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POLITICS

Body cameras no panacea but still a good idea

September 29, 2015

Body cameras on police officers won’t be the panacea envisioned by some, warned Rep. Steve Smyk, R-Milton, in a statement released last week by House Republicans.

Smyk, a retired state trooper, said, “I do not believe most people fully understand what this entails and how potentially burdensome and costly it will be, not only for police, but for the criminal justice system as a whole.”

Last week, the Delaware Department of Safety and Homeland Security announced that state and municipal police officers would participate in a pilot program to test the wearing of body cameras.

The program can’t begin soon enough.

Last week, sadly, a police shooting occurred where the evidence from a body camera could have proved useful. The story attracted national attention.

Wilmington Police received a report about a man in a wheelchair who had shot himself. They responded and wound up killing him after it appeared he might be going for a gun.

I say “appeared” because I couldn’t see a gun in the video taken by a bystander, though the man’s hands were near his waistband. (The woman who called in clearly said the man had a gun.) A police body camera might have provided more definitive evidence. The existing video was taken by a bystander.

The case was among issues discussed Thursday at a town hall meeting held at the Unitarian Universalists of Southern Delaware church titled “Life or Death: A Critical Look at Criminal Justice and Race.”

Smyk is right about body cameras not being a panacea. Even a body camera won’t show everything, and the police, of course, have only split seconds to make life-and-death decisions.

It’s a lot easier to sit in your living room, replay a video and consider how the situation could have been handled.

But a body camera would be invaluable in cases like the one in South Carolina, where a police officer calmly shot a man in the back as he was running away. We know what happened only because a man recorded the shooting on his phone.

Body cameras would make incidents like that less likely to happen. They might also help in less deadly situations.

At Thursday’s meeting, Jane Hovington, an African-American and a former candidate for the District 19 Senate seat, talked about an incident involving her son. He had gotten something out of his father’s car and was returning the keys when “the police pulled up to him and threw him up against the wall,” Hovington said. Her son asked why he was being stopped.

As it was, nothing happened. Police found out the young man was Hovington’s son and “the situation changed.”

But even small incidents like that can lead to a criminal record, Hovington said. A young man who questions an officer, as her son did, can be charged with resisting arrest. She thinks her son would have been arrested had she not been well known by the police.

In most such cases, there would be no recourse. It would be the young man’s word against the cop’s that he was resisting arrest. The cop would always win.

Body cameras could change the whole dynamic of police and citizen interactions. They might also have the positive effect of demonstrating the dangers of police work.

Another topic at Thursday’s meeting was the death penalty. I’ve written before about the inherent unfairness of capital punishment, but Claire Snyder-Hall, another former senatorial candidate, brought up another point that night.

One proposal would end the death penalty except in cases where a person was convicted of killing a police officer. This would go a long way toward ending capital punishment in Delaware, but it presents a problem: It leaves the death penalty in place, said Snyder Hall, who now works as a lobbyist for Common Cause Delaware.

This would make it easier to bring back the death penalty or to continue adding exceptions. Yes, killing a police officer is a horrible crime. But so is killing a toddler or a new mother. It would be easy for a politician, hoping to appear tough on crime, to propose new exceptions.

There’s also the question of logic. One of the chief reasons for eliminating the death penalty is the possibility of error. We know such errors occur.

Cape Henlopen graduate Bryan Stevenson, in his book “Just Mercy,” details cases where innocent men were sent to death row. (The book, out in paperback, is on the bestseller list.)

There’s no reason to believe this possibility is eliminated because the case involves the death of a police officer.

That doesn’t mean a full repeal of the death penalty will be an easy fight, but the people gathered Thursday are sure to bring the issue up again before next year’s General Assembly.


Don Flood is a former newspaper editor living near Lewes. He can be reached at floodpolitics@gmail.com.


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