A campus cop in Cincinnati shoots and kills a motorist he pulled over. He says he was dragged when the man tried to drive away. A fellow officer backs him up.
But the officer's own body camera tells a different story.
It shows Officer Ray Tensing lied about being dragged by the car, a prosecutor said this week, and he likely lost his temper when driver Samuel DuBose wouldn't get out of the car. Now, Tensing is charged with murder. And that video is critical evidence in the latest racially tinged and explosive encounter between police and the public.
So, why are some in local law enforcement reluctant to use those body cameras — unquestionably a valuable tool?
For some pretty intriguing reasons, actually.
The Pasco County Sheriff's Office has outfitted all of its officers with body cameras. The Gulfport Police Department uses them. Tampa police are trying out 60 of them, and Clearwater just took on five. The right-headed theory is that they can protect police and the people while recording what actually happens.
Others are cautious. They talk high costs and privacy rights and worry this is a knee-jerk reaction. And they talk trust.
Pinellas Sheriff Bob Gualtieri says body cameras won't fix mistrust of law enforcement and could even provoke an encounter into turning worse.
"A body camera's not going to build that trust," he says.
So what is?
Changing a culture, he says. Building relationships.
"If cops … need a camera on them to do the right thing, boy, we've got a problem," he says.
And given the national headlines, in some corners this is true.
Gualtieri says some of the situations we've seen in the news appear to be what he terms "contempt of cop" — an officer who gets angry at something a subject does. But he compares these high-profile incidents to plane crashes or bad doctors — tragic, but not the norm.
But, we are where we are in this moment in America. And doesn't video like this one released to the public foster some form of — if not trust, maybe post-trust?
They also talk cost: "I don't see how you sustain it," says Hillsborough Sheriff David Gee. He has seen numbers that estimate 36 months of body cameras could exceed $7 million.
But here is the most intriguing criticism I heard this week: Body cameras could take away an officer's discretion to, say, give one ticket instead of four that could be justified, to take into account someone's circumstances, to factor in that a person is clearly poor or has a car full of children to get home or just deserves a break.
"You're going to get the robot," Gee says. "He's going to be on film."
St. Petersburg police Chief Tony Holloway has said his department will eventually use the cameras, though he, too, has expressed concerns. I ask about Cincinnati, and yes, he's seen the video now gone viral.
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Explore all your options"I think the camera speaks for itself," he says in that case.
Exactly.
"But then I keep asking the same key question," he says. "Are we in this world now where we don't trust anything?"
I get that, too. And maybe we are.
There will be glitches that will need fixing. Already, we have a law that shields body camera video taken on private property from disclosure under public record laws.
But I keep going back to Cincinnati and a killing that would have relied on the word of the officer who fired the gun and the fellow officer who backed him up.
Except for the camera that did not lie.
Contact Sue Carlton at carlton@tampabay.com.