Keep filming the police
Video of police officers on the job can help protect the public - and the cops.
If a quick-thinking seventeen year-old girl hadn’t taken out her cell phone and recorded Derek Chauvin murdering George Floyd - and now we can definitively call it a murder, not just a killing - that horrifying incident might have passed into history:
If not for Darnella Frazier's quick thinking, Derek Chauvin might still be a Minneapolis police officer.
Instead, Chauvin is behind bars, convicted of two counts of murder and one count of manslaughter after kneeling on George Floyd's neck for more than 9 minutes.
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Floyd's aunt Angela Harrellson praised Frazier, who was 17 when she captured the footage that proved to be damning in Chauvin's trial.
"The sad thing is if it hadn't been for that 17-year-old girl Darnella, it would have been another black man that was killed by the police ... and they would have said, 'Oh, it was drugs, oh it was this,'" Harrellson said.
"And we would never have had the story we would have. And wouldn't be here today talking."
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz publicly thanked Frazier.
"Taking that video, I think many folks know, is maybe the only reason that Derek Chauvin will go to prison," Walz said.
The impact of Frazier's video extended far beyond Chauvin's case. It led to the firing of three other officers at the scene, a ban on police chokeholds and a federal investigation. It also sparked a global racial justice movement.
"With nothing more than a cell phone and sheer guts, Darnella changed the course of history in this country, sparking a bold movement demanding an end to systemic anti-Black racism and violence at the hands of police," wrote Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America, a nonprofit that works to defend and advance freedom of expression.
"Without Darnella's presence of mind and readiness to risk her own safety and wellbeing, we may never have known the truth about George Floyd's murder."
The video shot by a high school student "will go down in history," the NAACP in North Carolina, the state where Floyd was born, said in a statement.
"Like the Abraham Zapruder film of the Assassination of President John Kennedy, the traditional police coverup was impossible," the North Carolina NAACP wrote. "No one, not even many of Chauvin's police colleagues, could argue against Ms. Frazier's film."
Unfortunately, the NAACP is not exaggerating when they refer to a “traditional police coverup.” Just compare the Minneapolis Police Department’s initial press release about the case to what we now know actually happened:
Chauvin’s conviction is a step forward, but it’s not going to fix everything overnight. There will still be bad cops and departments covering up for them. And that’s why we have to keep the cameras rolling.
The thing is, this week we’ve also seen how video of a police killing can actually absolve the officer involved, or at the very least show that the situation was much more ambiguous than social media outrage led us to believe.
My heart sunk when, almost immediately after the announcement of the Chauvin verdict, another white police officer - this time in Columbus, Ohio - had shot and killed an African-American teenage girl. Body camera video, however, showed that the officer may have actually saved another African-American girl’s life in the process:
Police in Columbus, Ohio, on Tuesday fatally shot a Black teenage girl they confronted as she lunged at two people with a knife, as seen in police video footage of the encounter, authorities said.
The incident, sparking street protests in Ohio's largest city, came as the nation was focused on the guilty verdict a Minneapolis jury returned against a white former Minneapolis police officer charged with murdering George Floyd last year by kneeling on his neck.
Authorities described the teenager who was fatally shot as a 15-year-old girl. But family members have identified her as Ma'Khia Bryant, aged 16.
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Releasing police body-camera video of Tuesday's shooting hours later, Woods said officers involved were responding to an emergency-911 call from someone who reported an attempted stabbing at a home on the city's southeast side.
Arriving police encountered a chaotic scene of several people on the front lawn where Bryant, brandishing a knife, charged toward one person who falls backwards, then lunged at a second person, the video showed.
A slow-motion replay of the video shows the second person stumbling backward against a car parked in the driveway as Bryant raises the weapon as if about to stab her, and an officer opens fire.
Bryant immediately collapses against the parked car and on to the ground, and the weapon, which appears to be a kitchen knife, is seen lying on the pavement near her as an officer crouches at her side to render medical aid.
I remain open to suggestions that the officer could have handled the situation differently. (As a popular meme puts it, police aren’t supposed to kill guilty people, either.) But this definitely wasn’t another George Floyd situation, in which the “threat” from the suspect - assuming there was really one to begin with - was neutralised. This was the kind of horrifying split-second dilemma police officers face almost every day, and sometimes the correct course of action isn’t clearly obvious until after the fact.
The same applies for the tragic Adam Toledo shooting in Chicago. Then there’s the shooting of Daunte Wright, also in the Minneapolis area, in which video strongly suggests criminal negligence but not murder. An experienced officer grabbing the wrong weapon seems hard to believe, but it is even harder to imagine her deciding to summarily execute a man, knowing all the while she has her body camera on, and then giving an Oscar-worthy performance pretending to be shocked after firing her gun.
Video is not the solution to all of our problems. It can easily be misinterpreted, selectively edited, and even completely faked. And the videos that are released, even if accurate and shown in context, can leave people with a misleading impression of how often American police officers kill unarmed people, and who is getting killed.
But it’s still preferable to a world in which the word of the police - or outrage mobs on social media - can remain unchallenged.
Pray for the people of India, a great nation of over a billion people brought to its knees by the COVID-19 pandemic:
India has recorded the highest one-day tally of new Covid-19 cases anywhere in the world - and the country's highest number of deaths over 24 hours.
It has close to 16 million confirmed cases, second only to the US.
The country is in the grip of a second wave, raising more fears about its overwhelmed health care system.
Crowds have formed outside hospitals in major cities which are filled to capacity. A number of people have died while waiting for oxygen.
What happened? Allahpundit examines why India was caught napping, and how the outbreak might be even worse than officially reported:
How did a country that had endured a comparatively mild pandemic for 12 months suddenly turn into a raging inferno? There are two theories. One, a la Chile, is that India believed it had COVID licked after many months of few infections so it let down its guard and relaxed restrictions. Movie theaters opened at full capacity on February 1. The prime minister, Narendra Modi, began holding mass rallies again and didn’t bother wearing a mask. (Which sounds familiar.) Last month the health minister arrogantly declared that the country was in the “endgame of the COVID-19 pandemic.” An epidemiologist writes today that “The mass political, religious and sporting events, which are extensively covered by the Indian media, sent mixed messages about the seriousness of the pandemic” and that “there is an unfounded sense among a large number of Indians that exposure to pollution and microbes had endowed them with superior immunity.”
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The other factor in India’s outbreak is that they have a variant of their very own now. A “double-mutant,” in fact, so called because it has not one but two key mutations on the spike protein…
Atlantic Canada and India have very little in common when it comes to population size and our public health infrastructure. We’ve also handled the pandemic remarkably well, even compared to the rest of Canada.
But Nova Scotia did see a marked increase in confirmed COVID-19 infections yesterday, and there is once again talk of further restrictions and lockdowns. Local news reports are starting to include the dreaded words, “community spread.”
Until we’re all vaccinated, at the very least, we’re going to be stuck with this thing for a while. The worst thing we can do is become complacent.
If only all of our children slept so soundly:
Every Titanic survivor remembered the screaming. Fifteen hundred people all plunged at once into waters that were minus two degrees Celsius, and begged for help in the 30 to 40 minutes that it took them to die. One survivor, Frank Goldsmith, was never again able to attend a baseball game because the roar of the crowd reminded him of the wails that night.
The screams were all the more horrific because they were unexpected. Those drifting in lifeboats on a moonless night would have assumed that the rest of the Titanic’s passengers and crew were also safely evacuated. It was only when the ship took its final plunge just after 2 a.m. that they realized they were witness to the greatest maritime disaster yet seen.
And through the horror, one solitary person that night didn’t bother to wake up. For all six-year-old Douglas Spedden would have remembered, he peacefully went to sleep in his first-class stateroom on the RMS Titanic, and then woke up at dawn in a nine-metre-long lifeboat, bobbing in the middle of the North Atlantic.
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Douglas had been briefly woken with the promise that he was going to “see the stars,” and the groggy child and his parents were soon off in a lifeboat long before panic had begun to set in. When they left the Titanic only one hour after its collision with the iceberg, its lights were still blazing, its band was still playing and the top decks had only sparse crowds. The ship’s crew had not begun to send off distress flares, and the dim lights of a ship on the horizon (now believed to be the S.S. Californian) convinced many that their predicament would be alleviated without any need to cast off in a rowboat. Lifeboat Three, in fact, would be set off with nearly 30 empty seats because crew members couldn’t not find enough people willing to fill them.
The Titanic’s lifeboats that night would see people freeze to death, pull guns on one another and engage in grisly searches for survivors among masses of frozen bodies. One boat that overturned would become a nightmarish odyssey for survival as desperate men clung to it throughout the night, occasionally losing consciousness and slipping under the waves when the cold overtook them. But Lifeboat Three was able to host a peacefully sleeping child and his bear.
The story would have a cruelly ironic ending: young Douglas would be struck by a car and killed just a few years later. It’s like something out of a Final Destination movie.