I would have thought, given the rapid proliferation of video recording devices throughout society, and the intense media scrutiny that came in the wake of the Eric Garner and Michael Brown killings, that police officers might be a little more inclined to show restraint when dealing with members of the public. Apparently, though, old habits die hard… especially when officers involved in excessive force cases, like the ones cited above, keep not only getting off without jail time, but end up wealthy as a result of their actions.

So, I don’t think it came as much of a shock to anyone that yet another unarmed black man was shot to death this past weekend by a police officer in South Carolina.

This past Saturday morning, just minutes after being pulled over for driving a vehicle with a broken tail light, Walter L. Scott, 50, was dead. According to officer Michael T. Slager, 33, he had no choice but to shoot Scott.

According to the local paper, The Post And Courier, it was all relatively straightforward. Scott had attempted to flee, officer Slager tased him, and a fight over the weapon ensued. “The dead man fought with an officer over his taser before deadly force was employed,” the article said. Officer Slager, in the words of his attorney, “felt threatened and reached for his department-issued firearm, and fired his weapon.” But, as we’d learn yesterday, the truth was a little more complicated than that. Scott hadn’t been killed in a struggle over the taser. He’d been shot eight times in the back, at a distance of approximately 20 feet… And his family had video to prove it.

This is how far apart the two men were when the fatal shots were fired.

And, as if that weren’t enough, the video also appears to show officer Slager, after killing Scott, pick up the taser from the area where they first struggled, cary it over to where Scott lay dead, and toss it on the ground beside him, in hopes, one would assume, of giving the impression that the dead man had possession of the weapon at the time of his death… a fabrication that officer Slager would reinforce moments later, when he radioed in the following: “Shots fired and the subject is down. He took my taser.”

The video also makes it clear that, contrary to early reports, the police did not attempt to perform CPR on Scott. The following is from the New York Times:

…Police reports say that officers performed CPR and delivered first aid to Mr. Scott. The video shows that for several minutes after the shooting, Mr. Scott remained face down with his hands cuffed behind his back. A second officer arrives, puts on blue medical gloves and attends to Mr. Scott, but is not shown performing CPR. As sirens wail in the background, a third officer later arrives, apparently with a medical kit, but is also not seen performing CPR…

Thankfully, now that the video has surfaced, all of Slager’s support has evaporated. Not only that, but he’s been charged with murder.

I know the “state’s rights” folks and the police unions would do everything in their power to keep it from happening, but I think our friend Bob Sloan may be onto something with his suggestion this evening that the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights division should, from this point forward, investigate all police shootings.

Admittedly, I don’t know much about how such things work, but, as I understand it, the local police force in this instance was not even compelled to hand the case up to the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division. [From CNN: “The North Charleston Police department was not legally obligated to but chose to hand the case over to the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, according to a news release from Scarlett A. Wilson, the Ninth Judicial Circuit solicitor.”] So, at the very least, it would seem to me that laws could be changed to give more oversight both at the state and federal level, and not just leave investigations in the hands of individual departments that very well could be biased in favor of the officers being looked at.

With that said, I know that the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, the South Carolina office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the South Carolina U.S. Attorney’s Office are all involved in this case some extent. So I know there’s already some pressure being exerted from federal entities, regardless of who might technically “own” the case. Still, however, I don’t believe that happens in the case of every police shooting, and, regardless, one has to think that there are things that could be done to increase federal oversight.

And, if we can’t do that, could we at least mandate the use of body cameras across the country, and change the reporting requirements so that police departments are compelled to tell us about instances where force is used?

The following, by way of background, comes from the same New York Times article linked to above.

…Because police departments are not required to release data on how often officers use force, it was not immediately clear how often police shootings occurred in North Charleston, a working-class community adjacent to the tourist destination of Charleston…

Regardless of what we do, my hope is that we’re all in agreement that federal action of some type needs to be taken, and taken soon… I mean, leaving this to the states apparently isn’t working, right?

Here, getting a bit at the root causes for what we’re facing today, is a clip from Think Progress.

The city of Ferguson will have its own local reforms to consider, as the council has already passed several bills to establish a police review board, and set limits on excessive court fines and fees exposed after Brown’s death. If past experience is any indication, reforming the police department is possible over the course many years and many battles.

But nationally, problems persist. “This is a very systemic problem in just about every community throughout the United States,” Brickner said.

And even in communities that have seen dramatic change, there are as many holes left to be filled as there have been reforms. One is the intransigent, incredible challenge of holding police accountable. Police unions exercise strong influence over many local boards that decide whether cops get to keep their jobs. Juries tend to side with police. And the law overwhelming favors the police. UC Irvine law school dean Erwin Chemerensky, who has long followed this issue, wrote after Brown’s death that “the officer who shot Michael Brown and the City of Ferguson will most likely never be held accountable in court” due to doctrines from the Supreme Court down that weigh against holding officers accountable.

Another is a culture that embraces guns. Police are given a lot of leeway to use deadly force, in many instances when the public perception is that other lesser measures might do. As CNN’s Mark O’Mara noted after Brown’s death, “Cops are doing the job we told them to do.”

Riots in Ferguson have also exposed to America the extreme militarization of police forces that has only grown since the past waves of police shootings. And the racism in the criminal justice system persists, both overtly, and implicitly, even as more whites than ever believe the criminal justice system is no longer biased.

But there are reasons to be hopeful. For one thing, criminal justice reform is increasingly becoming a bipartisan issue. Even Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) became one of a growing number of congressional Republicans who have called for criminal justice reform. Domanick said he was also encouraged that there was outrage at Ferguson’s police militarization across the political spectrum. For another, reform options exist that didn’t before, such as body cameras for police. In fact, it is the emergence of mobile recording devices that has exposed some of the recent violent incidents — and debunked any attempts by police to skew the facts.

In the case of Ferguson, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has announced he will initiate an investigation of the city’s “patterns and practices” in addition to the separate criminal investigation of the Brown case. In fact, Holder has taken on a new tone for the country’s top law enforcer that acknowledges the United States epidemic of discriminatory and overly punitive criminal punishment.

But underlying all of this is the segregation and oppression that was unveiled in Ferguson. A Washington Post investigation last week revealed that these underlying problems still persist in Cincinnati, meaning that while police were indeed reformed, fixing the racial tensions that existed in 2001 Cincinnati is “a job unfinished.” Even Cincinnati’s black police chief says he fears his own son’s encounters with the police.

“The cultural disconnect is very real; you have the weight of generations of abuse on African Americans,” Cincinnati Police Chief Jeffrey Blackwell told the Washington Post after Brown’s death.

“[T]he mentality is that these lives in the ghetto are not to be valued,” added Domanick. “Policing and violence are only symptoms of this larger problem. We’re gonna have problems. But at least we’re starting to know now what works in terms of reducing crime short term and long term and what works in terms of community policing and good community relations.”