Police advocates say “cellphone vigilantes” are popping up at various crime scenes and disturbances across the nation to capture short clips of high-tension moments, snippets that typically lack context and damage not only police-community relationships but the chance for cops to be treated fairly in the court of public opinion.
Law enforcement officers should be allowed to understand, explain and investigate a situation before it becomes a YouTube sensation, said Don Mihalek, the legislative director of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, who says the ubiquity of cellphones presents a major challenge.
“Clearly there’s an uptick in that behavior, and it comes down to a few things,” Mr. Mihalek said. “No. 1, just the number of cellphones out there. That’s just the genie that’s out of the bottle that we’ll never get back. The second thing is, the younger generation is very tech-savvy and capturing a video and uploading it is almost like sleeping and eating these days.”
There are also privacy rights concerns — not just for the police but for the civilians who have no way to avoid being included in a controversial video, experts say.
“Video footage is not a panacea,” John Malcolm, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation. “Sometimes you can’t see on video footage what let up to what was being filmed. And you can’t see on video footage what occurred outside of what is being played.”
Photographers and videographers say they are doing the community a service, protecting the public from overly aggressive police officers who have traditionally been able to control the narrative before the proliferation of cellphones.
“Before some of these videos, I think many of these incidents would not be noticed because, usually, the officers describe these incidents differently than what we see on video,” said Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association.
Earlier this week, South Carolina police officer Michael Slager was indicted on murder charges for shooting a black motorist in the back during a traffic stop. Video evidence captured by a bystander showed the officer shot the suspect in the back as he tried to flee, undermining the officer’s story that the suspect tried to grabbed his taser.
In Texas, a police officer resigned Wednesday after a video of him slamming a bikini-clad teenager to the ground at a pool party went viral on YouTube.
Mr. Osterreicher’s group says people should not be deterred from filming so long as they are not interfering with cop activity and remain in traditionally public spaces — like a sidewalk or in the street,
There is some concern about how cops hold “a heavy finger” on the fairness scale in depicting how a particular incident unfolded, said Mr. Malcolm.
“They are afforded a lot of credibility,” he said. “Many police officers deserve that credibility because they are honorable public servants, but many do not.”
The attorney of Eric Casebolt, the Texas police officer in the pool party incident, tried to explain Tuesday how Mr. Casebolt’s actions were taken out of context. The video doesn’t show the strain he was under before he showed up to the party in response to a report of unruly activity, and it also didn’t provide context to Mr. Casebolt’s intentions or explain his actions, attorney Jane Bishkin said.
“He believed that those who fled were possible suspects,” Ms. Bishkin said. “He was not targeting minorities. In fact, he also detained a white female who you do not see on the video. His effort to gather information was hampered by some teenagers who were instructing others to defy police instructions.”
But the video appears to depict a man who appears to have lost control of his emotions.
Additionally, while that cellphone footage might be key to a police investigation, the video is already circulating on the Internet before officials even have a chance to study whether it bolsters or contradicts allegations of wrongdoing, he said.
“There are privacy issues that need to be addressed,” Mr. Mihalek said. “There are also evidentiary issues here that need to be addressed, and nobody’s really done that because the technology is moving too fast.”
Mr. Osterreicher has been training police departments around the country on the rights of private citizens to videotape their actions. Mr. Osterreicher says police requests to ask bystanders to delete videos of police activity have no standing.
“You’d also be surprised by how little training there is by departments,” he said.
• Maggie Ybarra can be reached at mybarra@washingtontimes.com.
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