A video that captured the brutal arrest of a Black college student pulled from his car and beaten by officers in Florida has led to an investigation and calls for motorists to consider protecting themselves by placing a camera inside their vehicles.
The footage shows that William McNeil Jr., 22, was sitting in the driver’s seat, asking to speak to the Jacksonville deputies’ supervisor, when authorities broke his window, punched him in the face, pulled him from the vehicle, punched him again and threw him to the ground.
I think the best solutions to problems like this take a sociotechnical approach. That is to say that in this case, I think that a crowd of people recording is more powerful than any app. I live in a country where police violence is less prevalent than in the US, and I have seen times when the police have tried to intimidate someone into stopping recording them. One of those times, it was successful, and the bystander got scared and stopped. Another of those times, someone who was better informed overheard the exchange and whipped out their camera too, and explained that the police had no grounds to ask that, especially given that we weren’t interfering with their investigation of the original person.
It is unfortunate about the ACLU app though. Tech tools like that helped protect individuals who were trying to hold the police accountable, which is a useful step towards normalising a healthy suspicion of the police. I haven’t read the above article yet, but I suspect the only reason why this footage wasn’t destroyed or confiscated is because the cops didn’t realise they were being recorded.