Jon Fasman - We See It All

O N THE WEST SIDE OF C HICAGO A VENUE BETWEEN T HIRTY -S EVENTH AND Thirty-Eighth Streets in South Minneapolis, there sits a long, low brick building housing a few small businesses. The buildings south side faces a patch of asphalt that in ordinary times could serve as a small parking lot; aside from two rows of glass-block windows near the top, the south side is solid brick. When I saw it, on a balmy July day, the building had been painted purple, with bluish clouds on top and vibrant yellow sunflowers below. Between the flowers and the clouds, in swooping block letters, was painted, You Changed the World, George.

That building sits down the street from the Cup Foods store, where on May 25, 2020, a Minneapolis police officer slowly choked George Floyd to death, in broad daylight and in full view of spectators and their cellphone cameras, as three of his fellow officers looked on. Millions of people saw the horrific video of the incident, which went viral on May 27.

Im writing this sentence on the afternoon of July 12, just a couple of hours after my visit to the intersection now known as George Floyd Square, so I dont know whether or how the weeks of protests that followed Floyds murder affected, or perhaps even determined, the presidential electionstill months ahead as I write, but in the past as you read. Nor do I know what lasting reforms they will have wrought in American policing. But on this warm afternoon, the muralist seems to have gotten it right: George Floyd did change the world.

A couple of doors down from the purple building, I saw a boarded-up shopfront window covered in signs calling to Defund & Dismantle the Police. A row of flowers hanging on a clothesline framed a piece of laminated paper urging people to creatively imagine a world without police. On a bus shelter a few blocks away, a sign showed a balance, with a police car weighing down a school, a hospital, a bus, and houses, and asked, Why are we fighting over crumbs for the things we need? #DefundMPD.

Minneapoliss city council pledged to abolish the citys police department, and while as I write that hasnt happened, that they even passed such a measure at all shows how much the ground has shifted. Politicians, particularly Democrats, used to be terrified of appearing soft on crime. City politicians never wanted to get on the wrong side of the police and their unions. Now many otherwise left-wing, pro-union activists and politicians cast police unions as impediments to reform, and openly discuss curtailing their collective-bargaining power.

Two things link all of these developments. First, they involve a long-overdue rethinking of the rules around American policing. I dont agree with all of them. I would rather see a world with good, well-regulated police than no police, for instance, and in my view, the city council acted precipitously in vowing to abolish the Minneapolis Police Department without a full consideration of what comes next. But as a society, we have asked the police to do too much. To the extent that defund the police means redirect some share of the police budget to social service workers better equipped to handle many of the problems that, by default, police handle today, Im all for it. To the extent that it means wantonly reduce police budgets for political reasons, Im against it. Vindictive, grandstanding policy is almost always bad policy.

Second, the protests escalated and spread across the world only after I submitted the manuscript for this book, on May 30, 2020. Hence this preface.

Its true that the protests did not directly concern surveillance technology, the main subject of my book. But George Floyds apprehension and murder were recorded on security and cellphone camerasboth of which I discuss in these pages. During the protests that followed, cellphone cameras captured police officers assaulting unarmed, peaceful protesters and driving SUVs through crowds. In many instances, they shot rounds of nonlethal rubber bullets at journalists (nonlethal just means they dont kill you; they still injured numerous people, some permanently, simply for engaging in First Amendmentprotected activity). Thomas Lane, one of the four officers present at Floyds death, bolstered his motion to have his aiding and abetting charges tossed with transcripts from officers body-worn camera (bodycam) footage.

The eighty-two pages of the transcript make for horrific reading. Those transcripts showed that Floyd was, as he said, scared as fuck, pleading with officers, Please, dont shoot me. He told officers that he couldnt breathe fifty-one times, at one point saying, Ill probably just die this way. Without bodycams and cellphone cameras, Floyds death may have gone unnoticed by the wider world.

That points to an important benefit to camera footage that I perhaps paid too little attention to in my chapter on the topic. I was mainly concerned with the question of whether being filmedby bodycams or cellphonesimproves officer behavior, principally as measured by use-of-force and other civilian complaints. On that question, the social science is ambiguous: some studies have found that outfitting officers with bodycams results in fewer use-of-force complaints; others have found that doing so produces no noticeable changes.