Sixty days? How about 60 hours?
Since June 2016, policy guidelines in Chicago call for the release to the public of police bodycam video and related audio evidence connected to “incidents involving the use of force by police officers” within 60 days.
For nonlethal incidents, OK. Approximately two months is unambitious but arguably an acceptable delay to collect, review and present relevant evidence.
But for police shootings that result in the death of a person — cases bound to leave a shaken community searching for answers — sharing video evidence more quickly is essential.
Police in Columbus, Ohio, posted their bodycam video of the April 20 fatal shooting of Ma’Khia Bryant less than six hours after the 16-year-old was killed. Police in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, posted their bodycam video of the April 11 fatal shooting of Daunte Wright the following day.
Contrast the timing in these high-profile cases elsewhere with Chicago’s most recent police shootings. It was 28 days between when police killed Anthony Alvarez on March 31 and Wednesday’s release of the bodycam video of that shooting; it was 17 days between when police killed Adam Toledo on March 29 and the April 15 release of the bodycam video.
“Getting out truthful information in a timely fashion is how a department builds trust and earns legitimacy,” said University of Chicago law professor Craig Futterman, a specialist in police accountability issues and member of Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Use of Force Working Group.
“The default must be transparency,” said Futterman, who has advocated for a release of police videos within 48 hours of incidents. “Without transparency, the headline becomes, ‘What are they hiding?’ “
That was certainly the case in the recent Alvarez and Toledo killings. Angry speculations and accusations filled the information vacuum, a vacuum that authorities also unaccountably filled with misinformation and odd demurrals of their own. Requests for answers should never have to turn into furious demands.
Surviving family members deserved quick access to the available evidence, with an option to postpone the public release of that evidence to give them time to process it.
“The longer you wait the more you risk losing the confidence of the community,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, an organization that provides guidance and training to law enforcement agencies nationwide. “In Washington, D.C., and other cities they now do it the next day. This is the new reality: If you give your officers cameras and they record events, you must treat that video like it is a public record.”
________
Columns are opinion content that reflect the views of the writers.
________
David Klinger, a former police officer who is now chair of the department of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, said that he’s all for transparency, but that a consistent deadline of “a week or two” for video release would be better for preserving the integrity of investigations.
This integrity is key not only to building trust in the community, but also to helping survivors attain closure, to aiding in the search for long-term improvements in policing that will save lives and to appropriate discipline or prosecution.
“It’s vitally important to have independent, on-the-record interviews with every witness before any of them have seen the video,” Klinger said. “And that can take time depending on the circumstances.”
Witnesses will have different angles and vantage points than the ones provided by the jiggly cameras on police officers’ chests and, increasingly, by doorbell cameras and other private security devices.
“There’s nothing a defense attorney likes more than prosecution witnesses whose memories seem to have been influenced or altered by a video,” Klinger said. “They can be impeached and form the basis for reasonable doubt in the jury.”
But Futterman argues that any delay is the real enemy of integrity when it comes to an investigation. “Police need to separate witnesses and interview them promptly to learn what they actually saw and heard, not what other witnesses say they saw or what they might have seen on a video. The more you allow people to talk to one another, the more their perceptions and their stories can be altered.”
Futterman said, “If they haven’t spoken to the key witnesses within 48 hours, their investigation is already tainted.”
Futterman and Klinger agreed that extraordinary circumstances — such as witnesses who are hospitalized and unable to be interviewed or witnesses who can’t be located — would justify extending a release deadline. Chicago currently allows for a 30-day extension “upon written request from a government entity” that lists one of the permissible reasons for delay provided under state law.
But whatever the deadline, those reasons must be spelled out with great specificity for the public and OK’d by an independent arbiter, Futterman argues, in order to tamp down suspicion that, once again, the police are attempting a cover-up.
He wants the evidence out within 48 hours. I’d settle for 60. But as it is, the waits are too long. The city should do better.
Twitter @EricZorn
Get the week’s best columns, reports, tips, referrals and tirades from columnist Eric Zorn in the Change of Subject newsletter. Sign up here.
