The Problem With Video

In recent days it has become popular to record encounters with police.  In some ways, this is a good thing, it offers accountability to law enforcement.  Let's face it, there are good and bad cops just like there are good and bad doctors, lawyers, jewelers, and so on.  There is a lot of responsibility and power that is put in a police officer's hands and there needs to be accountability.  However, the recordings can be bad too.  Most people watch a recording, and because it is video they assume they have all the context they need to make a judgement about what happened.  This is a very bad assumption for the following reasons:

• What happened before and after the video are often essential to understanding what happened in the video.
• Often it is the person of interest who is taking the video and as such they are likely to alter their behavior to make themselves look innocent even if they are not.
• Although I have a brother and many friends who are police officers, and we have conversations about training and so on, I don't have the expertise to evaluate the conduct of the officer based on their training.  Neither does the vast majority of the public, and that probably includes you.
• Just because we see an officer hitting someone and we don't see the other person hitting them, doesn't mean the violence was unnecessary.  We can't know this because we don't have enough context in almost all instances.  
• Video can be deceiving, we are predisposed to believing what we see, but video has perspective and sometimes the perspective doesn't communicate reality.  Everything from the angle of the camera, to the quality of the audio and what was happening just out of frame can have an impact on what the viewer thinks they are seeing.

In short, when you see a video on Facebook, Twitter, some other social media or news source, assume you don't have enough information to make a judgment.  Be a reasonable skeptic and dig a little deeper before condemning a law enforcement officer.