I have never understood the argument against body-cams and dash cams for officers on duty. They protect good officers from false accusations and protect the people from bad officers.

Yeah. I think mostly there just have to be strict standards for when they can be reviewed. Policing is work that requires the exercise of discretion, including -- sometimes -- not enforcing laws to the letter. Rigorous review of every action by a superior could make people less hesitant to exercise their discretion, more rulebound, and that would lead to worse policing and a worse society. So the cameras should be unreviewable if there is not either a death or a claim.

Worse policing than an officer shooting a guy point blank in the face for no reason?

Let's not forget the other officer who lied to corroborate the murder's story. Hopefully he is dealt with as well.

No, abge, and I was not arguing against the cameras.

But we do need to be careful with these arguments I think. We could, after all, put cameras absolutely everywhere, and then we would catch every murderer. Yet even ignoring the expense, I wouldn't want to live in that society.

I'm willing to put up with cameras on police officers, though, given sensible protections, because they carry enormous power and privilege and represent the state, that is, all of us.

I believe what semck is trying to describe is ala 1984. The "Thought Police" and all that. I agree with body cams on cops for sure though.

In order to enforce the law a cop must be able to break the law. This is the ugly truth of it.

I actually sort of agree with semck, especially in this sense;

Even if police body cams were ubiquitous and live streamed to the public or something, it would do nothing to address the underlying problem that Black Lives Matter is protesting: the police in America are not part of the communities they police - they seem them as the enemy and worse, are often explicitly racist against them. As I posted recently we are now even hearing that white supremacist hate groups are intentionally infiltrating the police.

While body cams could help to solve certain surface level problems, they will not solve racist policing; they will not solve illegitimate policing, they will not solve the oppressor/oppressed relationship that the citizenry currently has with their police forces. At core what is wrong with our police is their philosophy of policing. That's not a popular critique to make, more popular is to suggest a new technology can solve it, but we will find I am sure, we we always find in such cases, that it will be "improved means to an unimproved end," with its own set of problems and not really solving the first set.

In my opinion it goes even further than the philosophy of policing. It's about democracy. In a country with a democratic deficit such as the United States, the police becomes the agents of the unelected elites. They enforce their laws, and do not protect the interests of the public. No surprise, then; when their supposed job of protecting us from real threats begins to play second fiddle or even becomes irrelevant (people in New Orleans rarely even bother to call 911, doubly so if they are black).

Eric Garner, remember, was killed for selling loose cigarettes. The people in the community he was part of have no problen with selling loose cigarettes. Yet the police enforced the law of the land; which is increasingly unjust, the laws being made by elites and not by the people.

So that's the *real* underlying problem. Till you fix that, expect more riots, protests, and police brutality.

Diagnosing is great, Thucy, but one needs prescriptions for it to be particularly useful. What are yours (and I mean concretely -- not "stop having the police be the tools of oligarchs" or similar)?

(I don't really agree with most of your diagnoses either, but those are closer to things we've discussed before; some of it has a point).