In Sight

A central argument of Out of Sight is that when people see horrible things, they are outraged, and thus corporations do everything possible to separate consumers from production so that they don’t see workers dying like at Triangle or rivers burnings like the Cuyahoga. Instead, when these things happen in Bangladesh, it might get the attention to people like me, but the general public basically doesn’t care and thus no sustained movement develops to force accountability on corporations.

Some of the same dynamics are at work with police cameras. I heard a lot of people last night express frustration that the murder of Eric Garner was filmed and the cop still got off scot free. And that’s really messed up. Police cameras are no panacea. But they are a tool. If Garner’s murder is not filmed, no one knows about it. The same dynamic worked with Rodney King’s beating over twenty years ago. The cameras open our eyes to the horrors of racist police violence. Requiring them is something we must do. But just because this stuff is filmed doesn’t mean that it will necessarily lead to more convictions of murderous police officers. There’s a whole infrastructure set up to protect these cops. Unpeeling one layer of this onion brings us closer to justice but doesn’t guarantee it, not when you have a justice system set up to let cops off and not when you have an overwhelming attitude among many white Americans that “these people” should just follow the cops’ orders. But when the cameras bring us out to protest, express outrage, and demand justice, that places pressure on the police and their supporters to clean up their act. If they react like jerks to this pressure, as so many have done in recent weeks, then we can build on that too.

So fight for the cameras. If it’s not for the cameras, people aren’t on the street last night and continuing to express outrage today. It’s just another dead black man otherwise, one of far too many, the vast majority of which die from police violence without any movement for justice arising out of it. Just don’t expect the cameras to lead to prosecutions of cops. Not yet. Even if that’s absolutely what should be demanded. There is much more pressure that needs to be applied at more pressure points first. But like the Triangle Fire and the Cuyahoga River Fire, or for that matter the Ray Rice video, the knowledge that comes from viewing horrible things leads to meaningful calls for change.

Meanwhile, a white cop in Phoenix murdered an unarmed black man last night. Just another case of racist police violence toward people of color.