When Georgia authorities tried to disperse protesters from forested property near Atlanta in January, to make way for the construction of a $90 million police and fire training facilityA confrontation with a group of activists who derided the project as “Police City” resulted in a barrage of gunfire.
A state soldier was wounded, and officers killed a 26-year-old environmental activist named Manuel Esteban Paez Terán. Months later, the shooting is still under investigation, with friends and relatives of the activist disputing official account Terán opened fire first, wounding the soldier.
Investigators, who recently turned over evidence of the incident to a special prosecutor, say that the soldier and other members of the law enforcement task force were near the shooting. don’t wear body camera. The lack of live video evidence has raised questions about what happened and prompted calls for more police agencies to document their actions consistently.
“Why they don’t use cameras, I don’t know,” said the activist’s mother, Belkis Terán, who has called for an investigation into her son’s death to be conducted independently of Georgia authorities. “I don’t trust them,” she said.
Relatively rare a decade ago, police body-worn cameras became more widely adopted after the incident Police shot dead man in 2014 by Michael Brown, 18, of Ferguson, Mo. In some cases, police forces began using them as a result of federal civil rights investigations. Over the past decade, they have become an important tool for both police investigations and efforts to hold law enforcement agencies accountable for misconduct.
“You’re giving a level of evidence that can produce a better outcome,” said Volkan Topalli, a professor of criminology at Georgia State University. Professor Topalli contributed to a research agency pointed out found that, compared to police departments that did not use cameras, police departments faced fewer complaints from the public and their investigators solved more cases.
A dramatic example of the impact of cameras came less than two weeks before the shooting outside Atlanta in January, when body cameras and other surveillance video captured images of police officers in Memphis. . beat Tire Nichols, 29 years old, who later died of his injuries. The footage led to several shootings and five officers were charged with murder.
The rapid use of body-worn cameras, especially by agencies in many of America’s largest cities, has raised public expectations that law enforcement actions will be captured on camera. — and greater suspicion when they are not recorded. Some city police chiefs. push the Ministry of Justice to allow released footage from cameras worn by local officers serving on the federal task force, saying the step was necessary to meet public expectations for transparency.
However, the use of body cameras continues to vary widely and Only seven states have issued the requirement for them, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
At georgia, Sheriff’s Association reports that nearly 90% of the 254 local agencies they surveyed in 2021 are using body-worn cameras in some way. But the Georgia State Patrol, with nearly 800 soldiers, doesn’t regularly arm its officers, relying instead on cameras on dashboards. Neither did the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, part of the deforestation task force and leading the investigation into Terán’s death.
Because most troops operate primarily from their own vehicles, there are only three Georgia State Patrol units – those at the Capitol and the tourist destination of Jekyll Island, and one motorcyclist in metropolitan Atlanta — currently using a body camera, according to Courtney Floyd, a spokeswoman for the agency. “Every marked patrol vehicle has a dash cam fixed to the vehicle,” she said.
John Bagnardi, executive director of the American State Military Association, said several other state police forces share that policy. Although his organization doesn’t track the use of body cameras, he says, “I know some states prefer dash cams, as most of their work is done in and around the vehicle. .”
After the Terán shooting, Democratic lawmakers in Georgia proposed requiring all law enforcement officers in the state to wear body-worn cameras, but the bill did not go to a vote. State Representative Sandra Scott, one of the bill’s sponsors, said opposition to the bill stems from a desire to protect the police force from accountability. “We still have officers doing things they shouldn’t be doing,” she said.
But the Georgia Police Chiefs Association, which helped block the proposal, said it opposed requiring agencies to use body cameras without providing them with money. Each camera can cost around $1,000 to purchase, plus maintenance and video storage costs, and cost is a common concern among agencies that have not yet adopted them.
Some critics of the police say body cameras have done little to curb misconduct. “Police are ready to kill people on camera,” said Micah Herskind, a policy associate at the Southern Center for Human Rights, citing the recent death of Mr. Nichols in Memphis, George Floyd in Minneapolis And Rayshard Brooks in Atlantaall are recorded.
Even experts who advocate the use of body-worn cameras warn that footage can sometimes be misleading or have different interpretations. Seth W. Stoughton, a University of South Carolina law professor and former police officer, told The New York Times: “People disagree on policing and will continue to disagree on exactly what content. that the video shows. for a 2016 video investigation.
The January incident outside Atlanta occurred in the South River Forest in DeKalb County, where the city plans to build an 85-acre training center on land it owns. The project has sparked months of backlash from activists who want to preserve the nearly 400-acre forest and those who oppose what they call further militarization of policing.
Investigators said that officers from the deforestation task force tried to order Terán out of his tent in the woods, and that the activist then shot a state soldier, prompting the other officers to return fire. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation said it found gunshot marks on the activist’s hand and records show Terán purchased the gun used to shoot the soldier.
But the activist’s family members insist that Terán, who is non-binary and known to forest activists as Tortuguita, or Little Turtle, is a pacifist. The family conducted their own autopsy, which found that Terán was shot while sitting cross-legged, arms raised. The family’s autopsy found no trace of gunshot wounds, and neither did an official autopsy conducted by the DeKalb County medical examiner, which found Terán suffered at least 57 gunshot wounds. shoot.
Although investigators said no video footage of the shooting was captured on camera, the audio was. Footage released by the Atlanta Police Department, where officers wear body cameras and in another part of the woods, includes the sound of gunfire in the distance and the voices of officers discussing shooting friendly. Activists captured the exchange, showing that the soldiers wounded one of their own.
In a statement after the footage was released, the state office acknowledged that “at least one statement exists in which an officer speculates that the soldier was shot by another officer in the crossfire.” But it added: “Speculation is not proof. Our investigation does not support that claim.”
The office referred the case last month to a special prosecutor, George Christian, who is the district attorney for the Mountain Court of Justice in northeast Georgia. In a statement this week, Mr Christian said he was working to determine “whether the use of lethal force was authorized” and had not completed a review of the evidence. He did not say when he would make a decision.
