September 22, 2018

Yesterday Binghamton Mayor Richard C. David, Binghamton Police Chief Joseph T. Zikuski, and the Broome County District Attorney Stephen J. Cornwell Jr. launched a joint offensive to denounce those who have protested local police brutality. Standing in front of deep ranks of police officers, they jointly met the press to reject any public charges of the unnecessarily violent arrest of a 5’ 2” Black woman outside the YWCA.

As the press dutifully reported, Police Chief Zikukski was “outraged” at any criticism.   DA Cornwell sternly exclaimed that “there is only one, only one conclusion that can be made! There was no misconduct by the police officers involved.”  Mayor David proudly confirmed that “after reviewing the videos, I can say without hesitation, the officers responded and acted appropriately.”  The DA agreed: “You would have to be from another planet to come up with any other conclusion.”

Why such language and why such a show of force?

The city, county, and police do face a common problem:  community complaints of police violence are escalating all across the country. That’s true locally as well.  In less than a month we have seen three instances of community mobilization against police violence, two backed by video and bystanders’ accounts (one on the harsh detention of Black/disabled children here and the YWCA’s account here).  As in the past, the city, county and police refuse to release any of their surveillance or body-cam footage and rules for them. Even the local media is blinded, the city having rejected (as usual) an attempt by the local press to get a copy of the police’s videos through a freedom of information act.  So much for transparency and oversight.

This should put an end to liberal reformers’ hopes for body cameras, which is now a $ billion industry.  In the wake of Ferguson and increasing exposes on police brutality, many reformers called for police forces to adopt body cameras.  When they know they are under observation, so the argument went, people, even police, behave better.  And public confidence in the police would be reaffirmed.  Or so the argument went.

Data from surveys of large urban police forces soon undercut these assumptions, as they showed that police wearing cameras used force and faced public complaints at the same rate as officers without cameras.  Meanwhile police-controlled cameras rise in ever greater numbers among us, backed forcefully by the Mayor and his allies, including in the past SUNY-Binghamton President Harvey Stenger (who faced his own protests in 2017 over giving $1 million for more police and cameras in town).

When the Mayor tells us “body cameras captured everything at the YWCA from start to finish from multiple angles without favor or bias,” we should demand: let the community see it, all of it, all the time. When city officials proclaim the lack of bias in policing we should ask:  open up to public oversight the data on stops, arrests and bail by race, gender, age—something city and and county officials have rejected forcefully in past years. What are they hiding?

The one statistic we do have isn’t reassuring: diversity in their ranks.   At the Broome County Jail, the Correctional Officer force is 97.5% white.  As for the city’s police force, this is what the Press and Sun-Bulletin reports: “Among the ranks of the 138-member Binghamton Police Department, 13 officers are women and three are black. If the department reflected the city’s demographics, 69 officers would be women and 21 would be black.”