Joaquin Castro: “First, I would like to thank the chairman and the ranking member for their hard work on this bill. My amendment would…”

“First, I would like to thank the chairman and the ranking member for their hard work on this bill. My amendment would add $10 million to the Community Trust Initiative account for police body-worn cameras, and would take those $10 million from the DEA account for salaries and expenses. Over the last several months, we have seen more and more encounters between members of our communities and law enforcement that have been too powerful to ignore. We have seen in those recordings instances of police abuse. We have seen instances where police were justified in the use of force. We have even seen instances where police went above and beyond doing their job. Mr. Chairman, over the last two decades or so, something changed--two things, in fact. First, we developed a technology so that basically each of us who walks around with a cell phone camera is a social documentarian of the things going on around us. The second thing that changed is the advent of social media, which allowed people not only to document their experiences, but also to widely distribute what they have documented to this country and to the world. Because of that, we have gotten a better indication of the interaction between law enforcement and members of our community. In this digital age, we have a responsibility to seek and to know the truth about those encounters.…”