They Used Smartphone Cameras to Record Police Brutality—and Change History

In the last decade, the smartphone has become a tool for witnessing police violence toward African Americans. From the 2009 killing of Oscar Grant to the 2020 killing of George Floyd, we reviewed the footage and talked to the people who captured it, to see how the accounts of racial injustice became clearer as the phones evolved. “This is our only tool we have right now. It is the most effective way to get us justice,” said Feidin Santana, who used his smartphone in 2015 to film a police officer killing Walter Scott in South Carolina. “The smartphone is a weapon that tells the story. This is going to tell what happened to me, this is what will tell what took place,” said Arthur Reed, whose organization Stop the Killing surfaced an anonymously filmed video of the 2016 killing of Alton Sterling by a police officer in Baton Rouge (LA). Many white Americans, myself included, failed until recently to grasp one of the biggest impacts of the smartphone: its ability to make the world witness police brutality toward African-Americans that was all too easy to ignore in the past. We could now see, with our own eyes, the black sides of stories that were otherwise lost when white officers filed their police reports.