It’s been 55 years since police violence sparked the Watts rebellion. It’s been 28 years since the Rodney King arrest, beating, filming, and subsequent uprising in South Los Angeles. Today, the systems and patterns of police abuse are as rampant as ever. What has changed is our collective ability to document these moments. “The violence is not new,” says writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. “It’s the cameras that are new.”
In the span of little more than a week, some 10,000 people have been arrested, many while engaged in peaceful protest. We’ve seen police target both journalists and civilian witnesses exercising their first amendment rights, and attack them with tear gas, rubber bullets, and unhinged billy clubs.
WITNESS, a 2005 Skoll Awardee, formed in the wake of the Rodney King incident to help people use video and technology to protect and defend human rights. For the last 28 years WITNESS has trained people to use their cell phone video camera to record incidents of police and government civil rights abuse, then share it with the media and justice system so wrongdoers can be prosecuted and further abuse prevented.
One key strand of WITNESS’s work in the US and globally is to document state violence, push for accountability, and implement structural change. In the past week in the U.S., we’ve seen huge demand for guidance from WITNESS on how to shoot and share footage of police violence safely, ethically, and effectively. It’s a demand coming from people in communities facing direct experience of police abuse for generations, but now we’re seeing a spike in interest from people directly experiencing police violence for the first time.
Focus on first principles
The guidance we offer at WITNESS focuses on three main principles. First, how can you safely record video of police abuse, without endangering yourself or others. Second, how you can ensure the video footage holds up in court, where it can stand as powerful, trustworthy evidence. And third, how can you share the video footage in a way that doesn’t jeopardize safety or reduce its effectiveness.
Let’s start with safety. We train people to make sure they are not endangering the person being filmed, not increasing the risk to other people around them, and not bringing risk to themselves. We know that witnesses to police violence face repercussions. This is particularly common for the people of color who’ve been high profile witnesses to police violence. They have often faced retaliation and harassment.
Next we teach people how to film in a way that can stand up as evidence in a court of law. We train people on how to film continuously, how to do it in a way that can be confirmed as a particular location, and at a particular time. These are techniques that become incredibly valuable if the footage needs to be introduced as evidence—this has been particularly important in documentation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids—or if you need to show a pattern of abuses across a moment from multiple perspectives.
Finally, we try to educate about the most impactful, effective way to share video footage of abuse. People assume that releasing footage in the heat of the moment on social media is the right move. But our experience shows that to successfully prosecute police officers, a more effective tactic is to hold back the footage until a police account comes out, and then use the video to reveal that the police account is demonstrably false.
Beyond the bad apple: advocacy for systemic change
Our work at WITNESS has shown these instances of police violence are not examples of a few bad apples ruining the entire barrel. What we’ve seen on the streets of America in the last few weeks is about racism and systemic violence. We partner with community-based organizations like Berkeley Copwatch and El Grito de Sunset Park to build open sourced tools that help track the kinds of patterns of police abuse that sparked this current mass movement of protest.
At the root of the problem is systemic racism and ill-informed policies compounded by failures to invest in communities on a structural level. It’s important to listen to the communities impacted to understand what they want: failed reform actions in the past have led to things like body cameras, which don’t help protect communities.
Yes, video is a tool to show violence. But more importantly, it’s a tool to show patterns. It’s a tool to force the broader public to pay attention, and force authority to change.
We’re seeing an uptick in police violence around the world right now because of COVID-19 lockdowns. In Nigeria, security forces killed 18 people while enforcing a lockdown. Some 100,000 people have been arrested in the Philippines for violating curfews, and the state sanctioned violence in Brazil has reached the highest monthly level in years.
At WITNESS we think of these efforts as video advocacy. How do these videos fit within a broader set of aspirations towards accountability and change in the world? The starting point is the recognition of violence. But showing violence is not enough. We have to ensure the media will cover it, the government pays attention, and the leadership of communities who are directly affected in this can demand the changes they need to implement structural responses.
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