Winston-Salem Journal. May 1, 2021.
Editorial: Police video law leads to mistrust
The tortuous slow drip of police video footage in the fatal police shooting of Andrew Brown Jr. in Elizabeth City has confounded national media, which have struggled to explain this state’s convoluted police video law to the rest of the country.
Welcome to North Carolina.
And if it’s any consolation to our visitors, we don’t get it either.
As counter as the law is to the spirit of trust, open government and accountability, that’s how we roll here. And it needs to end.
Consider how, only a day earlier, the city of Columbus, Ohio, handled a similar situation very differently.
Following a fatal police shooting of a Black 16-year-old girl, authorities released body-camera footage of the incident within hours. In Elizabeth City, it will be a matter of weeks.
A Superior Court judge ruled Wednesday that the police footage will not be made public, as both media outlets and the Pasquotank Sheriff’s Office had requested, for at least another 30 days.
Judge Jeffery Foster did, however, rule that Brown’s family will be allowed to view five videos of the incident within 10 days.
As of now, Brown’s family has been able, privately, to view only 20 seconds of footage.
While we wait, wildly conflicting accounts of what happened to Brown are swirling and tensions are rising in the small, majority-Black city in the northeast corner of the state.
Did Brown, a Black man, “make contact” with deputies with his car, as the district attorney suggests? Or was Brown seated at the steering wheel when the shots rang out and tried to move his car only after the deputies advanced and started shooting, as one of the Brown family’s lawyers attests?
The state’s police video law, passed in 2016, requires a judge’s order for its release to the public, which never made sense.
And its primary sponsor is Rep. John Faircloth, a High Point Republican and former police chief.
Time and again the law has bred confusion and frustration as the public tries to sort out what happened in high-profile incidents of police shootings or other uses of force.
And how it is applied can vary wildly from one instance to the next.
In March 2020, following a request by the police chief in Raleigh, a judge released footage of a nonfatal police shooting two days after the incident. But in June 2020, when media requested the release of body-camera footage following the death of a Greensboro man, John Neville, in the Forsyth County Jail, the case wasn’t heard until July - and the videos weren’t released until one week later.
There are many such examples.
The case of Brown, a Black man who was shot while in his car by deputies as they attempted to serve warrants, is disturbing enough in itself.
The lack of access to the deputies’ body-camera footage only heightens tension and increases the space for rumors and misinformation.
What lawmakers also seem not to realize is that police video often justifies an officer’s actions.
After the shooting of Ma’Khia Bryant in Columbus, early accounts had swirled that the youth was shot by a white officer after she had dropped a knife she was holding.
But police footage showed Ma’Khia swinging the knife at a second female, who appears to be pinned against a car, before the officer fired.
The video was released so quickly “because the public deserves to know what happens,” Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther said. “They needed to have this footage … to have this information, to have this transparency, to have this power, given to the community. So, it’s no longer about an officer’s word versus a resident’s word or different neighbors’ takes on things, but we have this footage. And we know that having this footage increases accountability on both sides of a camera.”
Bills sponsored by Democrats in the N.C. General Assembly would add consistency to the state’s police video policy, requiring that footage be released within 48 hours of a request. The legislation also would allow the agency that possesses the video to request a delay.
As we see it, these bills would turn right-side-up what is upside-down under the current law. Police video is a public record and, as such, should be made available to the public. That’s where the law should begin.
Then any requests for exceptions should go before a judge.
The public’s right to know comes first. And until the backward logic of Faircloth’s bill is fixed, we will remain stuck in an endless loop of delay and mistrust.
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Charlotte Observer. May 5, 2021.
Editorial: A surge in tech jobs will test NC’s ability to channel growth and share prosperity
In April, a Swedish plastics manufacturer announced that it would be locating its first U.S. production facility in Gaston County, creating 22 jobs at an average salary of $59,132. That news merited a press release from the state Department of Commerce and a quote from Gov. Roy Cooper.
The announcement was welcome news, especially for Gaston County, but it also puts into perspective just how extraordinary recent announcements about companies coming to the Triangle are. Invitae, a genetic testing company, will bring 374 jobs at $90,000; Fuji Diosynth, a pharmaceutical company, will create 725 new jobs averaging almost $100,000; Google plans to bring a thousand high-paying jobs to Durham. And then there’s the granddaddy of economic development announcements: Apple’s new campus in Research Triangle Park will be home to 3,000 employees earning an average annual salary of $187,000.
North Carolina, a state accustomed to incrementally celebrating new employers and the expansion of existing companies, is now seeing a boom in biomedical and information technology jobs that dwarfs typical job news.
Brooks Raiford, president and CEO at the North Carolina Technology Association, said Apple’s announcement alone may match IBM’s coming to Research Triangle Park in 1965, a historic change that brought thousands of new employees and helped launch RTP as an economic engine. He said winning Apple’s new campus represents “a transformational pivot moment.”
But the surge in tech jobs also raises worries about whether there is such a thing as too much good news. Will rapid job growth and bountiful salaries create problems as well as prosperity?
In the short term, the answer is mostly no. The job announcements have come in a rush, but the impact is a few years away. First, facilities need to be constructed and hiring completed. And the lofty tech salaries hardly mean a big inflationary shift in pay across the workforce. These are highly specialized positions in a period of extraordinary demand for tech workers, particularly those who are top artificial intelligence researchers
There is time to get ready, but it needs to be time well spent. Local governments have taken steps to address growing pressures on housing costs and transportation. But much more needs to be done on regional and statewide levels to adjust to the effects of a rising tech economy that has grown even stronger during the pandemic.
In the Triangle, Charlotte and other North Carolina cities, the tech boom is not creating new problems. It is aggravating existing ones. The need for more affordable housing has been
growing for years. The Triangle and the state have long been behind on mass transit. There’s nothing new about public schools needing more state help to keep up with a growing population.
What is different now is the greater need for collective and coordinated planning involving government, industry and citizens groups. They need to channel the pressures of more jobs and more wealth in ways that benefit people of all incomes and protect the quality of life. Cities such as Austin, Tx., and San Jose, Calif., have enjoyed the benefits of tech booms but are also struggling to cope with sprawl, gentrification and sharply rising housing costs.
The News & Observer’s Aaron Sánchez-Guerra and Anna Johnson last week explored how the boom in tech jobs will challenge the greater Triangle region. In their report, the key to solving the problems of growth was offered by Sally Goettel, president of the board of directors of Dorcas Ministries, which helps people in western Wake County where the new Apple campus will be built.
“The trouble with gentrification and with people getting pushed out of the housing market did not start with the Apple announcement,” she said. “This may exacerbate the problem in some ways, but it is one we can address and have the opportunity to do so if we have the community will to address it.”
The days of economic development being a collection of isolated events – a new plant here, a new distribution center there – are passing. The state and national economies are increasingly interconnected by information and bio technology and so are the challenges of fast growth and income inequality they bring. But those challenges can be overcome if, as Goettel said, “we have the community will.”
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