In 2008, Steve Jobs had an assignment for a small team of engineers in Cupertino: Make the iPhone record video. After seeing that people liked taking photos with the first iPhones, he wanted to add moving pictures. A year later, Apple released the iPhone 3GS, the first iPhone to record video.
About 10 years and 10 iPhone models later, 17-year-old Darnella Frazier found herself standing on a sidewalk in Minneapolis, swiping on her purple iPhone 11 lock screen to launch the video camera as fast as possible.
She hit the red circle and for the next 10 minutes and 9 seconds she held her phone as steady as she could, capturing George Floyd, a black man crying for his mother as his face was smashed into the pavement by white police officer Derek Chauvin.
“I opened my phone and I started recording because I knew if I didn’t, no one would believe me,” Ms. Frazier said in a statement provided by her lawyer, Seth Cobin.
A day later, May 26, she opened up the Facebook app, and tapped the video of Mr. Floyd to upload it. The world now knows his name.
Over the last decade, while tech companies were focused on marketing megapixels and multiple lenses to better record pastries and puppies, smartphone cameras found a greater purpose.
“This is our only tool we have right now. It is the most effective way to get us justice,” Feidin Santana told me. Mr. Santana 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.
For this column, I looked back at a decade of incriminating cellphone video, and tracked down many people who bravely used their phones to capture brutality and tragedy on American streets.
2009 - Oscar Grant
A sequence of full-frame screengrabs from a video of the killing of Oscar Grant on January 1, 2009. Jamil Dewar recorded it on a flip phone.
2015 - Walter Scott
A sequence of full-frame screengrabs from a video of the killing of Walter Scott on April 4, 2015. Feidin Santana recorded it on a Samsung Galaxy S5.
2020 - George Floyd
A sequence of full-frame screengrabs from a video of the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. Darnella Frazier recorded it on an iPhone 11.
All said some variation of the same thing: It’s not that these incidents never happened before, it’s that we have the ability to capture proof and expose it widely—now, more clearly and indisputably than ever. The smartphone’s proliferation and evolving user experience is partly to thank, though through this we’re also discovering its limitations.
Once upon a time, capturing bystander video was about being in the right place, at the right time, with the right equipment.
That is the story of George Holliday on March 3, 1991, brand-new Sony Handycam in hand as he stood on his balcony with a view of Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King. The footage is shaky, the bodies are hard to make out, the helicopters drown out the screams yet it was enough to set off what Mr. Holliday calls “the first viral video.”
This image, from video shot by George Holliday in 1991, showed police officers beating Rodney King.
Photo: George Holliday/Associated PressIt’s also the story of Karina Vargas, who had her Fujifilm Finepix digital camera the night of Jan. 1, 2009, when she witnessed officer Johannes Mehserle shooting 22-year-old Oscar Grant III at the Fruitvale BART transit station in Oakland, Calif.
Ms. Vargas also had a Motorola Razr cellphone, but she turned on her 10-megapixel Fujifilm because it could record better quality video. (At the time, that meant 480p.) In a series of clips, many of them pixelated and shaky, she captured the officers surrounding Mr. Grant and eventually the sounds of the gunshots.
A day later a local television producer came out to watch what she had recorded; he transferred the footage from her memory card to his laptop and aired it that day.
“If I had this iPhone back then I would have taken much better video,” Ms. Vargas told me. “I would have been able to get closer and I probably would have shared it to Instagram or another place so everyone could see it.” She added, “Right now, there is this culture of ‘Let’s f—ing record these cops.’ It wasn’t that way then.”
Other bystanders recorded from different angles with cellphones, though their details were quite blurry. All were submitted as evidence. In 2010, Mehserle was convicted of second-degree murder.
Jump ahead to 2014. Ramsey Orta and his 2011 Samsung Galaxy phone captured 720p high-definition video of Eric Garner, surrounded by New York City police officers. Mr. Orta filmed police wrestling Mr. Garner to the pavement and putting him in a chokehold. On the video, he said he couldn’t breathe 11 times before he died.
Mr. Orta originally shared the video with the New York Daily News, and it quickly spread across Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The phrase “I can’t breathe” became a slogan of the Black Lives Matter movement. Though Mr. Garner’s death was ruled a homicide, the officer involved was not indicted.
By 2015, 69% of Americans had a smartphone, according to the Pew Research Center.
Feidin Santana in North Charleston, S.C., had just gotten a new one from a friend, a Samsung Galaxy S5 with a 16-megapixel camera. He happened to be walking to his job when he saw Mr. Scott being chased by officer Michael Slager. Mr. Santana tapped the camera app and began recording for three minutes, capturing Slager shooting Mr. Scott five times as he tried to run. It was the first thing he filmed with the new phone.
“I was getting used to the phone but in less than a few seconds I was able to get to the video option,” recalls Mr. Santana, who doesn’t consider himself tech savvy.
The video, which was used as evidence in the trial, is shaky and at times blurry, but readable enough to see key parts of the incident play out. A jury convicted Slager of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Defense attorney Andy Savage points to a video during the trial of former North Charleston police officer Michael Slager, Nov. 15, 2016, in Charleston, S.C.
Photo: Grace Beahm-Pool/Getty ImagesOver the next few years, as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube made uploading, sharing and viewing mobile video easier, buckets of cellular data dropped in price, and smartphone ownership among Americans ages 18 to 49 passed 90%, recordings of police interaction mushroomed.
On July 5, 2016, one of two videos of police officers killing Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La., was uploaded to Twitter. One officer was later fired but not charged. The next day, Diamond Reynolds went live on Facebook as she sat next to her dying boyfriend, Philando Castile, who had just been shot by an officer in St. Anthony, Minn. The officer was later found not guilty of second-degree manslaughter.
That brings us to two weeks ago, when Ms. Frazier, only feet away from George Floyd and the police officer bearing down on him, captured it all in 1080p resolution video with the latest iPhone. It’s one of the clearest, highest-resolution videos of such a situation ever captured.
“I will post the video in the morning as soon as I wake up. I don’t give a f—. If it gets taken down I don’t care,” Ms. Frazier said in a live-stream on Facebook a few hours after recording Mr. Floyd’s killing. “At least you all will see for yourselves. I’m pretty sure it’s a murder we’ll be seeing on the news.” Officer Chauvin has since been charged with second-degree murder, the other officers at the scene have also been charged and the city of Minneapolis has moved to restructure its police forces.
Over the past decade, the smartphone changed our behavior. We went from photographing momentous occasions with specialized equipment—remember buying cameras?—to constantly, instantaneously capturing and sharing any moment we choose. Everyone I spoke to who had recorded these scenes of violence used the same word to describe why they did it: instinct.
“I knew what was going on wasn’t right. I felt something was about to happen so I just took out my phone and started recording,” said Brandon Brooks, who filmed Dajerria Becton, a black teenager, being violently wrestled to the ground by a white officer in McKinney, Texas, in 2015. A few days later, the officer resigned.
But capturing video of apparent brutality by those in power comes with a dark consequence: fear of retaliation.
“I didn’t share it right away,” Mr. Santana, the man who filmed the killing of Walter Scott, told me. “I thought my life might be in danger. It’s a tough decision to come forward.” He said he feared the police department would come after him; he also said he wanted to wait to hear the police department’s side of the story. Ms. Vargas said she still vividly remembers an officer trying to get a hold of her camera on the train after she filmed the Oakland shooting of Oscar Grant.
Feiden Santana, holding the the cell phone he shot video with showing former North Charleston Police Officer Michael Slager's fatal encounter with Walter Scott, testifies in Slager's murder trial, Nov. 4, 2016.
Photo: Grace Beahm/Associated PressAllissa Richardson, a journalism professor at University of Southern California and author of the book “Bearing Witness While Black,” said that the proliferation of such footage can have an insidious side effect, the expectation of video where none is available. “We are almost asking black people to prove they didn’t deserve this [violence]. We don’t ask white people where the video is after mass shootings,” she said. Plus, the videos can end up being excessively played in the media, she added.
And filming police violence doesn’t lead to an open-and-shut case. John Burris, a civil-rights attorney who represented Mr. Grant’s family, said that “without the videos all I would have had was the testimony of the African-American men against several cops. But ultimately the cops had their own stories about what happened which still made it extraordinarily difficult.”
Police officers are increasingly aware of the presence of smartphone cameras, and aren’t always deterred by them. Police departments have equipped officers with their own body cams or car dashboard cameras—though smartphone footage often provides a different vantage point. Some experts say that qualified-immunity laws and the power of police unions offer bad actors unwarranted protection.
“If someone were to do such a violent act knowing they are on camera, that’s some evil intent right there,” said Sheriff Christopher Swanson, from the Office of Genesee County Sheriff in Flint, Mich. He believes the killing of Mr. Floyd will result in widespread police union reform.
So smartphone videos have been far from a panacea for racial injustice. But at least now, more than ever, we all can see it, clearly and vividly.
The cameras will continue to improve. Like any technology story, what we do with them, and the world we want them to capture, is up to us.
—Jim Oberman contributed to this article.
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