Recording police brutality: how technology is driving the new civil rights movement

Nilay Patel talks with Verge reporter Bijan Stephen and video producer Mariya Abdulkaf about The Verge's new multimedia project Capturing the Police. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:54Nilay Patel?

  Hey, everybody. It's Neelai from The Vergecast. Really special interview episode this week. Yesterday, The Verge published a feature package we're calling Capturing the Police, which was a months-long effort from almost everybody at the site to really interrogate the role of technology in the movement against police violence. The heart of the package is a feature where we talked to 11 people who had filmed somewhat viral videos of police violence, asking them why they did it, what happened next, how they felt in the moment, whether they would do it again, really contextualizing some of these videos that we've seen over and over and over again. We also made two videos. One is about a specific incident with a specific set of men in Baytown, Texas,

• 1:37Nilay Patel?

  who filmed police violence and what happened next. Another one from the Verge Science Team is about body cameras and police body cameras and how they affect your perception of what's going on and some academic research that's come out about that. So I asked Verge reporter Bijan Stephen and Verge video producer Maria Abdulkah, the two leaders of this site-wide project, to come on today, talk to me about the project, what they learned. And really, I keep thinking about this, the role that our phones are playing in changing our relationship to the police and the government. I don't think any product manager Or designer at a smartphone company ever thought that their products would be used in this way or create this moment. This is the direct intersection of technology and culture, which is something the Verge was founded to investigate. So this was a really great

• 2:22Nilay Patel?

  conversation with Bijan and Maria and a really big project. We're very proud of it. I hope you read and watch it. Here are Bijan and Maria.

• 2:30Nilay Patel?

  Maria Abdulkah, Bijan Steven, welcome to the Vergecast. How are you two doing?

• 2:34Speaker 03

  Well, Neelai, I'm doing great. Another beautiful day in quarantine.

• 2:38Nilay Patel?

  Maria, how are you?

• 2:39Speaker 04

  I'm good. I'm very relieved that this really big thing that we have produced is out there. So now I get to just sort of like take back and reflect.

• 2:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so you two were the editorial leaders of a big project we did that for, I would say, two months, we just called the Police Project. I hope everybody can see it on site. We're very proud of it. In scope, it looks at how people have been using technology to record the police, record police behavior protests, use technology and the tools to organize those protests, to organize the movement around police brutality, and then a lot of how those cameras in particular affect our relationship with the police. So it's a huge project. It looks like one big feature, a bunch of additional reports around that feature and two videos that Maria helped produce. Let's start with where it came from. How did this project begin and how

• 3:32Nilay Patel?

  did it take the shape that it ended up being on the site?

• 3:36Speaker 03

  That is a very, very good question because it was sort of such a big undertaking. We, it started in a very different direction than it ended, as I think a lot of large projects generally tend to. So it started with an idea, a sort of idea in the staff. One of our executive editors was like, we should do something to capture the moment. Then it sort of fell on me to shape that idea, which is, which is an interesting sort of problem because I was very interested in, you know, working with the initial iteration of the, of the, of the project. But getting a chance to shape it meant that I had to think very critically about sort of what, what would fit the moment and what would capture the moment well, I would say. So that's how we came, came up with the idea of focusing on the people filming.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  ...of police brutality because it felt like there was there was a section missing to the narrative that was that has been circulating around social media. Which is to say, we don't really hear from those people. Like, we hear a lot from victims. We hear a lot from police officers, but we don't really hear from people who like the everyday people who are sort of in the line of fire and decide to make the very, I think, brave decision to pick up their phones and record and, you know, like shine light, like shed light on on this type of violence that is that really sort of goes undocumented. Because one of the things about police violence is it never really shows up in police reports.

• 4:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, one thing that caught me is, I say this a lot, but I mean, this is a new way of using phones. And that's like fundamentally what's happening with with all of these. If you look at our feature, we started it very intentionally with Rodney King and, you know, George Holliday, the person who shot the Rodney King beating in the 90s, he was using a gigantic Sony 8mm cassette handicap, which basically no one had those. Like, some families might have had those, but that that camera was present at that moment in time at 1 a.m. on that corner to witness that thing was astoundingly improbable. And as we've come to now, the presence of cameras is actually more likely than not

• 5:35Nilay Patel?

  in just the way people live their lives. And so the decision to record seems at once easy, simple. Everyone has a camera. It seems likely that everything will be recorded. But it also turns out to have like dramatic consequences.

• 5:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I think one of the main threads, which I'm sure we'll get into later, is a lot of these people felt afraid of retaliation from the police because once they'd posted on social media, they sort of were identifying themselves as targets.

• 6:00Nilay Patel?

  So Mara, and you produced the two videos here. How did you pick the two subjects? The Verge video team did one and the Verge Science video team did one. How do we land on those two videos?

• 6:10Speaker 04

  So with the first video on Isaiah Benavides, I initially saw the video on this very large, like, database of other videos of police brutality that had been collected and that was being shared on Twitter that we were using, that we were looking through for this project. And when I first saw the video, I sort of noted it as something noteworthy, but because it had it, it didn't happen at a protest. It wasn't the, the video that I thought I was going to focus on. But after Justine Callum did the interview with Isaiah for the Peace Reporters feature and told me after he published the video, there had been an increased police surveillance in his life

• 6:52Speaker 04

  and that he was feeling a lot of anxiety and a lot of paranoia since he published the video. It just really struck me that he still, even with all of this fear and all of this anxiety and what was happening, he still wanted to talk to us because he had told Justine that he was interested in being part of the video project. And so as soon as she told me that, I, I spoke to him and as we sort of spoke, it was just so clear that he understood the magnitude of recording and he understood the consequences that comes with it and yet still wanted to sort of bring awareness to not only this moment, but also what happens when you record the police. So that's how we landed on that video.

• 7:36Speaker 04

  So our second video on the role of body cams and capturing police brutality felt imperative that we would cover it in that way, given that it's not only bystander footage that is coming out of these recent protests, it's also a lot of body cam footage. And so we thought it was important and imperative and that Verge Science Team thought it was imperative to also cover the role of body cams and capturing police brutality, but also how they might actually influence how we perceive police violence. So it just added sort of a different layer and a different impact to this larger piece.

• 8:09Nilay Patel?

  One thing that caught me about that, and you know, Addie has a report that just has really stuck with me as we've been going through the project about how all these videos of protest and police violence are becoming a genre of film. And as I read that and I watched the body cam video, it just occurred to me that we actually have to use sort of the formal language of film to describe what's happening here, that the body cam is telling a story because it's one kind of camera and it shows you one kind of thing, it has a gaze and all these other cameras have. Another kind of perspective. And it, I don't think that we ever think about that as these videos as having maybe like that formal connection between what the cameras are doing and what you as the viewer perceive.

• 8:53Nilay Patel?

  And that to me has been a very powerful through line of this whole project that actually cameras are active participants in these stories and they shape the narrative. The same way that we, we know this in every other situation where there's cameras, the cameras shape the narrative and they leave things out and they enhance other things. And that to me, I think there's going to be a big, long cultural reckoning over the role of cameras in these moments because we don't really understand how that affects our relation to the culture, to the police, to the state. And it's changing because of the cameras right now.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  I mean, it is ironic a little bit that this genre of film started in Los Angeles.

• 9:32Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's where there are most cameras.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  Right. And it's, I mean, like, and you know, if you think about it that way, it's like, it makes sense that like the Rodney King beating was filmed by a person in Los Angeles and maybe not elsewhere. But also I think, I think it's, it's interesting that you bring up Addy's piece because I, you know, like, I do think filmmakers understand this. And it is also, I mean, to, to get not conspiratorial, but to go a little bit off the rails, which I still think it's in line, but you know, like, the US government spends a not insignificant amount of money advising filmmakers who are making films about the police and the military. And they do get some of these editorial, they, they do get editorial control over some of this stuff sometimes. And I think that perspective does shape the way that we see some of these institutions, which is why like, I think it's very powerful that, you know, like people on the ground

• 10:16Speaker 03

  are filming and they're making their own narratives about these institutions in real time.

• 10:20Nilay Patel?

  So let's start there. That's the, that's the big feature. That's the piece reporters. It's 11 interviews of people who filmed police violence. I want to just immediately atop credit our creative director, William Joel, and the engineer from the Vox Media team, Miriam Nadler, who built this thing. It is beautiful. It is quite an experience to go through it. But the stories in it are actually, of course, the most powerful thing. Bijan, tell me about, one thing you said to me at the very beginning of this project was this is the same story over and over again.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 10:50Nilay Patel?

  And there's something about the volume of it that I think really brings that home. Tell me about how the feature came together and tell me how you sort of came to that realization and tell us what that story actually is.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we interviewed a lot of people. That was, that was the hard part. One of the hardest parts of the project was finding people who actually wanted to talk to us. But I think, you know, we were using Greg Dusset's list on Twitter to find some of these people. Shots to Greg. I did actually interview him for a breakout, but you know, that's a separate thing. But yeah, I think, I mean, I think it's very, it's interesting, right? Because going through these videos, like, they all have the same, the same beginning, middle and end. And it's like, it's, once you see enough of them, it's like very, it's become sort of predictable where the rising action and the falling action isn't like purely film criticism terms. I think the reason that we decided to go this route was because it adds context to the experience of police violence. Like, it's, it's one of the things that like, it really gives depth to what's going on.

• 11:44Speaker 03

  And it's stuff that you don't normally see. And the idea was to bring that sort of reality home to people reading. Which is why, I mean, and the reason it's the same story every time. And the reason that it sort of like, it was, it was almost distracting, actually, at the beginning. Cause I was like, okay, this is a different place. This is a different time. These are different people. But like, chronicling the experience affected people in the same way. And that's why it was the same story every time. Cause it's not every day that you see somebody who is like an officer of the law, who is, who has sworn an oath to protect the public, just beating the shit out of, you know, a peaceful protester. And I think it's one of those things that sort of jars you out of complacency. And I think for, for a lot of the people that we spoke to, like, at least in the interviews, it seemed like these people were very sort of shell shocked.

• 12:29Speaker 03

  Like, they, they, they sort of knew the extent of the problem, but a lot of them were just normal people who like, happened to be at a protest and happened to be filming when, you know, the stuff went down. And so it like, it was very strange reading these, these reports from the ground, like, these 11 reports over and over again. Because like, one of the reasons I think that it's important that we have the like, Dateline, like, when it happened, where it happened, and like, you know, how many shares or whatever the, the videos got, was because it, it gave back some necessary context. Because again, if you're, if you're reading this stuff in a vacuum, if you're just reading reports from people who have filmed this stuff, it really does get eerily similar.

• 13:09Nilay Patel?

  And, and for whatever it's worth, the videos are almost all at night. It's, they're usually chaotic and they all feel like they're happening in the same place.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's really strange and maybe they are. I mean, at least psychically speaking, right? Like it's, it is the same sort of mental place, I think.

• 13:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And that was one of the notes as we were putting the thing together that we got from our editors was this, we have to return some sense of place to it. So we, we added that back in. As you were kind of editing each of these individual vignettes, was there a theme that, that like really came out from each of the people? Was it, what, what strikes me is, as I watch all these videos, there's just, everyone has a phone out.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 13:49Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like all the ti- it just seems like this instinct to have your phone out. That to me is new. That's,

• 13:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:56Nilay Patel?

  That's not how people thought 10 years ago or 20 years ago.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  I, I really do think that's in large part because of the power of social media. Because again, like the thing about social media, people dismiss it out of hand as like a bad and toxic place, which a lot of the time it is, like, don't get me wrong. However, it is one of the only avenues for social change for people who are marginal. It's like, it's, it's a place where you can go to be heard by, by the institutions who would normally just have the power to ignore you. And I think, you know, like police violence is one of those things where it is like, it is sort of an abuse of power. Right? It's one of these, it's like something that it won't show up on an incident report. Right? It's somebody like a cop, like using their baton on a protester. But if somebody films that and films like the, the circumstances where it, where it happened and how it happened, like you, you, you, you get a sense of like whether or not this was justified.

• 14:45Speaker 03

  And I think, you know, like a lot of the times it's not, and a lot of the times that goes unreported. And I think people have seen that you can actually like get some measure of justice from these otherwise unaccountable institutions by sharing this stuff on social media. Because public pressure is still a thing. And I, it's interesting that like, you know, to go back to Isaiah Benavides, you know, he, his video got that officer fired. Like his, him posting the video actually made like a change at the very local level in his town. And I think, I think that's a really important thing. And I think that's, that's sort of what's driving this stuff because again, institutions like the police were previously entirely unaccountable to the public.

• 15:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Maria, I mean, you, you are yourself a filmmaker. You talked to Isaiah. How do you? How do you take that, that everyone is just instinctively pulling out their phone because they think it will lead to some, some change down the road?

• 15:37Speaker 04

  I think what's interesting about Isaiah specifically is that this video doesn't take place at a protest. It, he was filming outside of a convenience store. They were coming from a barbecue. They hadn't gone to protest recently. They were, at that moment, they weren't planning, necessarily planning on going to a protest later that week. However, as the video begins, you hear him say, "I've got to get out and record this." You also hear his friends in the car say, "We've got to record this." And yet, when we interviewed them, it was the first time any of them had ever recorded the police, had ever been with other people who were recording the police. And I think that is largely part to seeing these videos on Twitter and on Facebook of police violence being captured by, by citizens,

• 16:21Speaker 04

  being captured by civilians. And so, they wanted to hold this police officer accountable, and they also started recording him preemptively. They didn't start recording him the moment he started, you know, approaching them. They started recording the minute they were pulling over. And so, I think that really signifies to us, at least to me, that even if you've never participated in a protest, or never participated in filming the police, you now know that's an option for you. That's an option for you, and that's an option for your community.

• 16:53Speaker 03

  It is, I mean, I do, I think the, the third part that is sort of going unsaid here, is that like, it is a protective thing too. Like, you have evidence that maybe you, that like, you weren't doing anything wrong. Even like, okay, like, you get pulled over like, by the cops and they cite probable cause. Well, you know, like, you're sitting there peacefully. It, you get to tell your story via the camera too. And it, I think, you know, these videos, I am sure, are showing up in courts of law across the country.

• 17:16Nilay Patel?

  One thing that's really interesting about this, and this, again, I, I come back to that, the piece from Addy, and I come back to the, the body cam video from the Verge Science team. Isaiah was filming someone else. He was at a remove, right? It was his friend who was in, in the encounter with the police. Most of the, the powerful videos that we see that lead to change are filmed that are removed. They're not from the participants. How do you, how do you think that sort of plays out in this larger...? Yeah, there's a lot of change in this country right now. There's a lot of conflict. I actually want to talk, we, you know, we published a piece yesterday. There's been some criticism. I want to talk about that. But right now, we're seeing one sort of very clear perspective from a remove. How do you think that's playing out?

• 17:59Speaker 04

  I think a big part of when you hear Isaiah speak about filming, he talks about the fact that he constantly had to remind himself to take a step back because he knew the moment that he engaged directly with this officer, that the officer could come out, could come for him. You know, he had, he very much understood the power dynamics at play, even as him as the filmer. So he kept, as the officer kept getting closer, he kept moving back. And he would ask, you can hear in the large, in the full 12-minute video of this incident, you continuously hear him ask the other officer in the video, "Hey, is it okay if I'm standing here? Is it okay if I'm standing here?"

• 18:40Speaker 04

  He's very conscientious of his body and his sort of proximity to the violence, to the violence that's being enacted against his friends. And when we interviewed him, the reason that he did take a step back was because he knew that if they took him, if that he got arrested along with his friends, that that video might not, like, not not get published, right? Like, he might not get his phone back. Like, these things might happen. And he knew the power of that video and the power of what he was holding in his hands. And he wanted to share it with the world. So that meant taking a step back so he could do that. And it doesn't mean that it didn't traumatize him.

• 19:20Speaker 04

  Every time he sees the video, he gets traumatized by seeing his friends violated in this way. However, he understood that the consequences would not have been possible had he not taken a step back and kept recording.

• 19:34Speaker 03

  I also think, I mean, just, just generally speaking, like, we, we, we tend to trust videos that come from outside sources or people who are around but not exactly involved. It like, it adds another, like, an extra veneer of credibility, I think, which is like another reason that like, some of the biggest videos that we see are not, like, it's not the body cam, it's not the person on the ground being choked to death, it's somebody else who has, has, has had the same realization as Isaiah. But it like, it, I think, I think, you know, just like, subjectively, we trust, we trust those perspectives more because they feel more objective. It's like a CCTV camera just happened to capture the incident on, on film.

• 20:15Speaker 04

  Well, I would say with this specific incident, like, the group that was arrested, right, Isaiah Benavides wasn't arrested, but his friends Skylar Gilmore and Isaiah Phillips were, they were all taking part in questioning this officer across the parking lot. So I don't think it's that they were necessarily objective. I don't, I don't think they were. I think they saw their friend being pulled over, they recognized the police officer, their friend had just been with them at this barbecue. And I think the fact that he was able to get the video out there and the fact that you can see the whole incident play out, right, like, in our video, we don't show the whole 12-minute video, but it's like, five minutes of not much going on until the officer sort of approaches them. So I

• 21:00Speaker 04

  think the sort of added, quote unquote, like, credibility is that you see the beginning, middle, and end of that incident. Isaiah did not stop recording until the police left. Isaiah began filming before the police had even, had even gotten out of their car. So I think with this specific video, it's less about the object, objectivity and more about the fact that he was able to capture it all.

• 21:23Speaker 03

  How do you think that ties into, I mean, one thing that we write about a lot is surveillance. We're all being surveilled all the time. You mentioned CCTV cameras, you know, on a different day, in a different moment, the way that our newsroom talks about, like, extremely prevalent CCTV cameras, is, oh crap, we're being put a camera everywhere, now we're being surveilled.

• 21:44Nilay Patel?

  When the cops have access to this footage, right? At the same time, what we've been talking about a lot is the presence of this camera at a remove actually serves a purpose, right? Isaiah, taking that video from that remove served a purpose. How should we think about this balance? Because I, I personally, right? Like you catch me in a different minute and I'm, I'm, I'm over here and I'm over there.

• 22:06Speaker 03

  Actually, surveillance is good. No, I think the difference is it really depends on like the, the institution that has the footage and what they want to do with it, right? Like the cops, when they get ring footage and what, like, I mean, like, it's not, it's like, the cops are using footage to incriminate. And I think generally, this is very generally, speaking in very, very general terms, like it's evidence, right? Um, and you know, when it's coming from people on the ground at a protest who are filming, it's documentation. It's like the same footage, but it can be used in very different ways depending on who's doing the asking, you know, for the footage, like, and, and where it's going. And I think, I think that context is actually super important, right?

• 22:44Speaker 03

  Because like in England, for example, there are cameras everywhere. They're just like municipal cameras run by the fucking, like in London, for example, there's, there's just cameras run by the Metropolitan Police Department. And that's just, that's just like a fact of life. Um, and I think it's interesting because like they, I think they have like controls on how you can use that stuff, whereas, you know, with ring networks here, it's like sort of ad hoc, private companies turning shit over to the police whenever they feel like it. I don't know. I guess I'm, I'm going on a little tangent here, but I really do think that like, it depends on who's asking for the footage and what they intend to do with it. I think, you know, people taking footage like Isaiah's, it's like intended to sort of exonerate his friends and show that they weren't actually doing anything wrong. And this was sort of an unjustified thing.

• 23:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I think, I think the intent really matters.

• 23:30Speaker 04

  So I think that it's not just about the presence of cameras and footage, but it's also about who has those cameras. And this sort of act of pulling out your phone to question authority, to question police officers is actually referred to as surveillance by scholars. It is the opposite of surveillance, right? Surveillance is often reserved for those in power. It doesn't necessarily mean- It's always the state, like you can surveil someone, but the moment that you begin to surveil them, you are taking a bit away, a bit of their agency away from them. You're taking a bit of their privacy away from them. But surveillance is this idea of challenging authority by trying to sort of disrupt this power dynamic

• 24:15Speaker 04

  by filming your oppressor, by filming specifically in marginalized communities, the police. And so with surveillance, it is the idea of, this is what we're talking about, right? Like, it's not mentioned one time in the videos, nor is it mentioned in any of these pieces. But all of this is what scholars refer to as surveillance, which was coined by Steve Mann. And it's all about looking from below. So you're not looking from below. You're not the person who is above in a position of power. You are the person who's often surveilled, right? Like with Isaiah and his friends, like they were, they knew this officer. They, they had never recorded this officer, but they not only knew of him,

• 24:58Speaker 04

  they had previously had seen incidences of him. And so I think by pulling out their phone, what they're doing is trying to challenge this authority figure to them that had represented sort of, had oppressed and had sort of harassed or had allegedly harassed and targeted African Americans in their community. So they see this white officer, they see their black friend being pulled over. They understand that this officer had allegedly been targeting and harassing African Americans. They pull out their phone to begin to try to create a counter narrative. And before any of these things, I think Bijan spoke about this earlier, like, when you start recording early on, you can sort of see that maybe there wasn't any probable cause. And what you hear them say in the first few minutes of the video is,

• 25:44Speaker 04

  what's the probable cause? What's the probable cause? Like, why did you pull him over? And the officers aren't engaging, right? And so I think the role of that video in that moment is about who has it, right? Like, you can hear them. It's not this, like, surveillance video from above that's muted, that can be distorted. It's not about the person who, like, got out of their car, who started filming once they saw him started getting attacked. It's a person who filmed at the very beginning. And surveillance often doesn't involve you filming once you see the police officer sort of attacking someone, but you film when you see a police officer because you want to challenge their authority over you.

• 26:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. When I say we're gonna face a long period of cultural reckoning over this, I don't think that we... The surveillance scholarship is at its very early stages, right? And it's not built out, it's not complete. We're learning how it works. And that, to me, is one of, you know, when the smartphone camera was invented, I don't think people thought... The people who invented the CCD chip in the back of every smartphone thought, "We're gonna have to have a conversation about surveillance when this is all said and done." And that, to me, is one of... Right, I mean, I think about that all of the time. Like, there are engineers and product managers and designers who make these products, and sometimes they have a guess of how they'll be used.

• 27:06Nilay Patel?

  But this, to me, is one of the most surprising revolutionary uses of the technology, right? Like, just fundamentally. And I think this conversation about what does it mean for everyone to record the state? What does it mean for the state to maybe record you right back with a body camera or something else? It's gonna change the nature of our relationship with the people in power.

• 27:25Speaker 03

  It is interesting. Like, one of the things that fascinates me about taking video at protests specifically is, like, I think a lot of police officers, like, on the ground see it as violence when somebody holds a camera up to them. Because it, like, it does challenge your authority, but it also, like, it is a thing creating a record in real time that they cannot control in a situation. And I think it's just very strange, because, yeah, I mean, the perspective really matters. Like, who's taking the video really, really, really matters.

• 27:52Nilay Patel?

  Well, let's talk about that for a minute. In this conversation, in the future, we have very intentionally chosen to highlight one perspective. The people filming the videos. We have almost no perspective from the police in return, no perspective from the state in return. As we were making this project, I, you know, I'm the editor in chief, ultimately, I'm accountable for everything. I knew we were making that decision. I felt comfortable with it. We do hear a lot from the police. But that notion that the camera is impeding the, the police officer's job, that the police are themselves scared of violence, they need to be protected, that there are people with guns in the street and they often fear for their lives. How do you think that, I mean, the piece was published yesterday, right?

• 28:36Nilay Patel?

  For many people liked it, some people were critical of it. We appreciate the criticism and makes us better. But how do you, how were you prepared for that criticism that there was no perspective from the police? After the piece was published, how did you react and where are you at now?

• 28:50Speaker 03

  That's a really, I mean, that's a really, really good question. I, I haven't seen much of that criticism. Shots to my filters, I guess, my hate blockers. But it's, I mean, the, I think the larger question of like what police think is really interesting to me. Neil, I don't know if you know this, but a few years ago, I actually, I spent like a year in Ohio, reporting a story on cops there. And like, like this is, it's this very, it was Liverpool, East Liverpool, Ohio, which is a very small town. Between, I think it's like West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio. It's right on the, the border of those places. And it was the site at one point of the, like, it had the worst heroin, like heroin outbreak. Like people were dying of overdoses every single day, like the average was like one a day. And the police department was like, it largely fell on them to, to take care of the people.

• 29:32Speaker 03

  And it was really interesting because I, what I did was like, I just spent like all of my time going on ride along. So I'd like, you know, suit up, get my notebook, get in the car and we just like drive around like, and I would smoke Black and Milds with this cop. And we would, you know, like he, he would pick people up. And so I like went to the county jail and like, I saw the mechanisms of the state, like from like the passenger seat, which was very interesting because like, the more time you spend with police officers, the more you understand that like, Seeing people's worst every day does something very bad to your brain. It puts you on extremely high alert and it makes ordinary situations seem incredibly terrifying. And I think one of the things that goes unexplored is the trauma that police officers sort of feel. And like, they just don't talk about it. Like, all of these, like, there were like seven people in this department.

• 30:17Speaker 03

  All of them were very, very, very clearly traumatized. And in a way that was like, not obvious to them, but very obvious to me as like, an outside observer. And it was interesting because like, the other thing that they did, most of the time, it was just like, social work. They were just, they knew all of the people they were talking to. They, they like, were involved in the community. Everybody knew them. Like, I remember the cop I was with, like, picked up this woman because she, like, had drugs on her. And he was like, why, like, why, like, what happened? Like, we talked about this. I let you go last time because like, you know, you said you were working on your rap career. What happened to that? And it was like, one of these things where I was like, oh, this guy actually really does understand, like, where these people are coming from. We ended up having to take her to the county jail because she didn't have money for bail. It was like a hundred bucks.

• 30:59Speaker 03

  And he was like, on the, on the hour-long ride back, he was fuming that she would have to spend this long in jail, just because she didn't have a hundred dollars. And so it's one of these things that I think, like, you know, there are good cops. The institution of the police is fundamentally, like, disordered, I will say. Like, it's like, and I think both of those things are in conversation with each other. Because like, again, there are days that are incredibly bad. Like, this cop was telling me, like, the worst day of his life. I asked offhandedly, "By the way, never ask a cop what the worst day of their life is." He, I, I was not prepared for the answer, which was like, he was like, "Oh, yeah." So I had to respond to a call, like, this, this guy, like, had kids who, you know, his, his kids were friends with. He, like, locked them in the house and burned the house down because his wife was cheating on him.

• 31:44Speaker 03

  And so this cop had to go respond to the call and then go tell his kids afterward what happened. And it was, I was just like, that is just like, outside, so outside of the scope of a normal person's life, that it's like, that it requires examination, right? And like, I think that's the kind of trauma that these people are, like, seeing. Like, one of those, one of those events can scar you for life. I don't necessarily think being a police officer is as dangerous as, say, being a

• 32:06Nilay Patel?

  Firefighter, like statistically speaking. But again, like these horrific incidents of violence really do change your perspective. And I think a lot of this kind of trauma is invisible and goes unexamined. And it's difficult because like at a protest, which is a very ordinary event, there is a potential, like there is some potential for stuff to go wrong. And I think if you're on the lookout for that, like it makes it like skews your perspective. And you, you can't see what is happening sort of objectively, which is, I think, why it's very important that people also film the police at these events because there is another record that is being created in real time.

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• 33:42Nilay Patel?

  In the midst of all of this, there is another debate about the role of social media, about cancel culture, which makes me, you know, I have a lot of thoughts about that. But social media is amplifying exactly one perspective, right? If you watch all these videos, the reason we put the Dateline in the platform to give them a sense of place that made them seem like they're not all happening in the same place at the same time. But if you just come across this stream of videos, the police seem like a unified force with one set of reactions, with, you know, one set of tactics, with one set of responses. They're showing up to protests in riot gear and then they immediately do violence. Do you think that is affecting the conversation?

• 34:26Nilay Patel?

  Because that's something I've thought about and honestly, I've worried about a little bit, is that social media. Even though I think some of the criticism is overblown, it does ruin nuance. It does collapse context. That's what it does. And here, this is a very complicated, complex debate about how we want the state to deploy violence to ostensibly protect us. And that nuance is being collapsed.

• 34:50Speaker 03

  The central irony of these protests is they are largely against police brutality. Like, the definition of brutality is something, it's like violence outside of the scope of, outside of a scope, right? I am leery to grant the state more power to shape a narrative just because they already do that. Like, the proliferation of, like, you know, Fraternal Order of the Police, like, social media accounts and copaganda, which is an idea that we, you know, we talked about including in the package and sort of discarded. Like, that stuff is alive and well and doesn't really need any help to spread. And I think that, like, what's happening on social media now is like a sort of necessary correction. It's not like, because I do think, like, portrayals of the police is, like, helpful and not violent.

• 35:34Speaker 03

  Like, that's been the generalized conception of, like, the cops in America for a very long time. That is not true, that has not been true for specific marginalized groups for as long, but like, the American public conception of the police, the white conception of the police is that they are necessary and helpful. And the thing that these videos do is upend that conception because, like, by interrogating where it comes from, right? Like, who are the police helpful to? Why are they helpful for this group of people? Why do they, why are they violent toward this group of people, statistically speaking, much more? Like, it's one of those things that I do, I do see social media as sort of a necessary corrective to the overwhelming, like, conception that the police are, like, one way. And I think that we don't necessarily need to hear more from them because I think we've

• 36:19Speaker 03

  heard a lot already.

• 36:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I accept the point. I think I just, I worry that, in a very polarized America, this just feeds that. And the reason I say that is, I am from southeastern Wisconsin, right? I grew up eight miles away from Kenosha. My parents worked there. The idea that Joe Biden was there yesterday, and as we're recording this, Donald Trump is going to show up today, Kenosha, Wisconsin does not need this kind of attention, right? Like, it doesn't, it's not, it's not a community that's built for it, and yet it has just quickly arrived there. Right? And that, and we're already watching that story. There's one version of it and there's another version of it. And there's almost no middle ground. At that, to me, like, I find that just generally worrisome.

• 37:06Speaker 03

  But is the middle ground any good? Like, I say that facetiously, but I'm also like, I, I, I don't know. I mean, I really like, I grew up in East Texas and I grew up like, the thought that I might get shot getting pulled over was just a thing that I, that that's just like, that's how I, that's like how I grew up, you know? And I didn't quite understand it till I left and like, was able to like, to think about it a lot more, removed from like, this really weird poisonous context. But like, the prevailing assumption that the police are like, meant to kill and harm you, generally speaking, it's like, that's just a cost of doing business, is incredible to me. Like, that's like, the idea that that's just sort of like, something that we accept, is, is something that like, blows my mind when I think about it too hard. And I think what happened in Kenosha is just like, and the, the, the other thing about this project, is like, this happens all across America.

• 37:51Speaker 03

  Like, the police aren't one unified force, but they do think very much the same everywhere. And they are outfitted very much the same everywhere. And it's one of those things that like, it points to a deeper structural problem with the institution itself, I think. But I don't know that the middle ground here is any good, because like, the middle ground is like, it feels like, it feels like the, it almost feels akin to the Reconstruction thing, where it was like, alright, like, the North and the South shook hands, I'm thinking of the meme, and we're just like, fuck black people. That's what happened? And like, that's where, that's what it feels like this middle ground is. Cause it's like, yes, we can have like, the liberal conception of the police, and the conservative conception of the police. And when they meet in the middle, it's like, everybody else who gets boned. And I, I think that like, the fact that police violence is, is so prevalent,

• 38:33Speaker 03

  and it is so structural, and is part of the founding, but it's, it's like, as American is like, just about anything else. And I, I think that what's new now is like, people have the tools to push back on that conception. They have the tools to be like, no, this is not how things should be. And I think what the project is all about is chronicling that specific moment. Like, that is what we were trying to, to show, is like, here is a point in American history, where there has been a pushback against the institution of the police, but it's also a legitimate pushback. It's like, it's not that people don't want to be, feel safe or protected, it's just that the institution tasked with doing that, has shown itself woefully inadequate to the task.

• 39:11Nilay Patel?

  There is a piece of this puzzle where almost all the videos that we sourced and talked about and reported on were on Twitter and they've become this national phenomenon. But the video from Isaiah, these communities, they all find it on Facebook. These are two platforms that are besieged by controversy around how they moderate, how they distribute, how they create filter bubbles. The balance here is that they're obviously being used by these communities to showcase what's happening to them. How do we think about the role of Facebook in this moment?

• 39:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, so my theory, this is only a theory. My theory is Twitter is national, Facebook is local. And like, that distinction means that like, I think Facebook bears more responsibility because it like affects people's lives on a much more granular level than like Twitter pundits do. Because like, let's be honest, the national pundit class is mostly on Twitter and that is mostly where they get their news and ideas. Facebook, on the other hand, it's like if you want to try and change somebody's mind in your hometown, wherever that may be, you go on Facebook. Like if you want to do something, if you want to make something local happen and get in touch with people who are around you locally, Facebook is where it happens.

• 40:19Speaker 04

  I think that interesting case study of Isaiah is that he posted the video on his Facebook. It received 100,000 plus views, around that amount of views. And then his friend Dejan cut down the 12-minute video to three minutes, put it on Twitter and it received 2.7 million views there. And the big difference there isn't just that the video was shorter, well, though I do think that people like want to sort of like get on with it, right? Like even when I first watched that video, because I was sent the Facebook link first, I was so confused as to like where it was going because there was no context. Like the thing that he posted it with was like, "Watch what happened to me and my friends, like make this go viral."

• 41:02Speaker 04

  Where like, on Twitter it was, "Police violence in Baytown, like look what's happening here", and it's shorter. And I think that even though people constantly say that they want more context, they're not sitting there for the 12-minute video. They're sitting there for the three-minute video, the 30-second clip of it, not the full video. And I think that sort of like complicates this narrative of people saying, "Oh, I want to see the whole thing." It's like, well, are you sitting down and watching the whole thing? And that's sort of, to me, a question that I still have, right? And I do think that like Twitter is a place where a lot of people, like a lot of these videos that we chose to highlight in this project, some of them hadn't posted on Twitter in several months, but they knew that was the place to go. They knew that Twitter was

• 41:47Speaker 04

  a place where you can publish a video police violence and it gets sort of archived, not directly archived, but indexed into this larger conversation. So it is, other people are doing it, they're doing it. Another friend of Isaiah Benavides's, Isaiah Phillips, says that in the video. They see other people doing these things and they join in, and they join them as well. And so I think that's the same for Twitter. You're seeing all these videos of police violence on Twitter, go viral, get all of these views. When you have a video of police violence, that's probably where you're gonna post it.

• 42:19Nilay Patel?

  We started off by saying cameras have democratized this. And the thing that I think the most about Kenosha is that Kenosha never made the national news when I was growing up, because nobody had cameras. And now because of the presence of one smartphone in one moment, Kenosha is the centerpiece, at least for this week, and then next week it will be somewhere else. But at least for this moment, this very small place that I'm very familiar with is the center of a national, a national moment about the police, which, again, that community is not, it is not built for that level of scrutiny, but it's because of the cameras on the ground and the people pushing back, and the power of just like democratized social media distribution. And I could take this conversation fully sideways

• 43:04Nilay Patel?

  and talk about Section 230 right now. Like, there's all of the things that we always talk about, all of the tools are being used in a very surprising way to push back against the power of the state. My worry is that there is, that gets packaged into Twitter moments that create one narrative. Or whatever, or one filter bubble, and then there's another filter bubble. And maybe the middle is bad, but it might be worse that those bubbles begin to actively hate each other.

• 43:32Speaker 03

  I mean, I think they already do. I mean, I feel like polarization is actually, it feels like more just of a, like a representation of the status quo than anything else. The fact that you didn't think Kenosha could receive national attention growing up is like, so first of all, like, everybody listening to this, you should expect something like this will happen in your hometown, because this is, this is just the state of America, and now people can see it. Like, that's point one. Point two is like, frankly, like, the stuff that goes viral, like, stuff goes viral in the opposite direction all the time. You know what I mean? It's like, not that, like, there are these heartwarming news stories, for example, about, like, cops, uh, for every, for every story that has young black kids running away from them in terror, there is a story about a policeman helping a kid in need. You know, and it's like, these, these two things, like, I think, on the whole, actually

• 44:17Speaker 03

  do receive equal weight on social media. It's just that your filter bubble does not show the other side. And maybe that's, I mean, if you want to see the other side, it's there, you know where to go look for it.

• 44:25Speaker 04

  I think I would be remiss if I, if we didn't speak about the fact that Baytown, Texas is a small town, but it isn't the first time that police actions of the Baytown Police Department has been questioned. In May 2019, Pamela Turner, an African-American woman, was fatally shot by a police officer, a Baytown police officer in Baytown, Texas. That incident did make national news, there was video of it. The video that was captured is sort of in the middle of the struggle, it is in the middle of everything that, of the incident sort of unfolding, right? So I do think that while these incidents are going viral, while there's more of a presence of cameras and, and a town, and a place like Kenosha, and a place like Baytown,

• 45:08Speaker 04

  these things can bubble up to the first, surface if communities rally up against, rally up with them. If there are, if, if there, if these sort of victims of police brutality are sort of finding allyship. For instance, with Isaiah Benavides and his friends in this protest that was organized, that protest was, they were joining in other victims of police brutality, including the family of Pamela Turner. Pamela Turner, the family Pamela Turner actually reached out to Isaiah, to Dejana, to all of the men involved to say, "We, we see you. We have seen that this has happened. This happened to our daughter. Let's join in on a protest and other victims in Baytown join together."

• 45:48Speaker 04

  So while, for instance, like this incident of Isaiah, of his friends, that what he, this incident that Isaiah recorded didn't make national news. It went viral on Twitter, it got 2.7 million views. A lot of the coverage was very local. And yet, because there had been other national coverage of police violence in Baytown, they sort of rallied together as a community. And so I don't think, I would be remiss to miss the fact that like for this town, it wasn't the first time that an officer of this department had used excessive force. But it happened at a time where there is this national reckoning against police

• 46:30Speaker 04

  officers. And where communities know what they can do, right? Like, they know they can now host a protest. They can start a petition to, you know, get the officers fired. They can start a GoFundMe to pay for legal fees. They can sort of continue trying to hold that department accountable. Now, there's just a lot more awareness of, it's not only that this video goes viral, but this video now can be sort of the, the avenue through which, the virality of the video is the avenue through which consequences can be had. And these communities, these small communities, recognize that.

• 47:05Nilay Patel?

  Pull that apart for me a little bit. Why is a million people saw a video a source of power? I mean, there's, there's a part of me that says, "It feels like a scene from a bad movie," where someone's like, "The video went viral," and then like, "A chain of consequences happen." But in real life, a video goes viral, and then five minutes later, another video goes viral. What is the nature of, like, millions of people across the country or world seeing a video? Why does that turn into change?

• 47:33Speaker 04

  In a town like Baytown, Texas, a small town, a population of around 70,000 people,

• 47:41Speaker 04

  When millions of people see this video, a lot of people in my community saw that video. That video was covered by a lot of local news organizations. It was on the news throughout that entire week that it was sort of happening. And so in this, it's not just that this video went viral, let's say, like in the UK. Like it matters where it's going viral, right? It goes viral and people in this community are seeing that video. Because the people in this community saw this video, they used it as a field to sort of hold this department that they had known, right? Everyone that we spoke to for this video had said that they were familiar with Officer Brown, that he had allegedly been targeting and harassing African Americans for years.

• 48:26Speaker 04

  And they were all familiar with him, they were all familiar with this police department, but none of them had ever had a video of it. And so now there's a video, other people, like if you look on the Twitter comments, they're like, oh, this happened to me with Officer Brown in this year, this happened to me, or like, oh, wow, like this thing happened to me. And so now people see this video as a way of sort of maybe not affirming the experiences that they've had, but seeing, oh, wow, like I can sort of also be an ally to this person in this moment and sort of amplify what's happening. And so the consequences aren't because this video went viral in New York. A lot of people that I spoke to, like all of the experts I spoke to for this piece had never seen this video. And it does get swallowed up, right?

• 49:06Speaker 04

  In a moment where there are lots of viral quote unquote, like videos of police violence, moments get swallowed up like this one. And even if it does, the community that it's happening to, it does not matter to them if New York, if a publication in New York, if The Verge does not cover it, it does not matter to them, right? What matters to them is that they have this video in which they can use to sort of show and denounce and try to hold some state actors accountable. And so I think the virality of where it's going viral and who sees it does matter, because I don't think that the family of Pamela Turner would have reached out to them had they not seen the video, right? Like, they saw the video, they reached out to them. Another friend saw the video and said, "I have to start this petition."

• 49:51Speaker 04

  And everything that happened to Isaiah and his friends was a result of other people seeing the video. Pamela Turner's family saw the video and asked them to join them in on this protest. Another friend of theirs, Ashton, saw the video, started a petition to get Officer Brown fired. Another friend who wasn't there, who had heard what happened, posted the video on Twitter. He posted a three-minute version of the video versus a 12-minute, which is the version that went viral. And so all these people see this video and they decide to sort of reach out or take action. So these consequences are driven by this community seeing this video and then reacting, whether it's by asking them to join a protest, or start a petition, or start a GoFundMe,

• 50:34Speaker 04

  whatever it is, it is all driven by this video, not someone's account. And Isaiah and his friends really recognize that, right? Like, he ends it with saying that, like, if there was no video, he does not believe people would have believed what happened to him and his friends, and that things could have maybe been worse, is what he feels. And I think that's something to really sit with and think through at this moment in time.

• 50:59Nilay Patel?

  Well, that is as strong of an ending as I can think of. Maria and Bijan, thank you so much for your work on this project. Thanks for talking to me today. Thanks for having me.

• 51:07Speaker 04

  Thanks for having us.

• 51:08Nilay Patel?

  Capturing the Police is on the verge now. It is, like I said, a big feature called The Peace Reporters, the 11 stories of people who film the police, Maria's video about Isaiah, Verge Science video about police body cameras and how they affect your perception of what's going on, and then a host of reports from across the staff exploring the edges of the story. So I hope you read and watch all of it. I hope you consider. I hope you tell us what you think. I'm very interested in knowing. We will see you on Friday on the Chat Show. Thanks, everybody.

• 51:42Speaker 07

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.

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