Video evidence of cop wrongdoing is great when it's not being suppressed

Activists for police accountability, as well as analysts and experts on policing and regular old observers appear to agree: many of the high profile cases of police brutality we have heard about in the last few years are simply due to video evidence. More specifically, many of the cases of police officers being disciplined and/or charged criminally are due to video evidence. And that could be one of the reasons that South Carolina—similar to some other agencies across the country—is trying to tighten its grip on video footage involving its officers.

Radley Balko over at the Washington Post is working on a four-part series on law enforcement in South Carolina. Part two looks at the power of video and some of the missteps of the main agency responsible for investigating law enforcement in the state:

Video can also demonstrate the futility of the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED), the state police agency that investigates most officer-involved shootings. Critics say it isn’t necessarily the conclusions SLED investigators draw that are problematic, it’s that they often neglect to pursue inconsistencies between video and officer statements. Worse, each time a new video demonstrates one more of these problems, the state’s law enforcement officials seem to tighten their grip on how and when video gets released to the public — or attempt to prevent it from being released at all.

Lots of police agencies around the country have taken an unreasonable length of time to release dash camera footage to the public or keep it hidden, so South Carolina is not an anomaly on that issue.