Following the death of George Floyd and the ensuing violent riots that raged across the nation in the summer of 2020, the thugs orchestrating the Black Lives Matter rampage demanded that police officers wear body cameras in order to document the supposed widespread, systemic, institutional racism motivating said police officers to wantonly slay defenseless, unarmed minorities.
BLM-aligned organizations like Justice for All and the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations advocated for legislation and funding to expand the use of body cameras, characterizing the use of the devices as a needed social justice reform.
Some, however, had more foresight than honesty and argued against expanding the use of body cameras. Why? Well, these activists claimed that body cameras were a form of illegal surveillance of minority groups, a waste of money on police departments that really should be abolished, and a biased tool favoring the police officer’s perspective and context over that of the subject the police is dealing with.
In all likelihood, this cunning subset of self-styled social justice warriors actually just leapt ahead to the logical conclusion that the vast majority of police officers are not homicidal racists bent on exterminating ethnic minorities and that maybe fatal altercations with police officers are less the fault of highly-trained law enforcement professionals and more the result of fast-paced, high-stakes encounters with unhinged personalities.
Sure enough, as the body cameras went into effect, videos began popping up demonstrating that cops weren’t acting out their demented Klansman fantasies on the job, but were often responding to life-threatening situations. In 2021, for example, police in North Carolina attempted to arrest Andrew Brown, Jr. on drug charges, but Brown instead attempted to strike officers with his vehicle, prompting them to shoot him — all captured on bodycam.
When a U.S. Marshals task force attempted to arrest Winston Boogie Smith, Jr. in Minneapolis, he opened fire on the law enforcement officers, who shot and killed him. Again, all captured on bodycam. Congolese immigrant Patrick Lyoya was stopped by police in Michigan for mismatched registration plates and was subsequently shot and killed by Officer Christopher Schurr. Thanks to bodycam footage, a jury acquitted Schurr of murder after watching Lyoya, who was already resisting arrest, try to shoot Schurr with his own taser.
When a Virginia police officer performed a welfare check on Sydney Wilson, he was rewarded with a slash with a knife as Wilson chased him down a hallway, blade hefted high. What a surprise, the whole thing was captured on bodycam.
After DeShawn Leeth crashed a car on the Ohio Turnpike, his first instinct apparently was to attack the Ohio State Troopers who showed up to help him, threatening to kill them while rushing at them madly. One trooper fired his taser at Leeth, who seemed unaffected while pummeling the trooper and saying, “I’m stronger than you,” before stealing the police cruiser.
(Ironically, Leeth was a “Transformative Justice Fellow” with Debt Free Justice. The howling man leaping over beaten cops to steal a state vehicle is probably not the most ideal advertisement for the social justice group’s services.) In another instance caught on bodycam, police officers showed up to a reported threat in Brooklyn, where Damon Louther attacked them with a knife.
This is but a sampling of examples of how the bodycam program demanded by BLM and its far-left affiliates ended up backfiring, exposing not some culture of racism and bigotry festering among corrupt cops across the nation but the wild and unpredictable threats that police officers face on a daily basis.
Now, left-wing activists have demanded that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents wear bodycams. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem confirmed this week that ICE agents are being equipped with bodycams.
“As funding is available, the body camera program will be expanded nationwide. We will rapidly acquire and deploy body cameras to DHS law enforcement across the country,” Noem affirmed. Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin noted that ICE agents are “asking for those bodycams.”
Citing a “highly-coordinated campaign against our law enforcement,” McLaughlin suggested that equipping ICE agents with bodycams is not so much a matter of bowing to the Left, but rather of exposing the aggression and violence that ICE agents face on a daily basis. “These agitators are using different tactics to provoke our law enforcement and then take it, selectively clip, edit, and make it go viral. We’re seeing that constantly, so this is going to be great transparency for the American people.”
Democrats in Congress have been clamoring for bodycams for ICE agents following the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis last month. Good was accused of attempting to run ICE agents over with her car, after first obstructing ICE operations and refusing to comply when agents asked her to move her vehicle.
Pretti had brought a gun with him when he interfered with federal agents and was caught on video assaulting and being tackled by federal agents the week before he was killed. What might bodycam footage have revealed in these cases? Would left-wing agitators still be celebrating Good and Pretti as martyred heroes if they had seen video footage of Good aiming her car at the ICE agent who shot her and looking directly at him as she laid her foot on the accelerator, or if they had video evidence of Pretti’s gun sticking out of his waistband as he rushed federal officers?
The riots in Los Angeles and other Democrat-run cities last year provided ample evidence that the left-wing activists and agitators impeding and targeting ICE operations are violent, and intend to do bodily harm to federal law enforcement officials for simply enforcing federal law.
Bodycam footage will likely demonstrate that these instances of violence and aggression are far from random, but are instead epidemic. Already, viral videos on social media have suggested that the progressives “fighting” for “justice” and “inclusion” are little more than delusional bullies. In a recent video shared by Right Angle News Network, a black ICE agent confronts several agitators, including one whom he addresses as “sir.”
Apparently, “misgendering” is a worse offense in the leftist’s moral code than racism. The agitators immediately start berating the agent as a “house [racial epithet].”
The BLM bodycam push has evinced over the years that police officers are not members of some nationwide law enforcement Ku Klux Klan chapter, but are largely responsible men and women who put themselves in harm’s way to protect those around them, sometime requiring the use of deadly force.
Just so, equipping ICE agents with bodycams is unlikely to turn up any evidence that they are racist Gestapo stormtroopers, while videos of left-wing lunatics hurling derogatory epithets and, more to the point, cinder blocks or explosives are about to become far more common.
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