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Extended Case Study Mobile Video Reveals Police Brutality and Racism

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If you have been following events of the past few years—uprisings and protests in Ferguson, Missouri; Baltimore, Maryland; North Charleston, South Carolina; Cleveland and Cincinnati, Ohio; Madison, Wisconsin; New York, New York; and elsewhere, all covered by news outlets and on social media—you would certainly be aware of concerns about police brutality across the United States and the fact that the victims of many cases of brutality were black.

Policing is a difficult job. Officers are obliged to protect the public and work under great risk every day. But in instances where police put certain members of the public at risk, that obligation is not met. The accompanying instinct of police officers to protect themselves at the expense of the public can be a sign of institutional racism, and African Americans are inordinately victims of such police violence.

Unfortunately, this is an old and persistent issue. In 1968, after racial uprisings in Newark, Detroit, and more than one hundred other cities in the year before, the federal government released the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (or the Kerner Report, after the Illinois governor who headed the commission).1 The Commission found police practices to be the number one grievance in black communities across the United States that contributed to uprisings. Even now, we have sayings like “driving while black” to describe the common problem of racial profiling of African Americans by police.

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We find out about most of these instances of police violence through the mass media. Fifty years ago, the Kerner Report charged the news media with sensationalizing racial uprisings and at times relying too heavily on official police accounts rather than citizen and community leader accounts for their reports.2 While this criticism could still be applied today, modern technology does allow for some positive changes. What citizens did not have in 1968 was access to small, mobile video cameras—security cameras, dash cams, police body cams, and, most significantly, citizens with smartphones. Where the word of the police was previously often the final word in news stories, informal video footage (and sometimes the police’s own footage, thanks to dash cams and body cams) has today shed new light on police brutality cases.

Here are just three recent cases in which video provided illuminating evidence on standards of justice and protection for black Americans.

These kinds of videos, often posted to social media sites, are as powerful as the photos and news film of the Civil Rights movement more than a half century ago, particularly the infamous case of the Birmingham, Alabama, police department attacking nonviolent black protesters with police dogs and high-pressure water hoses in 1963. The shocking images, shown in newspapers and on the evening news, were pivotal in revealing the treatment of African Americans and leading to national support for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In the 2010s, contemporary video recording made news stories of incidents that might have been overlooked otherwise. The videos advanced the Black Lives Matter movement, begun after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the 2012 Florida shooting death of seventeen-year-old African American Trayvon Martin, a young man in a hoodie sweatshirt walking back to his father’s house with a can of juice and bag of Skittles candy. The movement spread on Twitter via the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag.

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ONE LAW PROFESSOR AND FORMER PROSECUTOR CALLED THIS NEW WAVE OF VIDEO EVIDENCE “THE C-SPAN OF THE STREETS.”4 But do these new videos of police shootings change the charge from the Kerner Report almost fifty years ago that the news media tend to rely more on official sources and less on citizen sources? For this case study, we will look at stories of police shootings of African Americans, and whether or not available video evidence changes news media narratives about the events.

As developed in Chapter 1, a media-literate perspective involves mastering five overlapping critical stages that build on one another: (1) description: paying close attention, taking notes, and researching the subject under study; (2) analysis: discovering and focusing on significant patterns that emerge from the description stage; (3) interpretation: asking and answering the “What does that mean?” and “So what?” questions about your findings; (4) evaluation: arriving at a judgment about whether something is good, bad, poor, or mediocre, which involves subordinating one’s personal views to the critical assessment resulting from the first three stages; and (5) engagement: taking some action that connects our critical interpretations and evaluations with our responsibility as citizens.