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

[Yosem Companys]

I also wonder what happens should Nest or some other security system capture a
video of police brutality. Would Alphabet release that video to the world?
YosemCompanysPresident and CEOTechlantisM: (650) 796-1205A:2225 East Bayshore
Road, Suite 200,Palo Alto, CA 94303W: www.techlantis.comE: yosem at techlantis.com

To schedule an appointment with me, please visit https://calendly.com/yosem.






On Sun, Jun 14, 2020 7:46 PM, fuzzyTew fuzzytew at gmail.com  wrote:
Something that seems poorly discussed is how lucky you have to be to get a
recording of authority misconduct to be seen and acted on by others, before they
order you to delete it or it is otherwise lost.
I think a lot of people have exposure to that problem, now.  I wonder what apps
are being used or developed to work around it.
On Sun, Jun 14, 2020, 11:38 AM 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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