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Using satire, popular author and comedian Andy Borowitz explains below why police body cameras alone will not solve the grand jury problem we have on our hands.
But others — like Matthew Pratt Guterl at the New Republic — contend that, in real life, while there are hundreds of videos similar to the one of Eric Gatner on You Tube, “with millions of views,” and “part of an archive of abuse that is vast and growing—[it] has failed to produce a more trusting environment or fairer justice system.”
“Advocates of police body cameras might enthuse over [such a] collection, holding it up as proof that sunlight is a natural disinfectant. But it isn’t clear at all that the increasing ubiquity of cameras—or the massive circulation of such videos—has actually decreased the number of men and women of color victimized by overly aggressive policing,” he says.
Pratt Guterl adds that the case of Eric Gatner puts an end to the “fantasy” that “had the shooting death of Michael Brown been recorded, we’d know exactly what happened—and justice would be served.”
He concludes:
These videos are also a living document of an endemic problem in America, and taken together, they serve as a sort of public archive of black pain and suffering—a moral argument for humanity over hair-triggers. They’re also proof that something more than “healing” and “trust” will be required in Ferguson, in Staten Island, and in so many other places in America. Viewed all together, they tell us that it is worth dwelling on the pain and the remorse and the anger, worth listening to Eric Garner’s plea for one more breath, and worth thinking about what a deeper, more permanent repair of our social fabric would look like.
(Matthew Pratt Guterl teaches at Brown University, and is the author of Seeing Race in Modern America.)
Now to Andy Borowitz:
Many of us who have seen the video of a New York police officer choking and killing an unarmed black man on a Staten Island side walk, even while the man pleaded for his life by repeatedly telling the officers “I can’t breathe,” are shocked that a New York grand jury declined to indict the police officer who killed Eric Garner.
Thew video is powerful, damning and does not leave anything to the imagination or interpretation.
So much that former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele has now joined others, Democrats and Republicans, in condemning this latest grand jury decision: “They tell us, at least, a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich. Well clearly a black man’s life is not worth a ham sandwich when you put these stories together. And that is the frustration,” Steele said on MSNBC.
After the similarly flawed and stunning grand jury ruling in Ferguson a little more than a week ago, many have suggested that police officers should carry body video cameras.
To bolster local policing, the government also announced a $263 million program that will provide up to 50,000 body cameras for police. The video footage from these cameras could clarify disputed incidents like the deadly encounter between the teenager in Ferguson, Michael Brown, and the police officer, Darren Wilson.
The inimitable Andy Borowitz at the New Yorker notes that while body cameras will go a long way towards solving this worsening grand jury problem, it will not be enough until something else also happens.
Borowitz says that there is “growing support for a plan to supply grand-jury members with eyes.”
Borowitz:
“Body cameras are an important part of the solution,” said Harland Dorrinson, who is lobbying Washington to equip grand juries with the sense of sight. “But I strongly believe that if you take video evidence and add eyes, the combination would be unstoppable.”
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Some critics of Dorrinson’s proposal say that it does not go far enough, and that in order to process information sent from their eyes grand juries would also need to be fitted with working brains.
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“Yes, in a perfect world, all grand juries would have brains,” Dorrinson said. “But progress is an incremental thing. Let’s start with eyes and eventually work our way up to brains.”
Satire imitating life? You betcha!
Lead image: www.shutterstock.com
