Don't rush to condemn the cops the next time you see a citizen-recorded video of a police shooting. You may not be getting the entire story, and the clip will likely have been distributed to fan the hatred of police.
Over the past decade, social media and television news outlets have been saturated by videos of police shootings, which of course horrify viewers. But sometimes what you see is not all of what happened _ and sometimes it's been doctored.
It's important to understand these kinds of videos engage people in an immediate, emotional way, Pamela Rutledge, the director of the nonprofit Media Psychology Research Center, told CBS News earlier this month.
"We also have to remember that media, live streaming, et cetera, are curated by even as simple a thing as when you turned on the recorder and where you pointed the camera," Rutledge told the news outlet in an email. "They don't (and can't) show full context; they show a selective point of view."
Eugene O'Donnell, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former assistant district attorney in New York City, said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times last year that such videos often don't show the full scope of events.
"Knowing what happens on video after it happens is totally different than knowing what the cop was thinking and what he will say he was thinking," O'Donnell told the Times. "The video obviously could be damning in terms of a criminal case, but the ultimate question is, is there malice toward the kid? Is it totally unwarranted under any view of the evidence? The video does not speak for itself."
In some cases, it most certainly doesn't.
For example, a shocking cellphone video posted on YouTube in 2014 showed police officers in Hawthorne, Calif., fatally shooting a dog. The Southern California police department was bombarded with angry calls and emails, including death threats, which prompted the department to take the three officers involved off street duty.
However, another video taken on a cellphone by a second witness at the scene showed more of the interactions the dog owner had with police before the shooting. It also more clearly showed the careful actions the officers took before shooting the dog, a large Rottweiler.
In another case, soon after the city of Chicago released an audio-free dashcam video of a white officer fatally shooting a black teen 16 times, a 35-second excerpt with sound appeared online, garnering nearly a half million views on social media, according to the Associated Press.
The problem? A veteran audio forensics expert told the AP the audio had been edited in.
"It's fake," he said. "Hands down."
These situations illustrate that the existence of a video is not full proof police have acted wrongly. In many cases, they are a good start in cases that surely should be investigated. However, a good start is all they are sometimes.
These videos should be authenticated and their context ought to be established. Witnesses should be interviewed thoroughly and the cops involved ought to be questioned.
If police have acted wrongly, they should be punished, but not solely on the basis of one cellphone recording. On balance, these videos arguably can hurt the promotion of justice more than help it.
Meanwhile, there's a chance that the continued wide distribution of these videos will seriously affect cops' willingness to carry out their duties, as happened in Baltimore last year.
When city officials wouldn't let the police fully defend themselves during the Baltimore riots, and several officers were hurt as a result, cops started doing the bare minimum required to keep their jobs.
As a result, violent crime rates soared, people died and the city still hasn't recovered.
Cops are realistic people and they don't expect people to love them. But they do require respect and some cooperation.
If these videos stir up so much police hatred that officers can no longer do their jobs, we're all in trouble.
Consider what happened in Dallas.
Surely, citizen-record videos fueled the shooter's hatred, leading to five officers being murdered.
