The Cell Phone as a Civil Rights Tool

Professor J,

And now we have Baltimore and Freddy Gray.

But let's back up to your question which I answered. You asked, simply, what was the first reaction when seeing the police, without thinking about it intellectually. You assumed, even bet, it would be fear. You didn't ask whether there were any circumstances under which I might be fearful of police. If that is the question, then of course there are several instances in which that would be true, some of which you outlined.

From the rest of your last post I think we are agreeing that: yes there are lots of good police officers, there are some officers that have issues (whatever the cause) and shouldn't be in a position of authority let alone armed, and that police forces have a code of protecting their own and that is a huge contributing factor in all of these cases.

I'd be interested in knowing what the statistics are for female officers involved in cases like the ones we've seen a rash of recently.

While I was looking up statistics on that I found that last month a female officer in Pennsylvania was charged with shooting an unarmed white man twice in the back of the head after she'd tased him. I wonder why that story didn't get any national attention. I thought that was because there wasn't any video to stream on a 24 hour news channel, but there was actually audio and video of the assault that showed him not behaving in an aggressive manner (but guess what she'd reported). I'm guessing the reason we never heard about the story is that she was arrested and charged on March 24th. Which made me wonder about whether gender as well as race had any bearing on how these cases were perceived and resolved.

I can't help wondering if the greatest civil rights tool ever is the cell phone. Currently at the museum we have an exhibit of civil rights photography taken by nine photographers where were actual activists. Lots of photographs from that era are from publications where journalists showed up and chronicled an event then went home. These pictures were taken by people who were in the trenches, so to speak. But they still had to be published and publicized by the "gatekeepers" of information at the time. Which might have meant first winning those people over. Those barriers no longer exist. That anyone can record an event and post it or send it to someone in authority is helping to shine a light on the real problems that cannot be so easily covered up.

In recent years the law has upheld the right of citizens to record police officers doing their job anyplace that could be considered in plain view as long as it doesn't interfere with them. In the past it was up to the officer to decide whether or not that was happening (a problem) but that is changing. They also don't have the right to confiscate a camera or delete any images or video.

People who control the flow of information have power. Much of what we are seeing is a significant shift in who has the ability to shape the conversation and public opinion. In the Freddy Gray case the video that shows him before he got into that van looks damming. We can all speculate but only those officers inside the van know how he came to be so horrifically injured that it resulted in his death. We'd like to think that people conduct themselves whether or not they think they are being watched. Unfortunately we know that simply isn't the case. Any citizen would feel safer knowing that their interaction with a police officer was being recorded.  A camera inside the van and on every officer involved would eliminate the mystery of what happened to Gray once those doors were closed.

It may even have saved his life.