The president’s plans include launching a task force to study police practices, creating new rules to be issued for military-style equipment (including high-powered weapons and military vehicles), and placing tighter restrictions on money used by law enforcement agencies to purchase equipment for police officers.
Perhaps most notable is the administration’s reveal of a three-year, $263 million proposal to supplement and assist community law enforcement. The plan, which would still need approval by Congress, includes $75 million to cover 50,000 new body cameras to be worn by police officers to essentially record officers’ whereabouts and actions. The goal, Obama said, is to ensure our distance from building a [pullquote]”militarized culture inside our local law enforcement.”[/pullquote]
Overall responses to the newly announced program, as might have been expected, are mixed. While some see the new cameras and the proposed “Task Force on 21st Century Policing” as steps in the direction of built trust and accuracy, others view the plans, and more specifically the body cameras, as technological interference that invalidates the innate trust of law enforcement officials.
Paula Reid ’15, head of the upper school’s ACTION club, gave me her thoughts on the matter:
I thought Obama was put in a very hard position at that moment being a black man and the president of the U.S. Like many others, he probably felt let down by the U.S. justice system because any of the unarmed black men that get killed and have been killed by police officers could have been Obama himself or one of his children (if he had sons). Recognizing that there is a national problem and investing in body cameras for police officers so that there is trustworthy evidence for these kinds of situations is a step in the right direction, but overall I think the body cameras only solve the problems on the surface of an issue with much deeper roots. The murders of men and boys like Mike Brown, Trayvon Martin, Akai Gurley, and the countless other victims can be traced to the racism that this country was built on and the (not so subtle) forms of racism, prejudice, and discrimination that exist towards black people, and especially black boys and men, today.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oym0SyTFhsY&feature=youtu.be
See below for more information on the impact of police body cameras from previous experiences as well as implications for the future.