How technology is driving the new Civil Rights movement

Yesterday, a big group of my colleagues published a project they’ve been working on for quite some time. We’re calling it ”Capturing the police” and it’s about how technology is driving the new Civil Rights movement.

Capturing the Police is a project from The Verge about how people use technology to bring awareness of police brutality and racism — and what it costs them when they agitate for justice. These are stories about how people use technology to bring awareness to their communities and reshape what it means to have justice in this country. But these are also stories of what people sacrifice to enact that change.

Here’s how Bijan Stephen characterized the impetus behind the project:

It felt imperative to cover this moment somehow. I refined the idea into what you see here, because what I was seeing on my social media feeds felt like it missed a part of the bigger story — the perspective of the people who filmed these videos, and what happened to them. I wanted to let them talk about their experiences.

I’m turning the whole newsletter over to these important stories today. I couldn’t be prouder of everybody that contributed to the project and I hope you read and watch their excellent work. I also hope it spurs you to action.

- Dieter

┏ The Peace Reporters. If you read nothing else, please take some time to absorb this piece and watch some of the videos herein. I’m serious when I say you should take some time — it is not easy to get through and much of it may be triggering. But the important work here is telling the stories of the people behind these viral clips.

For the people shooting these videos of protest and police brutality, using a camera and sharing a video isn’t passive — it is itself an act of protest. The Verge spoke to 11 people who’d filmed videos of police violence across the country, to understand how and why they’d pressed record, what happened afterwards, and whether they would do it again.

┏ Recording police brutality: how one snap decision changed this town. Maria Abdulkaf introduces a powerful video:

Benavides spoke with The Verge to explain the cost of standing up to police violence. The virality of the video created a path to accountability for the Baytown Police Department, but it might have also put Benavides in harm’s way.

┏ The man who collects videos of police brutality. Bijan Stephen interviews T. Greg Doucette, a conservative lawyer in Durham, North Carolina:

“I probably wouldn’t be able to do it had we not been in quarantine,” Doucette says. “I tweet a lot as it is because a lot of my mornings when I’m in court, there’s nothing going on. But the video thread, especially the first two weeks of it, was just — trying to keep up was taking, you know, 30-40 hours a week.” ... That includes checking videos to see if they’re duplicates or controlling for what he calls bad information. “I had to put together a process because I’m like, ‘Well, shit. Now that we’re doing this and people are seeing it as something authoritative, I got to try and make sure we don’t screw it up,’” he says.

┏ Videos of this summer’s police brutality protests are a new genre of film. Adi Robertson:

Many clips don’t have this kind of discrete narrative or characters. They show the larger, ambient dynamics of the events: chaotic scenes of officers boxing crowds of protesters into clouds of tear gas, or brief clips of sudden, aggressive arrests under cover of darkness, shot from a distance and published online by an anonymous account.

┏ You can cop-proof your phone, but there’s a better way to stay safe. Russell Brandom points out that there’s a tradeoff to locking down your phone, because that keeps you from using it as a tool to document and to take action on the streets out into the digital world. It’s tricky:

In the middle, things get murky. As the countless photos from Ferguson protests showed, the right image can be a powerful force for good. But even with faces covered, a photograph can pose a threat to anyone in the frame.

┏ Police body cameras don’t tell the whole story. This experiment shows it.. Will Poor introduces a video about video. Always remember there’s somebody behind every camera, pointing it:

Different angles can tweak the narrative we as viewers build in our heads, not just about who’s doing what, but why they’re doing it. Watching a police body cam clip of an incident versus, say, a news camera clip can lead viewers to very different conclusions about whether the police meant to cause harm. In some cases, research shows that just seeing an officer’s arm or a hand appear in a body camera clip is enough to change viewers’ conclusions about that officer’s intent.

┏ How videos of police brutality can traumatize kids and teenagers. Nicole Wetsman interviewed Brendesha Tynes about a national study. Tynes is the director of the Center for Empowered Learning and Development with Technology at the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education:

We were able to use a nationally representative sample of 11 to 19 year old Black and Latinx participants. We were able to show that viewing viral videos of police killings, beatings, and arrests — and seeing images of immigrants in cages — was associated with symptoms of depression and PTSD. We kept seeing the same things, even with older groups, up through people who were 24 years old.

┏ The online rallying cry ‘defund the police’ runs into red tape at city hall. Calls to “defund the police” are polarizing — and that polarization can hide the diligent and dedicated members of local government who are doing the work to create reasonable reform. Andrew Hawkins has a good profile:

As an elected official, Fletcher has had an insider’s view of the Minneapolis Police Department and the equipment that it regularly uses, which includes body armor, riot gear, tear gas, and pepper spray. He’s been on ride-alongs with police officers and sat in on training sessions when officers learn how to use tear gas against mass demonstrations. But seeing those weapons used against his own constituents helped convince him that the Minneapolis Police Department was beyond reforming. “There was a lot of evidence that many of our officers viewed themselves as being in a battle between the police and the people of our city,” Fletcher says. “And that footage was a gut punch to anybody who would imagine that we could reform the department.”

┏ How to feed a protest. Monica Chin:

Technology and social media have given organizers like Gayns a bigger, broader reach than they’ve had in decades past. During the first weeks of protests, Google Docs listing hundreds of mutual aid funds spread across the internet. Media, from local news to national outlets, directed their readers to donate to sprawling lists of causes: victim memorial fundraisers, bail funds, clean-up efforts, food drives, and more.

┏ The advantages of looking like a white dad at protests. Sarah Jeong spoke to a 35-year-old white man who regularly attends protests in Portland, OR, to find out what it’s like there for him.

I was chased with a large group down the street. Whenever people broke away from the large group, they were either chased down or successively corralled back in. At one point, I felt like the police weren’t paying attention to me, so I made a right turn when the crowd didn’t. Turns out they were paying attention because three or four officers absolutely turned and looked in my direction. But they just didn’t do anything about it. They turned around again and chased the rest of the crowd. I hadn’t seen them leave people alone like that before.

┏ Surviving a police shooting turned a teenager into an activist. Kim Lyons spoke with Leon Ford, who has become an organizer in Pittsburgh:

Ford says he’s seen a shift in the public’s attitude toward police shootings and police violence since he was shot. The pandemic, he says, helped push many long-simmering issues to the boiling point. “People are frustrated, they’re losing jobs, they’re home, on social media all day, watching TV, and they can’t ignore what’s been going on,” he said.

┏ Why police officers embraced a banned weapon of war. Loren Grush on the effects of tear gas and some context we shouldn’t forget:

Tear gas is actually banned for use in wartime, because the Geneva Convention notably prohibits the use of chemical or biological weapons during war. More recently, in 1993, the United Nations convened the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), which prohibits countries from using riot control agents — such as tear gas — “as a method of warfare.” However the CWC lays out an exception for law enforcement to use things like tear gas for “domestic riot control purposes.”

┏ Writing against police brutality, then and now. Bijan Stephen:

History is never very far from us, but this is about as close as it’s ever been, and the internet is documenting everyone’s behavior in real time. The historians who’ll eventually sift through the petabytes of data we’ve generated will have an extremely granular picture of what it was like to be alive right now and how we met our moment. Your political commitments will be judged by future generations even if you like to imagine yourself a hero, which means the black square you’ve posted probably won’t escape their notice.