"It is not always an act of witness to watch someone else die. If you’re a white American — someone with the good fortune to feel outrage that this is happening to someone else, not fear that you might be next — and your outrage settles into placid opposition to other white Americans you imagine are still in denial, that is not witness; it is spectacle. If you’re a black American forced over and over again to witness the killing of another black American, that is not witness; it is trauma.
If video recording of a police shooting is actually going to be a tool for accountability — a tool that is used to prevent more police shootings in the future — then it has to be part of the process by which that particular shooting is investigated and addressed. It has to be used as evidence: in internal police department investigations, local and federal criminal investigations, criminal and civil trials, legislative debates over policing laws.
That means there have to be rules and guidelines for how that evidence is used and who gets to have it."
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