The New York Times shows up—a decade late

Editors finally choose to cover concerns about police body cameras co-opting the movement for Black lives that I publicly raised in 2015

Today, the New York Times ran a feature addressing what they described as “a disappointing policing change,” exploring the slight of hand and misdirection pervading the expansion of police body cameras as a response to unrestrained and unaccountable police violence.

At the beginning of 2015, I published an article on Truthout explaining why, for voices concerned about police violence, “police body cameras are no solution.” I explored several widely overlooked issues, including the central thesis now covered by the Times nearly a decade later: police wearing body cameras in no way ensures that the public will ever see the footage they record.

Image: Electronic Frontier Foundation, licensed through Creative Commons

But even that is merely the tip of the iceberg.

A bait & switch

As I explained in 2015, body cameras offer, at best, only transparency into individual incidents. But that’s far from sufficient given the lack of accountability for longstanding patterns and practices—which body cameras do nothing at all to expose.

Transparency is one problem enabling police violence and lack of accountability, but it is far from the only one. The unwillingness of prosecutors to seek justice when police commit crimes has been an equally entrenched problem, although recent history suggests that the small number of prosecutors who do aim to apply the law equally face many headwinds.

On the rare occasion when prosecutors do show up for the hard work of holding police accountable, they often confront biases among jurors favoring police that allow killer cops to escape justice despite prosecution.

No good deed goes unpunished

Perversely, prosecutors who champion police accountability have even become targets themselves.

Marilyn Mosby, who made national headlines in Baltimore for prosecuting the cops who killed Freddie Grey, found herself the target of a federal investigation and now faces prison time for what CNN described as “making false statements after authorities said she applied for…loans to withdraw money from her retirement accounts.”

In San Francisco, former prosecutor Chesa Boudin was removed from office through a recall campaign in 2022. Other candidates across California who sought to challenge predatory prosecutors faced vicious smears, not unlike those fabricated to insulate corrupt congressional incumbents in the face of grassroots challenges.

Stepping back even further, body cameras in the hands of police also represent a vast opportunity for street-level surveillance by local authorities augmenting the digital omniscience of federal three-letter agencies. Whether or not anyone ever sees the footage they capture of police misconduct, they ultimately support the policing-industrial complex by enabling criminal prosecutions or justifying uses of force relying on their footage.

Forcing an overdue debate

Policing, and proposed policing reforms, were just some among the vast spectrum of issues ignored by journalists when I ran for Congress to challenge a leading actor in Washington routinely indulged by the press.

After instructing Democrats in Congress to pay lip service to the movement for black lives in 2016, former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in 2020 showed up in Congress kneeling in kente cloth to introduce a bill named after George Floyd (whose name she forgot at the press conference introducing it) that proposed to expand police surveillance and police budgets in spite of the movement’s demands.

In 2020, when I appeared on the general election ballot in November, local journalists generally ignored our race. Those who did observe it ultimately chose to publish more ad hominem disinformation than legitimate analysis highlighting the stark contrasts between the incumbent’s policy record and my competing proposals.

In the midst of the largest grassroots movement for policing reforms in U.S. history, which I aimed to represent in office after supporting it long before the murder of George Floyd in 2020, I became the only progressive candidate in 33 (now 36) years to reach the general election for that seat in Congress.

Yet with the prominent exception of Katie Halper & Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone, few outlet explored my 20-point vision to transform criminal justice. And none conducted a rigorous examination of the incumbent’s public track record.

The last time Pelosi appeared in public to debate an opponent was 1987. According to Billboard, the #1 song that year was “Walk Like an Egyptian,” by the Bangles. That was not one generation ago—but two.

In the meantime, journalists have indulged every fabrication that her office produces, from claims about her future plans to false characterizations of her ultimately conservative voting record.

Wearing kente cloth is no substitute for legal reforms that could have stopped police from killing over a thousand—mostly Black and Brown—Americans every year. And human interest stories about premium ice cream are no substitute for the kind of journalism that empowers voters to make better choices.

In my disappointing experience, the press can be relied upon to cover policy issues neither in the abstract, nor even when they are closely implicated in historic election contests. At least the nation’s newspaper of record got one thing right eventually, even if it took a decade after others first observed the object of their eventual epiphany.

Watching Washington’s charlatans continue their machinations from as far away as I can get has offered me some personal solace. I hope the journalists and editors who continue to construct cults of personality supporting authoritarian oligarchs find some path to peace for themselves. 

Paid subscribers can access a preview of my next post. It will address the intersection of climate justice and international relations in the wake of the United Nations COP28 summit that concluded this week.