Would releasing a video about the Tarrant County Jail death really jeopardize the investigation?

Read the latest in our coverage of the death of Anthony Johnson Jr. and other issues at the Tarrant County Jail.

Amid calls for accountability for the death of a Fort Worth man in the Tarrant County Jail, the sheriff’s office declined to release video footage of the in-custody death, citing the sheriff’s role in criminal investigations.

Anthony Johnson Jr., 31, died April 21 after being pepper-sprayed in an altercation with detention officers during a routine contraband check of his cell, the sheriff says. The former Marine was arrested April 19 amid a mental health crisis after his family said he was turned away from a psychiatric hospital.

Calls for the video to be released came from Johnson’s family, her attorney and Tarrant County residents who spoke at Tuesday’s Commissioners Court meeting.

State law does not require law enforcement to withhold video footage of use-of-force events.

This month, Arlington police released bodycam footage of a man who was fatally shot by police in April while brandishing a knife.

The text at the beginning of the footage released by the Fort Worth Police Department in January clearly states that the video was released while the investigation into the death of a man shot by officers was ongoing: “At the time of this video, the Fort Worth Police Department was silent I am in the preliminary stages of this investigation and am still working to gather information regarding the facts and circumstances surrounding this incident.”

In Reality check In the following stories, Star Telegram journalists delve deeper into questions about facts, consequences and accountability. Read more. Story idea? [email protected].

According to Nick Hudson, a policy and advocacy strategist with the ACLU of Texas, the sheriff’s office has a responsibility to the public to release the video.

“The public interest in transparency is overwhelming,” he said. “If there is a death in custody, there is no good reason to hide video of a death in prison from the public. If you hide these videos, you destroy transparency.”

In many cases, refusing to release footage has less to do with the integrity of an investigation and more to do with the image of a law enforcement agency, Hudson said.

“Sometimes police departments don’t want to release videos because it might make them look bad, not because it would jeopardize the investigation,” he said.

Krishnaveni Gundu, an attorney with the Texas Jail Project, reiterated the call for transparency as a way to increase public trust in the county’s law enforcement.

“We believe that Mr. Johnson’s family and the community should be allowed to view the video footage,” she said in an email exchange. “The jail and sheriff’s staff are funded by taxpayers who have a right to know what they are buying with their public safety dollars.” Without transparency, how can the community have trust in a system that claims to be public “To improve security?”

Von Kliem, CEO of Force Science, a research, training and consulting firm focused on police use of force, disagreed. Releasing the footage without context could mislead the public about the facts of Johnson’s death, he said.

“The idea that videos speak for themselves or that you can see it with your own eyes is just not true,” he said. “It’s an illusion we created by watching Hollywood movies.”

Withholding use-of-force footage is common practice for law enforcement agencies across the country, Kliem said. They need to strike a balance between transparency and what he called “video literacy.”

Video recording technologies, whether police body cameras or correctional facility security cameras, vary in sophistication. Videos must be “corrected” to account for factors such as different frame rates, fisheye lenses and other technological issues that can result in what Kliem called an inaccurate representation of reality.

Still, pepper spray itself is not deadly, and the Johnson family’s attorney said Anthony Johnson’s body showed signs of bruising. Such discrepancies between the sheriff’s office’s accounts and the potential evidence of use of force beyond pepper spray may not fall within Kliem’s ​​scope of nuance regarding video literacy.

“Sometimes excessive force is so obvious on video that a video investigation is not necessary,” he said.

But data that could shed light on the real-world impact of releasing use-of-force footage is ultimately not enough, according to Christopher Maxwell, a professor of criminal justice at Michigan State University.

“Perhaps the most important insight you can share is the same one we share too often, which is: ‘We need more research!'” he said in an email exchange.