How come everybody in north Texas is totally reasonable all of a sudden? People want to film the police but don't hate them, and the police is totally fine with it, but asks them to do so from a safe distance without distracting the police officers.
As long as the people doing the recording are non-threatening white hipsters, this policy works fine. But I guarantee some poor black or hispanic kid is going to get shot because a jumpy cop thinks the camera is a gun, and will likely get off with a minor suspension because the justice system views officers as above the law.
Latent racism (e.g. white cops being nervous around black teenagers) is a huge problem in police work. Combine that with the kind of outright racism, the good old boy networks you see in rural Texas and the sense of "respect mah authoritah" many cops give off and I can easily see how someone would get shot.
> the good old boy networks you see in rural Texas
Arlington, a city of 370k smack between Dallas and Fort Worth is rural?
So the cops will get jumpy and start shooting once a hispanic kid shows up (which, one of them was) because they're good old boys from rural Texas (which Arlington isn't) should we keep digging or would you like to admit that your suppositions don't really have a foundation here?
Arlington isn't exactly "rural", but most of the town is definitely not what most people would call "urban". Dallas has a lot of suburbs that are similar; they're basically subdivisions full of 5,000 sq ft houses built on cheap farm land. Also, being Texas, there's a pretty good chance that anyone you encounter is armed, which makes the cops a lot more cautious.
I'm not saying people shouldn't videotape the cops, but that they should continue to do so at their own risk.
Eh, I think they are just talking reasonable and are in reality anything but.
The film group obviously has an anti-police bias (somewhat understandable given behavior I have seen from cops) and the police obviously would prefer to remain completely unaccountable to the public.
But you can't air these feelings in public and expect to be taken seriously so everyone is "reasonable" while secretly pushing their real agenda. Just like everywhere else I guess.
