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St. Louis Post-Dispatch - MO,
16 September 2007

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Amateur online videos put poli

What the video captures is confusing, but at least this much is clear: A St. Louis city police officer pepper-sprays the man holding the camera. The video cuts to the officer walking toward the man in his backyard, then abruptly turning around and leaving.

"You've seen on videotape what he just did!" the cameraman yells.

The video was shot back in 2004, in a confrontation between city police and Danny Carter, a St. Louis resident.

But it wasn't until a few months ago that the video found a worldwide audience on YouTube. From there it found an attorney.

"Without the video it's very unlikely this case would have been taken," said attorney Rodney Holmes, who in July filed a federal suit on Carter's behalf alleging civil rights abuses by city police. (A police spokesman declined to comment on the litigation but said a police report justified the officers' interaction with Carter, who was wanted on outstanding warrants.)

Using video to capture candid moments with police is not new. In 1991 a bystander videotaped the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles.

But how such video gets spread has changed dramatically. Thanks to video-sharing websites such as YouTube, Google Video or Metacafe, a video clip can reach thousands � even millions � in just days. Such speed was on display last week with the video shot by a 20-year-old St. Louis resident of his interaction with an angry St. George police officer. The clip, almost 13 minutes long, has been viewed more than 500,000 times in five days. The man who shot it, Brett Darrow, is now a quasi-celebrity. He has been interviewed several times in this newspaper and on national networks such as CNN and MSNBC.

Sites such as YouTube have spawned an explosion of these "police misconduct" videos � scenes from Kansas City to California to Malaysia � and plenty of questions about what exactly people are seeing. No one vets the images. Questions about editing and baiting are not addressed. There is no context. The brief clips are just uploaded and allowed to float out into the public domain.

But the videos are having an effect, says Greg Slate, director of the Police Complaint Center, a nonprofit police watchdog group in Washington. "It really is changing how people perceive police officers," Slate said.

Slate's group has turned catching police wrongdoing into a cottage industry. The group helps people find outlets for their videos. It also hires itself out to news organizations � almost exclusively TV stations � to do undercover stings of local police departments. In January, Slate was hired by KTVI (Channel 2) to visit police stations with a hidden camera and ask for a police complaint form. He visited several towns, including Bel-Nor, Maplewood and Florissant. He met considerable resistance. In Pine Lawn, he was arrested and charged with "failure to comply" after a police sergeant got upset with Slate's request. The charge was dropped.

(They also visited Metro East departments. But that footage never aired because recording audio without the other person's knowledge violates Illinois state law.)

Now people are taking advantage of these new distribution methods. This year, the ACLU of Eastern Missouri began handing out handheld Hi-8 video cameras to residents of St. Louis' Fairground Park neighborhood. Activists say police mistreat black residents. So far 10 cameras have been distributed. Nothing of interest has been shot yet. But, says Redditt Hudson, ACLU racial justice manager, the cameras empower people and provide a protective factor because police in that area know they may be videotaped.

"Another dynamic I see developing with the power of video on the Internet is that mainstream America is becoming aware of the scale and scope of this problem," Hudson says.

St. Louis police spokesman Richard Wilkes said police welcomed the cameras. "We have nothing to hide," he said.

Sites such as YouTube make it impossible to hide. And the widespread distribution of clips can put pressure on authorities to act against police misconduct. Last year, footage of a UCLA student's being Tasered by campus police in the library sparked widespread outrage. A UCLA report found the officer's actions "unnecessary, avoidable and excessive."

And even footage shot by police can find new life on YouTube. Thousands of people have viewed the cruiser-cam video of two Kansas City police officers who didn't call an ambulance for a pregnant woman during a traffic stop in February 2006. They believed she was lying about her condition. The woman later miscarried. A judge is considering how to discipline the two officers.

But a video camera does not guarantee compelling footage.

Take, for example, the short YouTube clip from someone called "Omahacopwatcher."

The video shows a young man preparing to ask for forms to file a complaint against an Omaha police officer. "We suspect they will not be giving us these complaint (forms) so easily," he tells the camera.

Anticipating a confrontation, he can be seen approaching a female officer behind a glass booth. He asks for 10 complaint forms. The female officer smiles and says, "OK. That's fine."

As she walks away to fill his request, he turns to the camera and smiles sheepishly.

"Well, that's surprising," he says.

In the eyes of "Omahacopwatcher," the footage was a flop. Viewers agreed. The clip had been viewed less than a dozen times since it was posted last week.

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St. Louis Post-Dispatch - MO,16 September 2007

Amateur online videos put poli

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St. Louis Post-Dispatch - MO,
16 September 2007