Response to Surveillance Articles

In today’s cultural atmosphere, these articles on recording the police are especially potent. As a photographer, I know that I am able to photograph anything as long as it is in a public space, I can view it from a public space, and there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. So, the fact that the police feel exempt from this is unbelievable to me, especially in light of the murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and the recent murder of Walter Scott. Walter Scott was pulled over for a routine traffic stop, and then shot multiple times in the back as he ran away from officer Michael Slager. The official police report states that Scott reached for Slager’s taser, and was shot in self-defense. A witness’s video, however, shows Scott running away, Slager shooting multiple rounds, and then Slager placing his taser on the ground next to Scott’s unresponsive body. The witness actually waited to see what the official report would say before coming forward with the video he shot on his cell phone. It is because of this video that Slager is being charged with murder instead of working another day as a cop. It is abundantly clear that the recording of police is absolutely necessary. There are too many lost lives and too many discrepancies. In the article about the Rochester woman arrested for taping the police from her own front yard, the cop says, “You know what, you’re gonna go to jail. That’s just not right.” It’s as if he waited until he ran out of patience to make an executive decision to arrest the woman even though she was well within her rights. Not only does it seem absurd to disallow citizens from recording police activity, who exist to serve them, but I am heavily in favor of all police officers being required to wear body cameras. There are cameras in restaurants, in gas stations, in retail stores, in nearly every other workplace imaginable, recording employees twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and yet, police officers are opposed to this. It doesn’t make any sense to me. They should have nothing to hide, and they are not above the law. In these cases, I think photography needs to be there to tap into its potential to document the truth, because who else is going to police the police?