What the Family Sees

The media cries for “transparency” in any public entity and claims to speak for the public. The public clearly has the right to know how their government operates, but the outcry for documents and videos needs to be assessed by a different metric. This is especially true in the case of police-involved shootings.

Jurisdictions have made the unedited video available to members of the family of the deceased suspect along with releasing edited video to media outlets. The issue is allowing parents to watch their child dying in real time. No one should watch that, even in a private setting.

Cincinnati, Ohio police showed a video of a young man being shot while running from a stolen car with a visible firearm in his hand. The police allowed the family to view the unedited footage. The following day, the father of the young man went to the University of Cincinnati graduation ceremony and intentionally struck a uniformed deputy sheriff, who was directing traffic, with his vehicle, killing the officer. The officer had zero involvement in the original incident and was not employed by the same agency that was involved in the shooting of the young man. He was struck simply because he was wearing a uniform and performing a police function.

Grief and outrage are expected from the family members who lost a loved one to violence. But actually viewing the incident in its totality only serves to exacerbate the frustration. In this case, the father lashed out at the first law enforcement officer he found, and a second family suffered a loss of a loved one.