My attention was drawn this
week to some rather arrogant and ignorant comments made by a
blogger/gadfly/wanna-be pontificator who, it seems, would like to
dictate to everyone in the world what their assigned places in the
world should be. This particular blogger mentioned the murder of
Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, by a white policeman in
Ferguson, Missouri, and stated that a surveillance camera video had
surfaced that showed Mr. Brown allegedly robbing a convenience store
shortly before he was shot. Thus, in the mind of this particular
blogger, the shooting of Mr. Brown was no crime, but rather the
judgment of a righteous society against a Black population that
insists on remaining stubbornly dysfunctional.
There are only three
problems with this argument. First, it is very easy nowadays to
alter digital video – assuming that the original video was
authentically made by a convenience store video camera. If you want
to know just how easy video can be altered, read this
2007 article from Scientific American. Or you can read this,
or this.
Or, you can just watch the
video
yourself. And that leads to the second problem. The video sample I have selected is representative of the
quality one would expect from typical store surveillance cameras; in
other words, you don't use cameras like these to take pictures of the
rings of Saturn or to shoot blockbuster movies. You tell me: who can
positively identify the faces of anyone in the video? (If you want
another version of the video, watch this.
See how much clearer the image of the Fox News liar is than the
images of any of the people in the alleged robbery video? Also note
in the beginning of this clip, that Michael Brown wasn't the only
person in the world who liked red hats and white T-shirts.)
The third problem, of
course, is that the police let slip the fact that officer Darren
Wilson did not know about the alleged robbery when he stopped Michael
Brown. Thus Mr. Wilson's act looks increasingly like what I have
called it: murder.
A person who has learned how
to think would ask the following questions about video evidence:
first, what are typical surveillance camera capabilities (i.e., image
quality, resolution, low-light performance, etc)? Second, how easy
is it for an ordinary person to alter a digital video (and the vast
majority of videos nowadays are digital), or to create
a fake video from scratch? Third, are there unaltered, untampered
9-1-1 calls from Ferguson, Missouri, describing a convenience store
robbery on the day that Michael Brown was shot? Fourth, what
motivations would the various players in this drama have for lying?
Fifth, what sort of track record does the Ferguson police department
have in regard to misconduct?
Sixth, how often are unarmed Black men shot
in this country?
The answers to all these
questions might be deeply upsetting to those who enjoy the rapidly
fading vestiges of Anglo-American privilege. But the willingness to
ask the questions and to face the answers would separate honest
people from dishonest gadflies who hold and voice opinions simply
because they like them, regardless of the facts. Again, I am
thinking of the blogger I mentioned at the first, who said during the
most recent race riots in England that the British had a problem with
immigration (and who disregarded the way the British violated and
victimized nonwhite residents and citizens), and who said that
Haitians were starving because Haiti had a population control problem
(without considering how multinational corporations had stolen
everything they could steal from that country). How easy it is to
blame the victims for the injuries you have inflicted.
