Jan. 27, 2022 — What are we normalizing?

This night, the information was all about two body-camera movies. One was taken from a gaggle of 5 Memphis law enforcement officials who’ve been fired for the brutal homicide of Tyre Nichols, and the opposite was from a San Francisco officer confronting a home terrorist who was beating Paul Pelosi, the 82-year-old husband of Home Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with a hammer.

There’s a public curiosity purpose for releasing this kind of video footage. One, after all, is to maintain public servants just like the police accountable, and to corroborate their statements after they make them to the courts. It is usually to make sure transparency of policing, metropolis governance, attorneys common, and the courts.

However in an odd approach, these two clips are a part of a normalization of the very crimes which can be being perpetrated on the display.

Police brutality has been an issue in lots of American cities since Reconstruction. Highly effective leaders in cities from Tulsa to Charleston have used not solely the police however armed gangs of white males to interact in racial cleaning of bustling Black-owned companies and the areas wherein they operated and fostered neighborhoods. It didn’t begin with Rodney King or George Floyd or Amadou Diallo. We didn’t must see the Nichols video to know that the 5 law enforcement officials engaged in official misconduct.

And within the Pelosi video, the home terrorist, an individual who believed the 2020 election was stolen, is now going to be endlessly proven assaulting the husband of the third-ranking public official in the USA. It’s video which goes to be unfold amongst the conspiracy theorists who had been chargeable for the Jan. sixth rebellion, and there can be conspiracy theories connected to that video as effectively. We didn’t must see the truth that an assault occurred on an unarmed senior citizen.

This weekend, these movies are positive to look on social media platforms, net presences, and information websites. So will a whole lot of different movies exhibiting every thing from police arrests to residents loudly berating waitstaff to dashing vehicles crashing into freeway obstacles. There are complete TV networks now dedicated to this kind of content material, one in all which covers police shifts like an NFL sport, full with pre-shift and post-shift reveals.

They’re referred to as “content material” by some individuals. However these reality-based movies aren’t, and shouldn’t, be for everybody. And from a coverage standpoint, they’re troubling as a result of it tends to normalize what’s being proven slightly than saying that it’s an aberration. Or, simply plain mistaken.