Recently on Democracy now Chris Stewart asked, "What if there was no video?"
But what does video evidence guarantee?
Nothing... especially in the face of white supremacist ideology that suggest that People of Color's stories can't be truthful and all police actions are justified because they are protecting the welfare of citizens.
While we know about this specific incident of police violence and attempts to cover up police criminality, video evidence does not guarantee that police perpetrators will be held responsible.
Remember the man who recorded the murder of Eric Garner?
"Ramsey Orta, is now locked up in jail after facing what he described as harassment by local police. Orta was first arrested on an unrelated gun charge the day after the Staten Island coroner declared Garner’s death to be a homicide. He was later arrested and jailed on a drug charge. His mother, brother and wife have all been arrested too. Supporters have accused the New York City Police Department of targeting Orta’s family for releasing the Garner video (1)."
Sadly, this force and targeting of Orta's family and of the North Charleston police officer who murdered Scott then planted evidence, illustrates the level of racism, abuse, and brazen criminality of the police. Even though police were caught on video, Officer Pantaleo Eric Garner's murderer, was not indicted. In this and many other instances how is it possible that no police are held accountable in the face of video evidence? Kwame Opam writing for the Verge argues that the emperor is naked "...save for a klansman's hood", hearkening back to the parable about the public's refusal to see what is in plain sight. At the same time many in our society are willfully ignorant about their own racism and racially motivated violence of the police.
Educational Philosopher, Jennifer Logue, writing about ignorance and racism suggests,
The fact that whites as a group fare better than non-whites in terms of health, wealth, and access to educational opportunity as a result of institutionalized forms of racism remains, by and large, free from scrutiny. By documenting the violence inscribed in the certainties of common sense and legal and moral authority, Charles Mills reveals how ignorance becomes not only socially sanctioned but also operates as a strategy of power and domination.
Logue Continues,
Sadly, rightfully angry protestors characterized as violent, criminalization of Blacks and Latinos, ignoring white criminality help to maintain the constructions of racial goodness for white people. This is carried out when Whites who commit crimes are characterized as good people, thusly suggesting there should be no accountability, especially if you are white and wealthy. Remember the drunk driving rich white Texas teen who killed four pedestrians ? He was sentenced to probation after expert psychologist witness testified he had "afluenza"....many whites live in what he [Mills] terms an “invented delusional world, a racial fantasy land,” where “misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion, and self- deception are among the most pervasive mental phenomena of the past few hundred years, a cognitive and moral economy psychically required for conquest, colonization, enslavement.” These phenomena are not innocent or accidental, he stresses, but prescribed by the terms of the racial contract, which“requires a certain schedule of structured blindness and opacities in order to establish and maintain the white polity.” Thus whites are able to think of themselves as good while in fact acting in racist ways. The misrecognition of themselves as morally innocent when it comes to matters of race is supported by structuralized ignorances whites fail to recognize. Because of white structural ignorance whites (consciously or not) largely are unable to disrupt white privilege or contribute to the creation of thriving critical communities of difference (2).
The North Charleston mayor has received a grant to buy dashboard cameras, the cameras themselves do not guarantee an end or even limitation of excessive force. St. Louis police turned off their dashcams. Officers said While I have in the past advocated for police wearing cameras, this is only part of the solution. There must be clear accountability for the institution of policing and every other sector of our society. The mayor and police chief in North Charleston suggested that this is only one officer, despite the video showing another officer present as false evidence is planted. "Hold up. Hold up, y’all. Hold up. Hold up, everybody, hold up. We’re red right now, so if you guys are worried about cameras, just wait" (3), signaling police to stop the beating beating until the cameras are off. well, there had to have been collusion when the false report stating the victim was given mouth-to- mouth resuscitation, when Scott's dying or dead body was hand-cuffed. There was still a chance to save his life. But that wasn't in the plans.
To say that there is only one bad cop is to deny the systemic racism that allowed the officer in North Charleston to kill Scott, plant evidence, make a false report and believe he would get away with it.
"THE WHOLE DAMN SYSTEM IS GUILTY AS HELL!"
Our society has devolved into one where accountability and morality is only present when there is video evidence and sadly the recordings shown to grand jurors in the case of Eric Garner and John Crawford did not warrant any imperatives for accountability. There are reasons for this, which are as deeply imbedded as is racism in our society. But generally, there is less likely to be an extension of humanity to People of Color by the vast majority of Americans, because since slavery (as described by Michelle Alexander and Douglass Blackmon), Blacks have been the disproportionately targeted by law enforcement. In our society, unlike many others, those deemed criminal are moved from their home communities, and when finished serving their time- not allowed to vote or participate in society. They are pariah. We don't wish to see them. Yet certain kinds of criminals are allowed to roam Wall street and the board rooms of America's corporations, destroying our environment and raiding our retirements.
There is a serious problem of public and private morality. It starts early, when students learn to cheat in school, realizing that they won't be rewarded unless they play the game. We even saw the Air Force officers responsible for maintaining the nuclear arsenal caught in a cheating scandal. I would argue that these officers learned cheating early on and it carried on to their professional lives. Cheating is symptomatic of a larger absence of morality.
My own university is in the midst of dealing with the fallout because of students using violent racial slurs on the campus radio. What was most disturbing was that students' comments', when responding to media focused on being careful about what they say because it might be recorded, not because of what is right and wrong. Morality is skewed in this society, in part, because of the racist logic of capitalism. Capitalism is rooted in inequity and inequality. Today a colleague sent me this quote, which reads "Capitalism requires inequality, racism enshrines it, and police violence enforces it." If we are to follow this reasoning, the police were operating from a system of morality devoid of any kind of ethical accountability and responsibility to others (and really only to each other) and especially Blacks who are criminalized and perceived as criminal.
The attempt to hide the racist and criminal acts by the police suggests it is only one incident and the case is exceptional. America, if it is ever again to be considered the bastion of freedom it claims to be, must put aside its exceptionalism, take stock and responsibility for its moral and ethical failings in private and in public. We must deal with and go beyond the corruption of policing to the corruption of government -which listens to corporations, rather than its citizens. We must tell the truth, listen and act with others to deconstruct this leviathan of injustice. No video can save us, but if we take evidence into account, put our bias aside, maybe we can begin to value each life, regardless of race, sexual orientation, gender, religion, body type and other ways people identify themselves. Its not enough to say that we value life, we must act in ways that go beyond talk and we don't need a video to tell us that.
by David Ragland
1. Democracy now April 9, 2015 2. Logue, J. (2013). “Sanctioned Curricular Ignorance as a Challenge to Critical Communities.”
in Philosophical Studies in Education, Vol. 44.
3. http://www.infowars.com/video-cops-turn-off-camera-before-beating-man/
