. In fact, when citizens complain about a specific cop, they will usually check that first (or their attorney will) and NOT having turned on the BWC is one thing cops are very often disciplined on. BWCs are easily countered with cellphone videos. In fact, the cellphone video has changed things a great deal, down to real time (or close to real time) witnessing of an on-going genocide. That is the only reason I carry a cellphone--to videotape police malfeasance--should I witness it. The police view it as a form of self-defense as well as surveilling the public. But the public is heavily surveilled without BWCs. And furthermore the first thing they take is the perp's cellphone which, if they are dumb enough to carry one, gives ample proof they were present at the scene of the crime. All the adjacent properties' security cams will back that up. As well as cold shows where bystanders identify the perp. I think you should talk to people who actually witness how they are used, including cops who don't like them. Not all cops are assholes, by the way. Some of them are pretty decent people, though most of those usually become detectives because dealing with the public as a patrol officer is really, really stressful. Cops are more scared of the public than the public is of them. FYI, I'm politically left, hate surveillance, don't like authoritarian control mechanisms, and in my youth was one of those people who referred to cops as "pigs". Those were the days! I appreciate what you are doing but BWCs do often help the citizen protect his or her own rights. The rich are most invested in property rights. That's a given. And that's a problem with our legal system. And the core problem there is capitalism. The poor don't care that much about property rights (except their personal items the cops take during the booking process) because their property is negligible.
Thank you so much for educating us, i would not know the details you provided your work is so important to expose this disgusting abuse on the populace