Cellphone Videos and Justice: What we can learn from our fetish of vision

Protests throughout the United States and the Black Lives Matter movement have increased focus on police shootings and reports of alleged police misconduct. In the summer of 2016, two African-American men were shot by police: Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La., and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minn. Before that there were Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., Laquan McDonald in Chicago and Tamir Rice in Cleveland. Part of what has forced the issue to the forefront of public discourse is new technology—all those cellphones videos.

Phil Stinson, a criminologist and member of the Washington Post team that won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of police shootings in 2015, argues that the phase change in awareness surrounding police shootings is not a matter a volume, but a result the evidence captured on cellphone videos. As Stinson argues, we likely wouldn’t pay attention to reports of police misconduct if it weren’t for cellphone videos.

Where police previously controlled reports in the media, advocates now have access to cellphones and other affordable cameras. Coupled with the rise of social media, advocates and protesters can now bypass the editorial prerogative of the police and of traditional news outlets to broadcast their own “side of the story,” quite often with cellphone videos. For example, seconds after the shooting of Philando Castile in Minnesota, his girlfriend Diamond Reynolds began live-streaming the aftermath on Facebook, breaking the story herself.

A screenshot from the video that Diamond Reynolds live-streamed in the aftermath of a police shooting.

Subsequently, discussions of criminal justice reform have expanded to include not only institutions of power, but also conversations about vision. Many have argued that if only we had access to a camera—an objective “third eye”—we would know better what happens between police and victims of police shootings. Trouble is, as any film student will tell you, there really isn’t such thing as an “objective” representation of reality.

As Trinh T. Minh-ha argues in When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics, “reality is more fabulous, more maddening, more strangely manipulative than fiction” (39). Referring to documentary in particular, Minh-ha stresses that no film/video report presents objective facts. Rather, it photographs isolated facts and assembles a coherent narrative according to the filmmaker’s vision.

It’s easy to expand this argument to topical debates over interpretations of video evidence in cases regarding police misconduct. Justice is fast becoming a double-interpretation of perception through a number of visual mediums. But police shootings are complex events. There will no doubt be more to a story than a single video. For example, a shooting may look like a ‘bad shooting’ from one angle because the spectator cannot see what’s in the suspect’s hands, while another angle may clearly show a firearm in the suspect’s hand.

In April 2016, The New York Times performed a study in which filmmakers staged encounters between actors and police officers. They filmed the encounters from two angles, one from a wide angle with a cell phone, and another from a police body camera. In one video, a police officer and an actor perform a dance routine together. From the wide angle, the dance looks comical, charming, and obviously harmless. In contrast, the action appears deceptively more intense  from the perspective of the police body camera. From this angle, the “struggle” appears to be far more involved than it actually is because the camera is mounted on the officer’s chest, producing jerky movements. This is a good example of the idea that perspective matters. When a video allows us to identify with the point of view of one witness, our interpretation favors that person.

In court, the question in cases regarding police misconduct won’t be whether an officer was correct, but whether his/her conclusions and actions were reasonable. This system has already proven to be problematic. For example, in December 2014, a grand jury decided not to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner, despite a cellphone video that clearly showed Officer Pantaleo holding Garner in a chokehold. Garner’s final words were “I can’t breathe.” Many, both liberal and conservative, clearly “saw” an injustice and an abuse of power. Others “saw” Garner resist which, in their minds, justified the response by Pantaleo.

While these questions of interpretation are important, they are only  part the larger issue at hand. This is an issue that not only has to do with race and class, but also the very structures of power that define our society, art and media.

I wrote last week about the works of Michel Foucault, who, in his work Discipline and Punish, introduces the concept of “Panopticonism.” Foucault uses 17th Century philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon,” a central tower where the observer could see but not be seen, as a way to understand modern power, based primarily on surveillance. According to Foucault, we have internalized the surveillance ‘apparatus’ and integrated it into our own subjectivity to such an extreme degree that there is no longer a need for an actual person to uphold the system.

Artists such as Steven Mann, and, more recently, Wafaa Bilal, have used Foucault’s theories to comment on today’s surveillance society by embedding surveillance in their own bodies. In 2010, Bilal even had a small camera, “3rdi,” surgically mounted to the back of his skull to record his daily activities and demonstrate the way people spend most of their lives under the watchful eyes of security cameras.

As Mann and Bilal demonstrate, Foucault’s analysis suggests surveillance has become distributed into our pockets and onto our own bodies to such an extent that there is no justice in the way we realize it in our technologies and systems. Surveillance represents a refinement of power and control, and cameras, the main technology, have not become a tool of justice, but a catalyst for discipline and punishment. One could argue that the camera is responsible for violence and control over the citizenry, and is no less totalizing than the gun.

Furthermore, Foucault introduces us to an anxiety experienced daily by marginalized people in the United States. This is the experience of constantly being watched while moving through public space, of being perpetually marked by skin color, manner of dress, or physical bearing. People of color experience their “public” and “free” space as surveilled space.

In some ways, cellphone videos help break this cycle. When advocates and protesters post videos to tell their “side of the story,” they are in many ways breaking free of the control maintained by modern social structures. Still, the idea that cameras can be a catch-all tool to uncover the truth has its limits. We must be mindful that no video can truly represent an “objective” truth, but we can also use this moment to learn from fetishization of vision, and reflect on the way we “see” each other.

Perhaps this is the very point advocates are attempting to make clear. Many poor communities of color experience their “public” and “free” space as surveilled space. When all aspects of their environment are controlled, they become the subject of the gaze of the ‘Other’—perpetually examined, fragmented, and disciplined by various modes of power. This is the experience of being unfree.