Pacific Views

Can't Tell The Brown People Apart

The nice thing about having cameras everywhere is that, in addition to watching civilians, they ostensibly watch the police. I wouldn't trust this government with that kind of power for a minute, but apparently the British were a bit mistaken in their belief that their own government could be trusted with it. After all, when they're in charge of the evidence, you never know what might happen:

LONDON, 23 August 2005 — Scotland Yard was yesterday challenged by London Underground officials over CCTV footage taken from three cameras trained on the Stockwell tube station platform where the mistaken shooting of 27-year-old Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes by armed anti-terror police took place a day after the failed bombings on July 21.

The police returned the three CCTV tapes saying that they were blank and no good to the investigation. But London Underground officials and transport unions have challenged this claim suggesting that the tapes have either been lost or erased.

A Transport Union official quoted in the Evening Standard newspaper confirmed that “at least three of the four cameras were working. There were no reports of anything wrong with the cameras. Sometimes you may have trouble with one camera, but staff cannot understand how none of the four recorded anything.” A station logbook which records all reports of faulty equipment had no entry regarding the cameras at the time of the shooting on July 22. ...

If the British can't be trusted to tell the difference between a strolling Brazillian and a gate-jumping Middle Easterner, lord knows we don't want to let American law enforcement get too out of hand. With our ever-vigilant, civil liberty loving conservatives playing watchdog, they probably wouldn't even have to bother with a cover-up.