If we can’t trust the system to police itself in this most important of civic duties, then why wait for the system at all? If the mandate of protection and inalienable rights has been corrupted, why waste time hoping for change from the top when the very foundation of this country is about people powered revolution to thwart tyranny. We don’t need to shoot with guns. We need to shoot with cameras. We don’t need to break store windows. We need to capture as much truth as possible. We need to watch the watchers. We need to police the police and I need your help.
What would police accountability look like if collectively we could capture the movements of every single patrol from the time they rolled off the lot for their shift to the time they rolled back in. What if the state could never again say, “well, we don’t know what happened off camera,” or “we don’t have the full context.” What if we always had the “full picture”?
What if you had one job any time you saw a cop: smile politely, pull out your phone, press record from the moment you see them until they’re out of frame. And with EVERYONE doing this, what if those videos (geotagged and time stamped) could be stitched together into a cogent narrative that helped us celebrate the heroes who do protect us and expose the bad apples who dishonor the badge and kill our black men and boys? Hard? Sure. Impossible? No. This is possible. This is happening.
