Kevin Johnson For Cops Analysis

In his essay “For Cops…” Kevin Johnson claims that videos of police officers are placing their actions under new scrutiny and changing the way that claims against officers are played out in court. Police have responded by trying to limit such recordings when they feel that they interfere with police actions. The fear that is most present in law enforcement is that these videos will cause officers to change how they behave in a life or death situation. To combat this, officers are now receiving training to deal with being recorded. The only upside to these videos, according to Johnson, is that they are helping victims tell their stories and making them credible. There are upsides and downsides to videotaping police officers. While one does …show more content…
Cameras have been put in every phone, which everyone has. By everyone having cameras everyone is able to video cops. All it has taken is a few videos to spark a revolution. Videos like Rodney King’s caused other people to start videoing police every time they saw them. Which then started exposing how many cops were crooked or made the wrong decisions. With this explosion of videoing also came the legality aspects of videoing police officers. At first many people thought that you weren’t able to video police officers because they weren’t able to consent to being videotaped. The idea was that both people had to consent to videoing. Without consent, the video could not be used as evidence. In recent years laws have changed that have made it legal to record police when they are on duty or in public places. The only stipulation with that law is that the witness doing the recording cannot interfere with the police procedures. This change in law allowed people to become more active in police investigations.
With all the videos of police brutality there has been a decrease in trust in the police. Many people now avoid calling the police in a situation because they think that they will do more harm than help. Because of these videos people, especially minorities, don’t trust the police. People who aren’t minorities don’t trust the police. The public now doesn’t want to call the police which could …show more content…
More and more videos surface of police beating suspects every day and the beating is not for the right reasons. Most people have said that police brutality has just increased in the past years, attributing that to lesser standards in vetting police candidates. When in reality police brutality has not increased, it has just become more exposed and less tolerated. In the past when a police brutality case was brought forward most people blamed the victim and the police officer received no punishment, allowing them back onto the force and into the public to repeat his actions. Now with video evidence police officers are receiving punishments and less and less people are tolerating police sliding by punishments because of their status. Riots have ensued because of court’s ruling in the officer’s favor when they shouldn’t have. Officers, such as Betty Shelby, Ray Tensing and Daniel Pantaleo, were let go of all charges because of their status. Daniel Pantaleo was a NYCPD officer who held Eric Garner in a chokehold, which later lead to his death in 2014. Pantaleo was not charged with murder or even manslaughter. Betty Shelby was an officer in Tulsa, Oklahoma and he killed Terence Crutcher in 2016. Shelby was later acquitted in 2017. These officers murdered people and there was video proof of it, even then they were still set free because of their status as a police officer. Riots and protests were in their