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Sure, and that's not wrong either. But the over-reaction at the time had me shaking my head, and that was before I recently saw a video from the time where - gold-plated coffin? what is to all intents and purposes a state funeral? the mayor kneeling and weeping as if at the tomb of a martyred saint? What the hell???
That's way more than "let's have a national conversation about the police and if they do get too much leeway".
Eh. OTOH, the widespread adoption of body-worn cameras has been a nearly unalloyed good (a rare culture-war thing!). It's reduced excessive force, it's vindicated cases w/ justified use of force and it's shed light that neither totalizing view was remotely correct.
I'm not sure we would have gotten them in an alternate timeline without that national conversation.
But the conversation would still have been possible without the deification of Floyd, who - whatever sort of death he suffered - was indeed a petty criminal engaging in fraud at the time of his death. I am not saying he deserved to die or that any one should be treated in that way, but the over-reaction afterwards was indeed like he was some martyr for religion. He wasn't a good guy. Bad guys also have human rights and shouldn't be killed by ignorance or malice, but the immediate emotional reaction was something like the death of Princess Diana where the real person got lost in this persona built up by a lot of hysteria and neediness, and has collapsed in the same way (Floyd's worship much faster than Diana's worship).
And worship is indeed the only word that I can find to fit - the mayor weeping while kneeling before the coffin, touching it like it's a relic? That's the kind of display that would have drawn the attention of Thomas Cromwell and invited a visitation from his commissioners about superstition and idolatry.
I'm not sure that conversation would have been possible at a policy level without the (largely, I agree, bullshit) personal angle. American politics doesn't seem to work at such a wonkish level. Without being too cynical, it seems at least possible that it just never happened otherwise.
The parallels to Trump are also interesting: would it have been possible to get conservative politics and a retreat of the worst of the LGBT (not that I want to roll back some level of acceptance, but surely high school locker rooms were a bridge way too far) without the personal angle of a thrice-married adulterer?
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I think it's a bit early to say that. Haven't a lot of places been starting to struggle with poor police recruitment on a similar timeline to rolling out body cameras?
It could be that the loss of privacy from body cameras isn't relevant to the recruitment problems. Body cameras could even be helping recruitment by reducing officer concern over false accusations. But until someone identifies and fixes the cause of the recruitment problems I'd be reluctant to conclude body cameras aren't relevant.
Personally, I think I'd find it quite unpleasant to have a camera and microphone active for most of the time I spend at work. Especially when those recordings could be released to the public.
The cops wanted the body cameras because they thought it would clear up false accusations/spurious complaints. Police recruitment problems have to do with hollowing out of the native working class male population through brain drain and low fertility and the need for police recruits to be super squeaky clean goody-goody two shoes- driving problems, drug tests, gambling debt(it's thought to cause susceptibility to bribery), MIPs exclude a huge portion of the population that finds police work appealing.
At least that's what my police officer friends tell me.
That doesn't match what I remember. Why did it take a national conversation to get body cameras in place if both police officers and reform advocates wanted them? Who else could have been getting in the way?
Additionally, unions in multiple large cities have demanded raises for wearing body cameras. This would be a very strange move by the unions if officers in these locations wanted body cameras.
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Yeah... you don't think the social movement to demonize the police might be more relevant here? Especially since it was the same movement that demanded the body cams, and thus explaining the timing?
Indeed, the prevalence of body cam footage has undermined the demonize-the-police movement considerably.
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Possibly! If we fix that problem, keep the body cameras, and the recruitment crisis goes away then the body cameras were probably an unalloyed good.
But as all three happened around the same time it's hard to untangle how much each of the former two contribute to the latter. Police certainly don't seem to have all-positive opinions of body cameras and I can see a number of reasons why even a good cop would hate wearing one.
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