No police body cameras is failure for Tacoma. Manuel Ellis’ death shouldn’t go unseen

Editor’s note: This editorial has been updated since amateur video surfaced Thursday of Tacoma police officers violently engaging with Manuel Ellis.

Cameras are everywhere in today’s surveillance society — on our phones, computers and doorbells. They can be Orwellian and invasive, for sure, but without them, few people outside Minneapolis would be aware of the outrageous killing of George Floyd. The last nine minutes of Floyd’s life, punctuated by his futile cries for breath, were captured last week on amateur cellphone videos and police body cameras.

Here in Tacoma, the sad death of Manuel Ellis played out differently. Like Floyd, Ellis was a black man who died from oxygen deprivation under police restraint. But unlike Floyd, Ellis’ homicide unfolded without a public audience — and without a full video record of what happened.

That’s because the Tacoma Police Department still doesn’t have a body-camera program, five years after it was identified as a key way to improve law enforcement accountability and build trust with a local African American community that understandably feels unsafe.

Visual evidence can also provide a defense for good cops, both in the court of law and the court of public opinion. Without it, people tend to fill the void with all kinds of information, some of it fiction.

That should alarm the many honorable TPD officers who must go out on the street and face angry protesters in the coming days.

City officials have much to sort out from Ellis’ death, which occurred around 11:30 p.m. March 3 at a dark intersection in a South Tacoma neighborhood. The Pierce County medical examiner ruled it a homicide, and the county prosecutor will determine if it was justifiable or criminal, News Tribune staff writer Stacia Glenn reported Wednesday.

But one lesson is already clear: The city must end the delays and prioritize the purchase of body cameras for patrol officers this year.

Spokane has had a body-cam program since 2016, and it signed a five-year contract for upgraded equipment in December. Why has Tacoma, a city of similar size, not made a similar investment?

Deputy Mayor Keith Blocker got it right this week, saying Tacoma had failed by letting the program languish this long. He noted the vital role of recorded images in exposing Floyd’s senseless death at the hands of white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.

“If there was no camera, quite frankly, it would have been the officer’s word against a dead black man’s word,” Blocker said at Tuesday’s City Council meeting. “And we know how that turns out.”

Mayor Victoria Woodards said Thursday night that she’s ordering the city manager to allocate funds for body cameras immediately. Her announcement came shortly after a short cellphone video surfaced, showing TPD officers taking down Ellis the night of his death. But that drive-by video shows only a few seconds of the melee, far less revealing than what we saw in the George Floyd tragedy.

The video images that shocked the world show Floyd begging for his life and gradually losing consciousness while Chauvin kneeled on his neck.

The recordings are hard to watch — sickening but essential, like ipecac syrup for our society’s soul. Forcing ourselves to collectively confront and expel this poison can put us on a course of racial healing.

The images also gave Floyd’s family a small measure of immediate justice. This was a cold-blooded killing, period. Watch the video, and it’s obvious why all four Minneapolis officers on the scene have already been fired and criminally charged in the death of Floyd, 46.

Here in Tacoma, there is no such clarity in the death of the 33-year-old Ellis. The case is nuanced, with reports that he had drugs in his system, struggled with mental health issues and was spoiling for a fight with Tacoma cops the night he died.

Unraveling all of this will require a thorough examination by Pierce County investigators, and that’s OK. Being patient with the criminal justice system is one of the duties of US citizenship.

But no matter the outcome, skeptics will remain — because they didn’t see it with their own eyes.

Requiring cops to wear body cameras is not a panacea for racial injustice. One large study of Washington, D.C. officers found that cameras had no measurable effect on police use of force or citizen complaints.

There also are ongoing concerns about privacy rights for individuals who encounter police, plus the expense and logistical challenges of storing thousands of hours of recorded footage.

No doubt some Tacoma budget hawks will say the city can’t afford a body-camera program, especially with the coronavirus shutdown blowing an estimated $40 million hole in the general fund.

We say the city can’t afford not to fulfill a promise it made from the outset of its Project Peace initiative in 2015, especially at a time when the black community’s trust in the city has plummeted.

Tacoma leaders should heed the plea of City Councilman Conor McCarthy and fast-track money for the program before the end of this year.

Unrest in the streets shouldn’t be necessary to make police body cameras a priority. But now that the unrest is here, it would be foolish to ignore.

This story was originally published June 4, 2020 at 11:45 AM.