Body Cams Never Lie

Lisa Edwards, shortly before her unnecessary death.

1,801 words

In response to 2014’s absurdly overblown and preposterously misguided public outrage over Michael Brown’s shooting death in Ferguson, Missouri , President Barack Obama asked the federal government to allocate $263 million to provide police departments nationwide with body cameras so they could finally film all these white-supremacist cops wantonly and sadistically brutalizing black bodies in the streets.

Nearly ten years later, far more police are equipped with body cameras than before, but the results don’t quite seem to match what Obama had intended.

About a week ago, body-camera footage finally emerged from a February 6 incident in Knoxville, Tennessee showing a sorely bedraggled 60-year-old white woman named Lisa Edwards flailing around in pain and desperately pleading with a group of police that she felt as if she was having a stroke. For reasons that are unclear to me at the moment, Edwards had been discharged from a local hospital after spending the previous night there. She was sitting right outside the hospital entrance when police arrived. The cops were responding to a call accusing Edwards of trespassing on hospital grounds.

Over the course of 76 minutes and 42 seconds, the footage shows the police mocking Edwards and accusing her of play-acting that she was sick. One segment shows Sergeant Brandon Wardlaw, a black cop whom the Knoxville Police Department honored in February 2018 as a shining exemplar of black progress for Black History Month, telling the other police — at least one of whom was black and a couple of whom were white — to ignore Edwards, because “I know it’s all an act.” One officer, a white underling, tells Wardlaw, “Unfortunately, if she goes over and can’t breathe, the act’s going to turn into a problem.”

Hmm. I seem to recall a few instances of criminal suspects telling police who were equipped with body cameras that they can’t breathe shortly before dying. Those stories all blew up into national news. One even inspired a prolonged national riot.

At one point, Sergeant Wardlaw scolds the woman and says, “Listen to me — this is the Lord’s day. All I want to do is get some coffee and some oatmeal. I’m not going to deal with your mess this morning!”

Police eventually crammed Edwards’ bloated and agonized bulk into the back of a patrol vehicle en route to jail. She died the next day. An autopsy confirmed her cause of death as a stroke.

Unlike what happened with Mike “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” Brown in Ferguson, Eric “I Can’t Breathe” Garner on Staten Island, and George “I Can’t Breathe” Floyd in Minneapolis, the Knoxville Police Department has allegedly already ruled out the possibility of criminally charging the officers involved.

Full disclosure: Assembled notes in hand, I woke up around midnight to write a story about Obama’s push to mandate body cameras for police and how it had backfired on him, only to skim the news one last time and be smacked in the face with the fact that Lisa Edwards’ death had become a national story only yesterday.

Initially, I’d been inspired to tackle the subject of police body cameras after viewing recent footage of a young black woman who’d been pulled over by a white cop because her car’s tail lights weren’t on. When the officer told the woman he smelled alcohol, the suspect denied that she or anyone in the car had been drinking. The cop — accompanied by two other officers, both of them black — told the woman to get out of the car. A breathalyzer revealed that the woman’s blood alcohol level was well over the legal limit. She was temporarily restrained with plastic handcuffs but managed to wriggle loose from one cuff. She made a dash for her car, jumped inside, and bit the white officer on the wrist when he tried to pull her out of the vehicle.

While cuffed and sitting on the curb, the woman told the white cop that she feared him because he’s a white male and that she was going to sue because he’d probably given her a concussion. She neglected to mention anything about being drunk or biting him.

Again, this doesn’t seem to be the sort of body-cam footage that populates the fever dreams of Barack Obama and the Racial-Industrial Complex.

Still unaware of the Lisa Edwards saga, I’d spent all day yesterday poring over body-cam footage of black women shooting at cops, screaming “I hate white people!” and going absolutely apeshit at Walmart.

And it wasn’t only black women — there was endless footage of unhinged and shitfaced white women barking, screaming, and taunting police who showed a level of restraint I’d never be able to muster in a thousand years.

If anything, equipping police with body cams served to undermine the myth of female innocence.

Sometimes the police have to deal with lawbreaking authority figures such as drunken sheriff’s deputies, entitled black police chiefs, arrogant judges, and cigar-chomping mayors who pull the “Do you know who I am?” card.

I don’t think Barack Obama anticipated that equipping police with body cams would reveal to the public the sort of post-traumatic stress disorder-inducing situations that police are forced to deal with constantly — things such as having a suspect you’ve been chasing down a highway suddenly jumping out of his car to start shooting at you. Dealing with any of these sorts of situations, even once, would traumatize most normal people for life. Cops do it again and again and again, only to be shat upon by a hostile press and a hopelessly misinformed public.

You can buy Jim Goad’s ANSWER Me! here.

I couldn’t handle the job for a day without clubbing people.

Research about the effect of equipping police with body cams is all over the place. Some studies suggest that it’s tamed police behavior, since they know they’re being filmed. Other studies speculate that it’s led to increased use of force by police, because the footage provides ample evidence of violent provocation.

I haven’t seen a single study that implies that body cams have led to improved criminal behavior. Even when they know they’re being recorded, it doesn’t seem to impede many criminal suspects from actin’ a foo’.

In many cases, body cams haven’t led to improved police behavior, either.

Footage from an incident in Georgia last year shows a cop body-slamming a confused citizen who turned out not to be the person who was seen breaking into cars.

And body-cam footage from 2015 that was entirely buried from national exposure and purposely covered up by Iowa authorities shows a black officer killing a white woman. The officer had claimed he’d been attacked by the woman’s dog. The footage showed he was lying.

That’s the thing about cops and robbers: They’re all human and thus prone to lying. To me, lying is an unforgivable crime. It’s blasphemy against reality. Unless you’ve been through the legal system, it may have never occurred to you that the only reason we have criminal trials is because accusers often lie. If accusers never lied, there’d be no reason for trials.

We expect criminals to lie, but we don’t expect cops and purported victims to lie.

We live in a world where people have seen too many Hollywood movies and selectively-edited news reports. They need to see more police body-cam footage of criminal behavior and citizen-recorded smartphone videos of police misbehavior.

If the crime isn’t recorded and there’s no other tangible evidence, mere accusations are nothing more than hearsay.

Civil libertarians argue that a fundamental problem with police body cams is that they invade criminal suspects’ privacy. I was unaware of any constitutional right to avoid being filmed while you’re out in public acting like an idiot. What’s more important: The right to privacy, or the right to vindicate yourself when someone is lying about you?

I obviously have a personal stake in this issue.

In last week’s feature, I shared voicemail messages from a former girlfriend of mine who repeatedly threatened my life. She kept on threatening and assaulting me even after I obtained a restraining order against her. When I was ultimately arrested for finally hitting her back and sent to jail, a friend recorded her gloating about how she was masturbating to the fact that my first wife was dying of cancer, how I was going to prison for at least 15 years, and how she got away with all manner of crimes because she’d never been charged — and since there were no charges, the crimes didn’t even “exist.” She actually said that.

Luckily, the tapes of her saying all that existed. Under Oregon law, it was legal to record her without her permission. And the fact that both a friend and I had recorded her acting like the true predator in our sick little romantic tango scared off the District Attorney to the point where he offered me a plea bargain of three years instead of the 25 years they were trying to give me.

After I got out of prison, I used to joke – bitterly — that I should just get a camera mounted on my head. About eight months after my release, when I broke up with my first post-incarceration girlfriend, she lied and told the police I’d been beating her for months. By this point, I knew that the only thing that would save me from having my parole revoked would be to record her without her knowledge admitting that she’d lied about the violence and was only trying to get revenge for the fact that I’d broken up with her. When my parole officer heard the tapes, she apologized for believing my ex’s story and for doubting me.

About four years ago in Georgia, after a parking-lot dispute with a young black male who falsely accused me of almost hitting his car, he threatened to pull his gun on me. When I showed no fear, the trembling coward decided to call the cops instead. Realizing that people lie about these situations all the time, I recorded him. This way I was able to prove that not only hadn’t I threatened him, I hadn’t spat any racial slurs at him, either. Back in the 1990s in Portland, a black male who tried breaking into my rental car while I was sitting in it told police that I’d called him dirty racial names. Luckily, there were witnesses at the scene who contradicted his story. But there was no such thing as a smartphone back then.

I’d much rather we didn’t live in a world where we live under constant surveillance, where police aren’t filming us, where we aren’t filming police, and where everyone isn’t constantly filming one another.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where people lie all the time merely to harm one another, all of it concealed under a false cloak of “justice.”

But body cams never lie.

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