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

[fuzzyTew]

Not in the past for sure.  Looks like that might change if we keep taking
action.

On Sun, Jun 14, 2020, 4:45 PM Yosem Companys <yosem at techlantis.com> wrote:

> 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?
>
> [image: upload image]
> Yosem Companys
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>
> 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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