Videos of Violence and the Primacy of Perception

Source: en.wikipedia.org

One large question lingers after videos of deadly force by the police against an unarmed person. What would the story be without the video?

In the killing of Walter Scott, the fifty-year-old unarmed man stopped for a traffic violation, the narrative of police officer Michael T. Slager dominated. For three days, before the phone video surfaced, Walter Scott’s reputation was questioned, his family was treated with suspicion by the police, and when Scott’s younger brother tried to talk to the police, his cell phone was confiscated. After the video became public, the narrative swiftly reversed. The police officer was no longer a threatened keeper of the peace but a murder suspect. All due to a four-minute cell phone video.

Almost a quarter century ago, Rodney King became a sympathetic figure to the general public only after a video went public showing members of the LAPD repeatedly beating him.

Why do people respond with such certainty after seeing events on video? When a video is unedited and filmed by someone unknown to the subjects or when the video presents the formal features of an unmanned surveillance camera, that video presents proof of the existence of the events in the video. An unplanned, unedited video is seen as a documentation of reality. We are aware that the camera angle can make a difference and that the unfilmed actions before and after the video can change the context, but we also know that the video is a recording of the events as they were taking place.

Psychologists refer to the “curse of perception” when trying to theorize in ways that seemingly contradict what we see. Perception takes precedence over thought. In Duck Soup, when Chico Marx is caught trying to impersonate the leader of his small country, he defends himself by saying, “Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” Our answer most of the time: our own eyes.

Two months ago, the dress that could be seen in different ways actually sparked heated disagreements. It is permissible to think differently, but to see differently creates discord.

The primacy of perception can interfere with efforts to explain and theorize beyond our senses. Ptolemy explained the movements of the sun and the stars in accordance with his perceptions. The heavenly bodies rotated around the Earth, in circular orbits of different sizes, some of which had epicycles. It was a brilliant, complex, and useful theory that lasted 1,500 years. But its fundamental assumptions were based on what he could plainly see, and these assumptions were wrong. Perception is not necessarily a good basis for theory.

But the primacy of perception can be a virtue for description. Unedited videos do not establish a unitary truth, but they do provide irrefutable evidence that something happened very much like what is represented on the video.

Importantly, videos establish what is not true – when narratives directly contradict the content of a video. We know from the four-minute video that Walter Scott did not resist arrest, did not struggle with Officer Slager, and did not get shot while threatening the police. We know that Ervin Edwards was alive before being excessively tasered in his prison cell (well beyond what policy recommended) – the surveillance camera shows this. We know that he lay motionless face down in his cell after being tasered. We know that after being stopped and forcefully subdued, Freddie Gray was unable to walk, before being loaded into the police van where he would die from injuries.

Later analysis of videos may reveal aspects of events that were not noticed on initial viewings and videotaped events are still open to different interpretations, but cell phone videos, surveillance cameras, and body cameras establish the boundaries of permissible narratives, telling us what happened and, importantly, what did not happen.