Video contradicted Garland cop's story of deadly police chase, led to manslaughter charges

For the second time in recent months, a Dallas-area police officer shot someone then filed a false police report about the incident. In October it was a Dallas cop who shot a mentally ill man, then along with his partner filed a false report declaring he'd approached them menacingly with a raised knife. Now, a Garland officer has been charged with manslaughter after an August 31st incident in which he plowed his car into a suspect's at the end of a high-speed chase, falsely claiming the man had rammed his police vehicle. Officer Patrick Tuter fired 41 rounds hitting the man three times, emptying his clip and reloading twice during the barrage.

The DA's office asked for a $10,000 bond, well short of the standard $25,000 bail typical of manslaughter charges in Dallas County. But the judge raised it to $100K, declaring “I’m not concerned about whether he is going to return to court or not. I’m concerned about public safety.” According to the judge, "the only other officer on scene did not fire, and also sought refuge from the bullets behind his patrol car," reported the Dallas News.

According to Mint Press News, "Since 9/11, about 5,000 Americans have been killed by U.S. police officers, which is almost equivalent to the number of U.S. soldiers who have been killed in the line of duty in Iraq." Nearly all of these are deemed justified by Internal Affairs investigators, but for the most part the press and the public must take the word of police flacks in determining what happened.

These episodes to me demonstrate the need for police departments to quickly move to body cams worn by officers that can corroborate police accounts or dispel lies when they dissemble after the fact. "Trust us, we're the government" just isn't good enough in an era when the fact of police "testilying" is well established and video is ubiquitous and cheap. The blog Simple Justice has a running series titled "But for Video" describing episodes where video documented police misconduct that would otherwise have gone undetected.

Dashcams have improved the situation and helped debunk the officer's false report in this case. (There was also a woman in the car with the deceased suspect who likely contradicted his story; press reports so far haven't revealed whether the second officer backed up Tuter's false report.)  But too often the tech malfunctions at just the wrong moment, or the right one from the perspective of officers covering up misconduct. In Cincinnati recently, an officer's dashcam reportedly malfunctioned seconds before he ran over an innocent bystander during a high speed chase. This was the second recent episode where the same officer's dashcam malfunctioned at a critical moment; the first in 2012 involved a high-profile shooting. There are also many instances when dashcams are functioning but simply pointed in the wrong direction.

Body cams and mics for police would provide evidence of misconduct when it happens, protect officers from false accusations, and provide better evidence for prosecutors to use in court. There's little excuse in the 21st century for not deploying such technology as rapidly as budgets will allow. Certainly you could probably outfit the entire Garland Police Department with them for the amount the lawsuit in this case by the victim's family will ultimately cost the taxpayers.