“Show us your hands. Hands!” the loudspeaker says, though Kloepfer is already holding them up. Immediately afterward, the officers unleash a torrent of bullets — about 15, the lawsuit says — wounding Kloepfer and barely missing Mahler.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Sadly, the proliferation of privately controlled cameras is going to do more for police reform than every protest in history.
More and more people have got to be noticing this pattern of incident –> police statement –> video –> police lies exposed.
Try as they might, these cameras everywhere are going to create more and more situations where they cannot escape punishment, and that is going to drive behavioral change on the part of police.
So many cheap cameras, and even better, so many small and easily concealed cameras. I can get a 1080p camera a little bigger than a AA battery, and get a video while they’re looking for people pointing phones at them.
I think there will be more stand your ground situations where the video will be used to justify shooting anyone that forcibly enters. Police, burglars are fair game.
I must say, while certain cases have had disappointing outcomes, I have been pleasantly surprised about how the courts have sometimes sided with citizens who have managed to live through firing on police.
Two I can think of that surprised me - the man in Minneapolis who won his case when he fired on police who had attacked him with less-lethals from an unmarked van during the 2020 protests, and also Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend of all people.
I believe body or other cam footage played a role in the first, but I’m not sure about the second.
In any case, I agree with you!
There was also a case a week or two ago (can’t find it at the moment) where some black guy had been accosted by plainclothes police, and shot at them, and was acquitted.
What? Cops lie???
They create their own truth.
