Publicize more police video; and can Hartford change?

By Chris Powell

Video from police cruiser dashboard cameras and body cameras worn by officers in Connecticut isn’t just protecting civilians against police misconduct, as was the main objective of camera advocates years ago. These videos, like the ones made quickly available by the state’s inspector general after recent shootings of criminals, are also protecting officers against suspicion.

When broadcast by television stations and posted on news organization internet sites, the videos are publicizing some of the contemptible conduct to which police respond every day, conduct often committed by repeat offenders. 

Even so, police departments resent requests for access to dashboard- and body-camera video, which are sometimes made by news organizations and parties aggrieved by an arrest. Fulfilling the requests means extra work. 

But the public interest would be served if police departments made a point of quickly posting on their internet sites all video of violent, angry, or disgraceful conduct encountered by police.

Of course criminal defense lawyers might complain that publicizing such videos could prejudice the trials of their clients. But such complaints would be empty, since Connecticut has few trials and most criminal cases are plea-bargained down to a fraction of the offenses committed, and the videos would be just part of the arrest reports the law already requires police to release.

To dispose of any question of police bias against criminal defendants, state law should require police departments to post all such videos promptly along with arrest reports.

If such videos also disclose what looks like police misconduct, so be it. For the sake of accountability the public is entitled to as complete an account of crime as can be provided, and dashboard- and body-camera video is less likely to lie than people are.

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After taking his oath of office, Hartford’s new mayor, Arunan Arulampalam, may have channeled John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address from 63 years ago, wherein the new president declared: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”

Arulampalam asked his constituents to take their own oath with him: “Will you pledge that for the next four years as a community, we will put aside our divisions, our vitriol, our cynicism, our old way of doing things, and that we will work together for the sake of the city?

“Will you promise to fight for hope, for light — to fight for each other, not just to support each other but to uphold each other? Will you promise to sustain, support, to uphold with passion and purpose everything we need to do to bring this city forward for the next four years?”

Arulampalam’s audience at the Old State House heartily agreed, but this was easy, since the new mayor did not specify “everything we need to do” in Hartford — or anything, for that matter — and any such list might require many more years than the four for which he has been elected.  

After all, Hartford’s population is overwhelmingly poor and dependent on government benefits and subsidies, and civic participation is low. As usual few people voted in the city election that chose the mayor in November. So how much do the city’s residents have to give? Or, really, how much can they afford to stop taking?  

The fate of Hartford and all Connecticut’s cities lies less with them than with the rest of the state, which, through state government, long has been sending them huge amounts of money without reducing their poverty or improving the education of their children, failures that pass without notice except when they can be construed as evidence that still more of what doesn’t work should be done. 

This policy has only appeased city employee unions, the engines of the giant Democratic pluralities the cities produce in state and national elections, which seems to be the policy’s real objective.

Will Mayor Arulampalam continue this policy or will he recognize it as part of “our old way of doing things,” needing to be changed?

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

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