September 22, 2018<\/p>\n
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\u2019 2\u201d Black woman outside the YWCA.<\/p>\n
As the press dutifully reported,<\/a> Police Chief Zikukski was \u201coutraged\u201d at any criticism. \u00a0\u00a0DA Cornwell sternly exclaimed that \u201cthere is only one, only one conclusion that can be made! There was no misconduct by the police officers involved.\u201d \u00a0Mayor David proudly confirmed that “after reviewing the videos, I can say without hesitation, the officers responded and acted appropriately.\u201d\u00a0 The DA agreed: \u201cYou would have to be from another planet to come up with any other conclusion.”<\/p>\n Why such language and why such a show of force?<\/p>\n The city, county, and police do face a common problem:\u00a0 community complaints of police violence are escalating all across the country. That\u2019s true locally as well.\u00a0 In less than a month we have seen three instances of community mobilization against police violence, two backed by video and bystanders\u2019 accounts (one on the harsh detention of Black\/disabled children here<\/a> and the YWCA\u2019s account here<\/a>).\u00a0 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. \u00a0So much for transparency and oversight.<\/p>\n This should put an end to liberal reformers\u2019 hopes for body cameras, which is now a $ billion industry. \u00a0In the wake of Ferguson and increasing exposes on police brutality, many reformers called for police forces to adopt body cameras.\u00a0 When they know they are under observation, so the argument went, people, even police, behave better. \u00a0And public confidence in the police would be reaffirmed.\u00a0 Or so the argument went.<\/p>\n Data from surveys of large urban police forces<\/a> soon undercut these assumptions, as they<\/a> showed that police wearing cameras used force and faced public complaints at the same rate as officers without cameras.\u00a0 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<\/a> in 2017 over giving $1 million for more police and cameras in town).<\/p>\n When the Mayor tells us \u201cbody 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:\u00a0 open up to public oversight the data on stops, arrests and bail by race, gender, age\u2014something city and and county officials have rejected forcefully in past years. What are they hiding?<\/p>\n The one statistic we do have isn\u2019t reassuring: diversity in their ranks.\u00a0\u00a0 At the Broome County Jail, the Correctional Officer force is 97.5% white<\/a>.\u00a0 As for the city\u2019s police force, this is what the Press and Sun-Bulletin reports<\/a>: \u201cAmong the ranks of the 138-member Binghamton Police Department, 13 officers are women and three are black. If the department reflected the city\u2019s demographics, 69\u00a0officers would be women and 21 would be black.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"post_folder":[],"class_list":["post-63","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","post-preview"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/justtalk.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/justtalk.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/justtalk.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/justtalk.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/justtalk.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/justtalk.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66,"href":"https:\/\/justtalk.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions\/66"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/justtalk.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/justtalk.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/justtalk.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_folder","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/justtalk.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_folder?post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}