- FrontPage Magazine -
http://www.frontpagemag.com -
Obama’s Police Commission Wants Race Stats, Not Body Cameras
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On March 2, 2015 @ 11:11 pm In The Point | 1 Comment
official White House photo
Gathering objective evidence isn’t the goal here. So Obama’s police commission, in proper commission fashion, wants a more permanent version of itself established, and wants lots of racial statistics to prove disparate impact.
No body cameras though. They might prove inconvenient things. Like police innocence.
Its “overarching recommendation” was for Obama to create a so-called National Crime and Justice Task Force to suggest more ideas. The report also urged, as civil rights leaders have long demanded, that police departments collect more precise data about the race and other demographic characteristics of people who are stopped and arrested.
The most controversial idea in the report may be a call for independent prosecutors to investigate whenever an officer kills a civilian while on duty.
Even as police departments and civil rights groups around the country have embraced body cameras, the report cast their adoption as “complex,” noting there are concerns about privacy and cost.
While body cameras are expensive, like dashboard cameras, they help resolve disputed cases. Imagine if a surveillance camera had captured Trayvon Martin’s confrontation with George Zimmerman. All the controversy and outrage would have been eliminated by the undeniable facts of what really happened. And you can see why the racebaiters and their lawyers would not be fond of that idea.
Body cameras can prove the innocence of the plaintiff and even indict a cop in some cases, but that’s not what they’re after. What they want is an ambiguous case that they can exploit and body cameras undermine the availability of such cases.
Consider the LA shooting, which the left had just began getting its teeth into, when the LAPD cited evidence from body cameras. If it pans out, there goes a few weeks of angry protests. So you can see why they’re big fans of keeping general racial records rather than proving what happened in specific cases.
Article printed from FrontPage Magazine:
http://www.frontpagemag.comURL to article:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/obamas-police-commission-wants-race-stats-not-body-cameras/
