[liberationtech] They Used Smartphone Cameras to Record Police Brutality—and Change History

[Prashant Singh]

I can't help but think about  zapruder film . He did it first . And people
still debated on basic  facts of that event. Human being have this weird
capacity of constructing their version of reality in the face of fact. I am
not sure how phone camera will change that . Short of that any other change
will be flash in pan imho.
What do you think?

On Sun, Jun 14, 2020, 9:08 PM Yosem Companys <ycompanys at gmail.com> wrote:

> In 2008, Steve Jobs had an assignment for a small team of engineers in
> Cupertino: Make the iPhone record video. After seeing that people liked
> taking photos with the first iPhones, he wanted to add moving pictures. A
> year later, Apple released the iPhone 3GS, the first iPhone to record video.
>
> About 10 years and 10 iPhone models later, 17-year-old Darnella Frazier
> found herself standing on a sidewalk in Minneapolis, swiping on her purple
> iPhone 11 lock screen to launch the video camera as fast as possible.
>
> She hit the red circle and for the next 10 minutes and 9 seconds she held
> her phone as steady as she could, capturing George Floyd, a black man
> crying for his mother as his face was smashed into the pavement by white
> police officer Derek Chauvin.
>
> “I opened my phone and I started recording because I knew if I didn’t, no
> one would believe me,” Ms. Frazier said in a statement provided by her
> lawyer, Seth Cobin.
>
> A day later, May 26, she opened up the Facebook app, and tapped the video
> of Mr. Floyd to upload it. The world now knows his name.
>
> Over the last decade, while tech companies were focused on marketing
> megapixels and multiple lenses to better record pastries and puppies,
> smartphone cameras found a greater purpose.
>
> “This is our only tool we have right now. It is the most effective way to
> get us justice,” Feidin Santana told me. Mr. Santana used his smartphone in
> 2015 to film a police officer killing Walter Scott in South Carolina.
>
> “The smartphone is a weapon that tells the story. This is going to tell
> what happened to me, this is what will tell what took place,” said Arthur
> Reed, whose organization Stop the Killing surfaced an anonymously filmed
> video of the 2016 killing of Alton Sterling by a police officer in Baton
> Rouge, La.
>
> Many white Americans, myself included, failed until recently to grasp one
> of the biggest impacts of the smartphone: its ability to make the world
> witness police brutality toward African-Americans that was all too easy to
> ignore in the past. We could now see, with our own eyes, the black sides of
> stories that were otherwise lost when white officers filed their police
> reports.
>
> For this column, I looked back at a decade of incriminating cellphone
> video, and tracked down many people who bravely used their phones to
> capture brutality and tragedy on American streets.
>
> 2009 - Oscar Grant
>
> A sequence of full-frame screengrabs from a video of the killing of Oscar
> Grant on January 1, 2009. Jamil Dewar recorded it on a flip phone.
> 2015 - Walter Scott
>
> A sequence of full-frame screengrabs from a video of the killing of
> Walter Scott on April 4, 2015. Feidin Santana recorded it on a Samsung
> Galaxy S5.
> 2020 - George Floyd
>
> A sequence of full-frame screengrabs from a video of the killing of
> George Floyd on May 25, 2020. Darnella Frazier recorded it on an iPhone 11.
>
> All said some variation of the same thing: It’s not that these incidents
> never happened before, it’s that we have the ability to capture proof and
> expose it widely—now, more clearly and indisputably than ever. The
> smartphone’s proliferation and evolving user experience is partly to thank,
> though through this we’re also discovering its limitations.
>
> Once upon a time, capturing bystander video was about being in the right
> place, at the right time, with the right equipment.
>
> That is the story of George Holliday on March 3, 1991, brand-new Sony
> Handycam in hand as he stood on his balcony with a view of Los Angeles
> police officers beating Rodney King. The footage is shaky, the bodies are
> hard to make out, the helicopters drown out the screams yet it was enough
> to set off what Mr. Holliday calls “the first viral video.”
>
> It’s also the story of Karina Vargas, who had her Fujifilm Finepix digital
> camera the night of Jan. 1, 2009, when she witnessed officer Johannes
> Mehserle shooting 22-year-old Oscar Grant III at the Fruitvale BART transit
> station in Oakland, Calif.
>
> Ms. Vargas also had a Motorola Razr cellphone, but she turned on her
> 10-megapixel Fujifilm because it could record better quality video. (At the
> time, that meant 480p.) In a series of clips, many of them pixelated and
> shaky, she captured the officers surrounding Mr. Grant and eventually the
> sounds of the gunshots.
>
> A day later a local television producer came out to watch what she had
> recorded; he transferred the footage from her memory card to his laptop and
> aired it that day.
>
> “If I had this iPhone back then I would have taken much better video,” Ms.
> Vargas told me. “I would have been able to get closer and I probably would
> have shared it to Instagram or another place so everyone could see it.” She
> added, “Right now, there is this culture of ‘Let’s f—ing record these
> cops.’ It wasn’t that way then.”
>
> Other bystanders recorded from different angles with cellphones, though
> their details were quite blurry. All were submitted as evidence. In 2010,
> Mehserle was convicted of second-degree murder.
>
> Jump ahead to 2014. Ramsey Orta and his 2011 Samsung Galaxy phone captured
> 720p high-definition video of Eric Garner, surrounded by New York City
> police officers. Mr. Orta filmed police wrestling Mr. Garner to the
> pavement and putting him in a chokehold. On the video, he said he couldn’t
> breathe 11 times before he died.
>
> Mr. Orta originally shared the video with the New York Daily News, and it
> quickly spread across Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The phrase “I can’t
> breathe” became a slogan of the Black Lives Matter movement. Though Mr.
> Garner’s death was ruled a homicide, the officer involved was not indicted.
>
> Feidin Santana in North Charleston, S.C., had just gotten a new one from a
> friend, a Samsung Galaxy S5 with a 16-megapixel camera. He happened to be
> walking to his job when he saw Mr. Scott being chased by officer Michael
> Slager. Mr. Santana tapped the camera app and began recording for three
> minutes, capturing Slager shooting Mr. Scott five times as he tried to run.
> It was the first thing he filmed with the new phone.
>
> “I was getting used to the phone but in less than a few seconds I was able
> to get to the video option,” recalls Mr. Santana, who doesn’t consider
> himself tech savvy.
>
> The video, which was used as evidence in the trial, is shaky and at times
> blurry, but readable enough to see key parts of the incident play out. A
> jury convicted Slager of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to 20 years
> in prison.
>
> Over the next few years, as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube made uploading,
> sharing and viewing mobile video easier, buckets of cellular data dropped
> in price, and smartphone ownership among Americans ages 18 to 49 passed
> 90%, recordings of police interaction mushroomed.
>
> On July 5, 2016, one of two videos of police officers killing Alton
> Sterling in Baton Rouge, La., was uploaded to Twitter. One officer was
> later fired but not charged. The next day, Diamond Reynolds went live on
> Facebook as she sat next to her dying boyfriend, Philando Castile, who had
> just been shot by an officer in St. Anthony, Minn. The officer was later
> found not guilty of second-degree manslaughter.
>
> That brings us to two weeks ago, when Ms. Frazier, only feet away from
> George Floyd and the police officer bearing down on him, captured it all in
> 1080p resolution video with the latest iPhone. It’s one of the clearest,
> highest-resolution videos of such a situation ever captured.
>
> “I will post the video in the morning as soon as I wake up. I don’t give a
> f—. If it gets taken down I don’t care,” Ms. Frazier said in a live-stream
> on Facebook a few hours after recording Mr. Floyd’s killing. “At least you
> all will see for yourselves. I’m pretty sure it’s a murder we’ll be seeing
> on the news.” Officer Chauvin has since been charged with second-degree
> murder, the other officers at the scene have also been charged and the city
> of Minneapolis has moved to restructure its police forces.
>
> Over the past decade, the smartphone changed our behavior. We went from
> photographing momentous occasions with specialized equipment—remember
> buying cameras?—to constantly, instantaneously capturing and sharing any
> moment we choose. Everyone I spoke to who had recorded these scenes of
> violence used the same word to describe why they did it: instinct.
>
> “I knew what was going on wasn’t right. I felt something was about to
> happen so I just took out my phone and started recording,” said Brandon
> Brooks, who filmed Dajerria Becton, a black teenager, being violently
> wrestled to the ground by a white officer in McKinney, Texas, in 2015. A
> few days later, the officer resigned.
>
> But capturing video of apparent brutality by those in power comes with a
> dark consequence: fear of retaliation.
>
> “I didn’t share it right away,” Mr. Santana, the man who filmed the
> killing of Walter Scott, told me. “I thought my life might be in danger.
> It’s a tough decision to come forward.” He said he feared the police
> department would come after him; he also said he wanted to wait to hear the
> police department’s side of the story. Ms. Vargas said she still vividly
> remembers an officer trying to get a hold of her camera on the train after
> she filmed the Oakland shooting of Oscar Grant.
>
> Allissa Richardson, a journalism professor at University of Southern
> California and author of the book “Bearing Witness While Black,” said that
> the proliferation of such footage can have an insidious side effect, the
> expectation of video where none is available. “We are almost asking black
> people to prove they didn’t deserve this [violence]. We don’t ask white
> people where the video is after mass shootings,” she said. Plus, the videos
> can end up being excessively played in the media, she added.
>
> And filming police violence doesn’t lead to an open-and-shut case. John
> Burris, a civil-rights attorney who represented Mr. Grant’s family, said
> that “without the videos all I would have had was the testimony of the
> African-American men against several cops. But ultimately the cops had
> their own stories about what happened which still made it extraordinarily
> difficult.”
>
> Police officers are increasingly aware of the presence of smartphone
> cameras, and aren’t always deterred by them. Police departments have
> equipped officers with their own body cams or car dashboard cameras—though
> smartphone footage often provides a different vantage point. Some experts
> say that qualified-immunity laws and the power of police unions offer bad
> actors unwarranted protection.
>
> “If someone were to do such a violent act knowing they are on camera,
> that’s some evil intent right there,” said Sheriff Christopher Swanson,
> from the Office of Genesee County Sheriff in Flint, Mich. He believes the
> killing of Mr. Floyd will result in widespread police union reform.
>
> So smartphone videos have been far from a panacea for racial injustice.
> But at least now, more than ever, we all can see it, clearly and vividly.
>
> The cameras will continue to improve. Like any technology story, what we
> do with them, and the world we want them to capture, is up to us.
>
> —Jim Oberman contributed to this article.
>
>
> https://www.wsj.com/articles/they-used-smartphone-cameras-to-record-police-brutalityand-change-history-11592020827?mod=djemTECH
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