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posted by on Wednesday April 08 2015, @10:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the lights-camera-action dept.

Robinson Meyer writes in The Atlantic that in the past year, after the killings of Michael Brown and Tamir Rice, many police departments and police reformists have agreed on the necessity of police-worn body cameras. But the most powerful cameras aren’t those on officer’s bodies but those wielded by bystanders. We don’t yet know who shot videos of officer officer, Michael T. Slager, shooting Walter Scott eight times as he runs away but "unknown cameramen and women lived out high democratic ideals: They watched a cop kill someone, shoot recklessly at someone running away, and they kept the camera trained on the cop," writes Robinson. "They were there, on an ordinary, hazy Saturday morning, and they chose to be courageous. They bore witness, at unknown risk to themselves."

“We have been talking about police brutality for years. And now, because of videos, we are seeing just how systemic and widespread it is,” tweeted Deray McKesson, an activist in Ferguson, after the videos emerged Tuesday night. “The videos over the past seven months have empowered us to ask deeper questions, to push more forcefully in confronting the system.” The process of ascertaining the truth of the world has to start somewhere. A video is one more assertion made about what is real concludes Robinson. "Today, through some unknown hero’s stubborn internal choice to witness instead of flee, to press record and to watch something terrible unfold, we have one more such assertion of reality."

Update: NBC News has identified the cameraman as Feidin Santana.

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 10 2015, @02:57AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 10 2015, @02:57AM (#168612)

    He took on some serious risk doing what he did but he did it anyway because he felt he was the only one in the position to affect a change.

    Yeah, well unfortunately there is zero evidence of this and a lot of evidence against it. Snowden says that's why he did it. But why, to make his magnanimous point, did he grab and dump thousands and thousands of unrelated intel on foreign sources and methods? Just this week we had a story, a shocking barn burner, that part of "the Snowden Files" is that Britain spied on Argentina during the Falkland War! OMFG!!!! He says he did all he could to raise concerns to his superiors, but he can't produce any evidence of that. He makes the effort to go through all that CYA effort of encryption, Tor, etc., he can grab a Gigabyte of data, and he doesn't copy his Outlook PST file? He can't produce a single email to back his story up? All his valiant heroics and selfless acts were all described after the fact when his house of cards started falling down. The emails, posts, his employment history and circumstances before his great martyrdom all paint a contrary image of him as cocky, thinking he's the smartest person around, boasting about his security clearance and how he lied his way into the job, etc. I have my own thoughts on his motivations, but they certainly aren't as pure and wholesome as many around here hold.