Ramsey Orta (left), who recorded the NYPD choking Eric Garner to death.
RACE LENS
The arrest of Ramsey Orta in August on gun charges would have barely registered on the daily crime blotter in New York City had he not been at the center of the most controversial police-related death in the city’s recent memory.
Police choking Eric Garner to death during a routine arrest on Staten Island made national news in July. Orta, a local resident, filmed the entire encounter, and the video became the rallying point for a renewed push against police brutality.
Shortly thereafter, the police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, brought mainstream media out by the truckloads to cover the ensuing protests —and the heavy-handed, militarized police response to that community’s outrage.
In the case of Orta, who says he was set up by police as retribution for the Garner video (Daily News, 8/4/14), the decision to film the encounter is representative of a growing trend of copwatching—which is exactly what it sounds like: filming cops. Even as traditional media cover the Ferguson police through clouds of teargas, communities of color are learning to rely on themselves to report on what happens around them and to them.
As Malkia Cyril pointed out recently on CounterSpin (8/22/14), the “decentralized nature of the Internet” allowed for “democratized” coverage of the Ferguson protests. In contrast to corporate media, bewildered when a Midwestern police department resembled Egyptian national police—“This doesn’t make any sense,” CNN’s Jake Tapper declared (FAIR Blog, 8/19/14)—street reporters recognize police aggression as part of a pattern they’ve had to confront in order to document.
Citizen journalism is a potentially inspiring development in bursting the corporate media bubble overall, but particularly for cases of police brutality, both at the individual (Brown) and community (protesters) levels. The Web plays a crucial role for marginalized communities, black and Latino in particular, by disseminating incidents media won’t cover—or won’t stop spinning.
Somewhere in America during the time it takes to read this column, there’ll likely be an incident of police harassment of the black and brown. Whether or not the incident is a story media can’t ignore (involving a fatal encounter, say, or a public figure like Harvard professor Skip Gates), these encounters are the context that surrounds high-profile incidents like the ones in Staten Island and Ferguson. This includes racial profiling, mass incarceration and the long history of systemic brutality.
“If you wanna take a picture of me one more time, I’m gonna lock your ass up.” -Officer Darren Wilson before arresting a resident filming him with a cellphone (YouTube, 11/14/14).
Copwatching videos, disseminated initially through decentralized Internet media like Black Twitter, can bring those experiences to the national dialogue. And videos that don’t make national news can still make the rounds on the Internet via sites focused on street culture, like World Star Hip Hop, or dedicated to police videos, like the Free Thought Project or Photography Is Not a Crime—which are best described as inversions of the long-running show Cops, showcasing police encounters through the eyes of the public.
The idea is that everyday people with camera phones and access to the Internet can put police aggression and misconduct on blast—with the hope of influencing opinion and politics. But there are at least two factors in traditional media coverage that make public perceptions of police difficult to move, even amid an avalanche of disturbing amateur police videos.
One is the traditional role of not just media in general, but criminal justice media (reporters and outlets that focus on policing and crime) specifically. When hip-hop artist Talib Kweli criticized CNN’s Don Lemon (Politico, 8/21/14) for failing to represent his and other protesters’ experiences, he could’ve added the critique emanating from social media that traditional media were adding to the criminalization of black men by their choice of pictures used on air (Al Jazeera America, 8/14/14).
These distortions happen often at the local level as well, culminating in media coverage that favors official narratives over community input (FAIR Blog, 6/19/14). Likely a result of the well-known tendency to favor power-holders in order to preserve access, bias in criminal justice media can deeply prejudice public opinion.
The other factor affects media as a whole: the issue of diversity. White reporters covering a police scandal, especially one in which race is key, are likely less equipped by experience to understand the situation. We use all sorts of experts in other fields to add depth into stories they may have insight into. So why do we send white reporters into communities of color to cover police brutality?
Polls find whites have a generally favorable perception of police (Pew, 8/25/14; Huffington Post, 8/21/14)—and rarely live in overpoliced communities. The urgency and proximity to the issue of police brutality is one that residents of communities of color are best suited to document. Which is why copwatching, as an invaluable media tool at their disposal, is here to stay.
