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Police brutality in the United States, especially on people of color, is and always has been a major problem. The Left has made some half-hearted attempts to reign in the nearly unaccountable police departments across the country, but the best tool to stymie the rate of people brutalized and killed by police so far has been the proliferation of civilians video-taping arrests and police encounters.

Killedbypolice.net, a collection of local news reports of police killings, said as of Wednesday, 4 November, 1,006 people had been killed by US police since the beginning of this year.

Speaking at the University of Chicago Law School in October, FBI Director James Comey said instead of attempting to curb police brutality, police are afraid to get out of their cars "in today's YouTube world." Comey alleged that the video-taping and monitoring of police officers by citizens could harm effective police work.

But if police departments don’t address their tactics, how can a citizenry attempting to aid fellow citizens be expected to change their own?

"I spoke to officers privately in one big-city precinct who described being surrounded by young people with mobile phone cameras held high, taunting them the moment they get out of their cars," Comey said. "I've been told about a senior police leader who urged his force to remember that their political leadership has no tolerance for a viral video."

It seems a camera shy police force and hyper-vigilant citizenry is achieving results in combatting the blatant abuses that take place everyday.

On the very same day Comey was speaking in Chicago, an incident took place at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina in which a police officer flipped a 16-year-old black student out of her desk chair after she refused to leave the classroom. Let it not be misunderstood. A police officer violently arrested and dragged a high school sophomore out of her classroom. Her only crime, refusal to put away a cellphone.

The arresting officer Ben Fields has a history of lawsuits for battery and using excessive force.

To anyone critically judging the situation in Spring Valley, it is presumable that if mobile phone cameras were not present, the officer would have done the same thing or worse--based on his own history--and gotten away with it.

Yet FBI Director James Comey notes the "Ferguson effect," referring to the August 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Much of the incident was videotaped and went completely viral, especially because Brown’s body was left lying in the street for four hours after being shot. It is considered by some a modern day lynching.

But the Michael Brown incident really sparked the latest attention on police brutality, an issue that has become central to American political discourse today.

The so-called “Ferguson effect” was also backed by DEA chief Chuck Rosenberg. Other than a buzzword, the facts mete out a different picture than Comey and Rosenberg paint.

On average, crime has been trending downwards or remained stagnant in the last decade, and the government is spending more money than ever on militarized police forces. The Justice Policy Institute found that the federal government spends $100 billion ever year on police.

Since 1980, the number of people incarcerated in America has quadrupled, from about 500,000 to 2.3 million, according to the NAACP. And African Americans make up more than 1 million of inmates in federal prisons.

The militarization of police forces, staggeringly high incarceration rates and outright systemic racism are all major problems and need to be dealt with meaningfully. But filming police brutality and using it as leverage to dissuade escalation or future abuses is a vitally important community tool in 2015. Don't stop filming.

If police departments are so afraid of getting caught committing abuses, they should stop committing those abuses.

Daily Show host Trevor Noah captured the essence of Comey’s hypocrisy, saying “The police are just trying to make a basic point: People are treating them unfairly just because of who they are and how they look. People keep following them around with cameras, watching everything they do, suspicious that they're always about to break the law, leaving police afraid to even get out of their cars for fear that someone might whip out a phone and brutally film them. Who can imagine how that must feel? And if you listen carefully, all the police are saying is ‘phones down, don't shoot.’”