Want to watch a video of a man being killed?
If, like many people on Earth these days, you get some or all of your news online, that was one of your first choices this morning when you checked your favorite Web site. There it was, front and center, on the home page of my local paper, the Times, and on the BBC, and the Guardian, and the Wall Street Journal, and thousands of other news sites, as well as hundreds of thousands of Facebook pages and Twitter feeds: a freeze-frame showing a white policeman in the process of shooting a black man to death, with a play button you could click to watch the whole killing from start to finish. The killer, Officer Michael T. Slager, of the North Charleston Police Department, in South Carolina, shot his victim, Walter L. Scott, first with a Taser. Then, after Scott started to run away, Slager pointed his handgun and shot him in the back again and again. A few minutes earlier, Slager had stopped Scott for driving with a broken taillight; now he was putting him to death. Slager fired eight shots, and when Scott fell, he handcuffed him, binding his wrists behind his back and leaving him to die face down in the grass.
The video—filmed by a civilian bystander with a cell phone—shows that Slager was lying when he later claimed that he killed Scott while in fear for his life as they tussled over the Taser. It shows that Scott was shot while escaping from that tussle. And it shows that Slager, after handcuffing the dying Scott, jogged back to the scene of the tussle to pick up an object—it is not clear in the video, although the Taser is a logical presumption—then jogged back to drop it beside Scott’s body. (When Orson Welles made a movie about a killer cop who touches up his crime scenes, he called it “Touch of Evil.”) Without the video, Walter Scott was on track to become just the latest in the grim roll call of black men killed with practical impunity by cops, the majority of them white. But the video stripped Slager of the usual benefits of the usual doubts that usually get police officers off the hook in such cases. When Slager’s original lawyer saw the video, he dumped his client. And the video showed the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division all it needed to take the unusual step yesterday of arresting the officer for murder.
So, as a piece of evidence, the video did a great public service. It made inescapable a horrific murder, an act of outrageous injustice by a putative guardian of the law. Does that mean we all need to see it? This is a complicated question hastened by technology. Without the video, Slager likely would not have been charged—a depressing fact when you consider how many cases involving police violence rest mostly on an officer’s word, and how unlikely it is that such a complete and unambiguous record of a crime should exist. And it is very much to the credit of the South Carolina prosecutors that they did not stall the case with a grand jury but acted swiftly in response to the video, even before it was everywhere in the press. Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the Times, told me that Slager had already been charged when his paper posted the video online.
Posting videos of killings is fairly new territory for the American press. Just a few years ago, the late media critic at the Times, David Carr, felt compelled to mount a defense of his paper’s decision to run still photographs of dead bodies in the street after a shooting at the Empire State Building—and those were hardly identifiable portraits. Yet, at the same time, Carr criticized the _Post _for running a photograph of a man on a subway platform moments before he was shoved in front of a train. Carr argued that the _Times _picture was less prurient because “the guy was dead. It was over. He wasn’t about to be shot.” In other words, the picture passed Carr’s muster precisely because it did not show what the South Carolina video does.
Last year, Baquet, explaining the Times’s decision not to show the video made by jihadis of their execution of the American hostage James Foley, said, “There is no journalistic value to my mind of showing what a beheading looks like.” Nobody in the mainstream press argues otherwise, and even in the free-for-all of social media the posting of such jihadi snuff films is reviled. The chief argument against displaying those videos, of course, is that they are the killers’ propaganda. All we need to know about them is that a few professionals in law enforcement and journalism have shouldered the awful burden of watching them closely enough to vouch for and describe to us the information they carry. But a sense of decency is also at play in the decision against showing such images—a whole complex of ideas about good taste and sensationalism, and the impulse neither to overstimulate nor inure viewers with the horror of graphic violence. It is hard to escape the feeling, too, that by watching such spectacles one is participating in, and thereby compounding, the original acts of victimization and violation. (I didn’t look; all that I wanted to know was in the freeze-frame and the accompanying reports.)
The South Carolina video appears in a different context, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests that have followed the unjust decisions by state and federal prosecutors in case after case across the country not to prosecute cops who’ve killed unarmed black men. There was video, too, in one of the most infamous and inflammatory of those cases, that of Eric Garner, the black Staten Island man who was killed by white New York City police officers last summer. Garner’s alleged offense—selling loose cigarettes—was as petty as Walter Scott’s, and he, too, posed no threat to the police. In fact, the video shows that he was trying to back away from the police when they lunged at him, tackled him, strangled him, and left him lying bound and choking on the sidewalk, protesting, “I can’t breathe.”
The Garner video was posted shortly after his death by the New York Daily News. It then got mass, nationwide exposure after a grand jury decided not to bring charges against the officers who killed Garner. At that point, the video appeared in the press as the illustration of what was widely perceived to be an incomprehensible failure to hold the police accountable for the utterly needless taking of a citizen’s life. By the time the South Carolina video hit the news, however, it didn’t challenge the official story. Rather, with the arrest of Officer Slager, the video became the official story.
If we had, instead, footage of a policeman being gunned down and dying—the two officers executed in their patrol car in Brooklyn recently, for instance—would it have been posted as readily? What if it were footage of a child being run over by a car? Or footage of the execution of a convict sentenced to death by lethal injection? Surely, even many editorial boards that oppose the death penalty would also resist making a public spectacle of an execution, even if doing so were the condemned person’s dying wish.
This is uncharted territory, and it is not insignificant that Walter Scott’s family has expressed gratitude that the video exists. So we are, to some degree, our own editors when we choose to click or not. Perhaps we’ll soon be seeing videos of all such violent deaths that a ready cell phone happens to record. To say that one hopes not is not to wish for censorship but for consistent, respectful restraint.
It is easy not to click on a video, easy to choose not to watch Walter Scott’s murder. But making that choice is now inescapable. So the questions that come with it are inescapable, too. For instance: If you’re being shown this video, what wouldn’t you be shown? And also: If you’re being shown this because black lives matter, should you decline to look because black deaths matter, too?
