The Charlotte police shooting through the Facebook lens
September 21, 2016
The fatal shooting of Keith Lamont Scott by a police officer in Charlotte, North Carolina, immediately made waves on social media, with direct accounts, pictures and videos from witnesses making their way to Facebook only minutes after the African-American man’s death.
The most widely shared testimonial came from Scott's own daughter, whose Facebook profile - now deactivated - was under the name Lyric YourAdorable Scott. She used Facebook Live to broadcast her reaction at the scene, minutes after the shooting took place.
Scott's daughter, who does not herself appear in the video, held her phone to film the scene, berating and swearing at the officers, accusing them of having shot her father "because he was black," and repeating that he was disabled and did not own a firearm - though police claimed he did.
When she started her stream, her father had just been rushed to the hospital and had not yet been confirmed dead, though Scott's daughter pointed out that he was not breathing anymore when he was taken away.
"My mother----ing daddy better be alive," she can be heard shouting repeatedly in the video.
About 14 minutes into the feed that she realizes that her father has died, after seeing it in the news.
Her hour-long live stream was watched over 600,000 times, getting over 25,000 shares and as many comments.
Though some comments chastized the young woman for insulting police officers, most others expressed sympathy for her loss and a similar outrage at the sight of another instance of police using deadly force against an African-American man.
Protesting live
The news of Scott's death spread around the neighborhood and through his daughter's stream, bringing in dozens of protesters to the scene of the shooting in the hours following the events.
According to a report by the local outlet The Charlotte Observer, as more and more people gathered to protest and stayed well into the night, police in riot gear closed access to the scene and attempted to disperse the crowd using tear gas, escalating tensions further.
The protests then spilled over to a nearby highway, where a small group of angry protesters disrupted traffic and allegedly violently confronted police and looted passing trucks.
Among these was a man who identifies on Facebook as Mills Shaka Zulu Gill. He started several live streams on the social network, which showed the protests as they unfolded.
His video racked up to 115,000 views, was shared over 9,000 times and received over 6,000 comments.
At first, the footage shows demonstrators as they arrive at the interstate highway, shouting "no peace, no justice," as a crowd gathers and begins to occupy the road and block passing vehicles.
The events are largely peaceful until about 12 minutes in, when some of the demonstrators decide to open the trucks and loot their contents, setting some of the boxes on fire. The man filming is heard saying "you want to see us act like animals, now we act like animals."
At the sight of these transgressions, the comments, up to this point mostly sympathetic to the demonstrators, turned angry, as some feared the looting would overshadow their anger at the fate of Keith Lamont Scott.
"Y'all are doing exactly what they expect us to do! Act out of anger and ignorance! Do you think Martin [Luther King] or Malcolm [X] would mess with an innocent person working?! Thought the police was the target?" a user named Tierra Ajon wrote on the live feed.
"This is why we are never taken seriously," said another user named Lakisha Lucky.
Mills Shaka Zulu Gill’s posted several live videos through the course of the evening. Some of them showed other instances of looting and violent confrontations with the police.
As similar images appeared on national television, the commenters' fears that their cause would lose favor with some parts of the public materialized, as hostile accounts denounced the looting and denied the legitimacy of the protests
A record of the violence
Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have encouraged activists to film their encounters with law enforcement. Last year, the organization went as far as to put out their own app, dubbed the Mobile Justice app, to allow protesters to record any incident and immediately send it to the ACLU’s database.
Other activists, such as those of the Black Lives Matter movement, have taken to social media, using tools such as Facebook Live with increasing frequency during their dealings with the police.
Last July, during the protests that followed the police shooting of Alton Sterling, civil rights activist DeRay Mckesson filmed his own arrest live on the Twitter-owned streaming app Periscope.
He later used the footage as evidence to sue the Baton Rouge police over his arrest, claiming the charges of highway trespassing levied against him at the time were clearly disproved by the video, which also highlighted excessive use of force by the intervening officers.
Witnesses and, in recent cases, even victims of shootings or other episodes of police brutality are also filming their encounters with armed officers.
The use of live streaming platforms was dramatically brought to the fore when another African-American young man named Philando Castile was shot dead by police in Minnesota.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, while still in the vehicle where Castile was agonizing, his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, took to Facebook Live to record its aftermath and her dealings with the police, spreading the news of the incident. The footage shows her explaining what she had seen, saying Castile had been shot as he reached for his documents in his pocket at the officer’s request.