YouTube, Periscope and Facebook Live. Baton Rouge, Falcon Heights and Dallas. We are a nation awash in shocking video.
I once thought seeing surveillance camera video in 2014 of former Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice punching his fiancee in the face was dramatic and revealing.
I also thought, after seeing the arrest of Freddie Gray and the deaths of Eric Garner and Walter Scott, that the citizen videos of black men dying in police custody might change us for the better. That ultimately, they might have the same positive effect that CBS and NBC evening news footage of civil rights marches in the South had in the 1960s.
I was convinced that people who dismissed claims that police often treated blacks and whites differently would change their minds once they saw such compelling visual evidence.
But not any more, after watching the grotesque deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile and the chaos and slaughter that left five police officers dead in Dallas this week. I no longer have faith in the power of the videos produced and disseminated by our new digital technologies to change our lives in any way, shape or form for the better — at least not until we get a handle on the raw, jarring images overloading the culture.
Perhaps, it was the two killings coming back to back this week.
First, there was Sterling, a black man selling CDs in Baton Rouge, shot multiple times in the chest at point-blank range as he lay on his back with two police officers on top of him. The officer who shot him was kneeling on Sterling's arm as he pulled the trigger.
Then came the livestreaming of Castile's death on Facebook. The police encounter was recorded by Diamond Reynolds, the victim's fiancee. She was in the passenger's seat of the car Castile was driving when they were stopped allegedly for a defective tail light. Reynolds' 4-year-old daughter was in the back seat.
Maybe it was the nature of that livestream with a remarkably composed Reynolds offering narration during a 10-minute stretch as the police officer continued to point the gun at her as her fiance bled out and died before our eyes.
As disturbing as the live imagery was, the narration took that video experience to another level of intensity altogether. Reynolds gave her audience as much of a first-person, in-the-line-of-fire account of life and death as did Edward R. Murrow, the legendary CBS radio newsman, standing on a rooftop in London during the Nazi nighttime bombing raids in World War II. Actually, given what she was going through personally, it was more impressive than what Murrow did.
Whatever the reasons, the reaction to those two deaths in the form of coast-to-coast protests was as intense as anything since the response to Gray's death in 2015.
From a NATO gathering in Poland, President Barack Obama spoke emotionally about the shootings, stressing "disparities" in the ways black and whites are treated by police in some cities.
"We are better than this, and we can and will do better," a somber Obama said.
But the truth is, for all the times we have seen such incidents on citizen video the last two years, we still don't seem to be any wiser about them. It seems as if we are still mainly overwhelmed emotionally by the flood of images, unable to sort, process and use them to improve our lives.
Instead of bringing clarity and new insights into police-community and race relations, they mostly leave us more confused, agitated and jangled — or, perhaps, even numb. Some analysts believe that the more people we see die on video, the more emotionally numb we become to witnessing death. The thinking here is that the video frame provides a kind of TV context to what we are witnessing, which makes it seem less real.
While it is important to remember that each one of us reacts differently to what we see based on our personal histories, the Dallas gunman told police before he died that he was angered by the police shootings he had seen.
How far have we gone down a video rabbit hole? During Thursday night's sniper attack, millions were watching live-streamed viral video of violence responding to viral video of violence.
We in the media have not done nearly enough thinking about the images we are pumping into the cultural ecosystem 24/7. We have not yet even come to any consensus on how to present such images to our audiences.
NBC's "Today" aired portions of Reynolds' livestream during its Thursday broadcast.
NBC blurred the image of Castile as he bled to death. All viewers saw was Reynolds in the passenger seat, the police officer outside the car and a red blur behind the steering wheel. The red was from all the blood on Castile's T-shirt, but a viewer watching only NBC wouldn't know that.
CNN, meanwhile, was carrying the same livestream with full access to all the images Reynolds filmed. Viewers saw Castile as he was bleeding to death, gasped for breath and then lay dead in the driver's seat.
Was one a better choice than the other?
Not necessarily. Some videos have audio, too, and none of the visuals were as moving to me as Reynolds wailing, "He's gone. Please, officer, don't tell me you did this to him. Please, please, no, officer, please."
While we in the mainstream media still have ethical gatekeeping responsibilities, we certainly don't have ultimate control.
Thanks to smartphones and social media, no one has that kind of muscle anymore.
The extent to which we have become a society wedded to our smartphone cameras is suggested by Patrick Cooper, a security guard in the Dallas parking garage where police shot it out with a sniper Thursday night.
"There were so many gunshots, I didn't know what else to do but try to survive," Cooper told Chris Cuomo on CNN's "New Day" Friday. "But I tried to get what I could on camera, because I didn't know if this would be my last day on earth."
When the videos of Gray's arrest first surfaced in 2015, I reached out to Soledad O'Brien to get her thoughts on their power. I did so because of her groundbreaking work in the "Black in America" reports she did for CNN starting in 2008. She was the first television journalist to systematically chronicle the disparity between blacks and whites when it came to police encounters.
Despite her appreciation of the power of citizen video, O'Brien said she was not sure it would make any meaningful difference in the real world of race as it is lived by black Americans.
"Keep in mind that we saw Eric Garner killed on camera and the officer wasn't indicted," she said. "And a glance at the cases that proceed to trial and conviction show the deck is stacked against civilians."
I thought of her each time the prosecution failed to get a conviction in the Freddie Gray case. I reached out to her again this week on direct-message Twitter as I tried to process my own feelings about the two latest videos.
Given her long career in creating and analyzing media images, it was comforting to see her acknowledge that she also found it "stunning" to see a "a woman livestreaming her boyfriend's death."
But she was no less pessimistic about the failure of such digital imagery to generate positive change.
"After Eric Garner — seeing him literally killed on camera — to assume that a video would somehow be inescapable proof of a crime is naive," she wrote. "The real issue that we really don't talk about is racism. The issue is the ease with which some police officers can take a life."
Videos can only show us that. We have to find the decency and the will to change the institutions that allow it to happen.
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