THE BIG BUSINESS OF BODY CAMS
On a gray afternoon in February, 18-year-old Curtis Deal was shot to death by a Baltimore detective. Police said Deal had darted away and, after a foot chase, turned and raised a handgun toward the undercover officer, who responded with a volley of gunfire. Two months later, on a Saturday night in the Dallas suburb of Balch Springs, an officer shot and killed 15-year-old Jordan Edwards, a passenger in a car that the officer said was backing toward him aggressively.
Normally, official accounts of police fatally shooting black teenagers rest largely on the words of the officers involved, a fraught proposition when public trust of law enforcement is lower than it’s been in decades. But because these two officers were wearing body cameras—and both had remembered to activate them—they weren’t the only witnesses.
In the case of Deal, the body-cam video backed up the officer’s account. But with Edwards, the recording revealed something different:
