The lesson not learned from the events in Ferguson MO is simple: All police should have body cameras! All Police Cars should have "dash-cams"!
Ferguson HAS them but has not deployed them.
More after the fold.
We have two stories being repeated over and over: Brown was shot in the back as he gave up, and Brown attacked the cop.
We have "eye witnesses" who saw parts of the events, but not all. And eye witness accounts often are found to be wrong when video of the event turns up. Not 100% wrong, just that the human mind changes things to make them fit.
Ferguson police have body cams. They just never issued them. Had they done that this would have been real short. Play the tape, see what happened. Gosh, Mr. Brown throws up his hands and starts to get down and cop shoots or Gosh Mr. Brown attacked the cop. End of debate.
Police across the nation need to have body cams that are on all the time and can't be deleted by the user. If police can afford to buy MRAPs, more body armor than i'm issued by the Army, and tricked out weapons i'm not able to have, they can afford body cams and support equipment.
Many places have gone to cams on cops, and the result is much lower allegations of abuse, and most of those result in the police being cleared because the cams show the cop was in the right.
They also have higher conviction rates. "Yes your honor, I could see the gun sticking out under the front seat, see here in the video there it is." Or "here is the accused on tape -'go a head and search my car you pigs won't find nothing!' - so they consented to the search your honor"
Why this is? part is when both sides know they are on camera they act differently. This would end the "he said" "he can't say" issue we see now in Ferguson.