Ferguson Effect had no effect on Ben Fields

Some big city mayors and even FBI head Jim Comey theorize the Ferguson Effect, passerby videos of cops behaving badly, including murder, has inhibited arrests in high crime areas, spiking crime rates. The data is mixed; some big city crime rates are up; some are down, with no definitive connection between videotaping and crime rates possible. But if there is a Ferguson Effect, it certainly didn't inhibit high school cop Ben Field from going violent with a teen girl in Columbia, SC, flipping the chair bound troublemaker upside down before tossing her across the room. The lesson here is that when bad cops go berserk, their rage makes them oblivious to the ubiquitous cell cameras recording their violent outbursts. The vast majority of cops who are capable of controlling their non professional emotions or character flaws, likely view the taping of their citizen interactions positively; they damn the unruly citizen, not the professional gendarme. But seeing the near weekly stomach turning videos of brutal cops traumatizing, injuring and sometimes killing unarmed, not violent citizens, makes one wonder how many thousands, millions maybe, have been victimized without any means of redress whatsoever before the video revolution. 

 

I revere and respect the police who have helped me several times including once preventing an imminent mugging while sitting on a Chicago park bench with a friend decades ago. But being white and affluent, I neither experienced nor fretted once about being victimized by a renegade cop. The solutions are many, including weeding out psychologically unfit applicants, promptly dumping the unfit once they demonstrate incompetence or worse, and alleviating the joblessness, despair, blight and institutional racism which continue to plague our minority and poor communities. And how about if the vast majority of good cops stop following the 'blue code' which prevents them rating out the bad cops whose disgusting conduct jeopardize the safety of the citizenry they're sworn to protect, and well as making the good cops' work much tougher and dangerous?