Why Live Video of Police Violence Is So Traumatic — and So Revolutionary | Wesley Lowery

Wesley Lowery's book is "They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement" ().
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Transcript - What I think is remarkable even in the time that we’ve been having this conversation if you trace the beginning of the current conversation to 2014, maybe to Ferguson or to Eric Gardner, right. How much the technology has developed and how the tools are now there in ways that they are not. It’s easy to forget that just two years ago when Ferguson was happening there was no live video capacity the same way. There were live streamers who were out there but there was no Periscope or Meerkat. There was no Facebook Live. There wasn’t even Twitter video yet. In order to upload video people had to use Vine or Instagram, right. And so what this allows is, the same way that all social media creates kind of a more democratic media process. People in real time can share their own stories. Live video allows us physical access to things that we never would have had otherwise. I mean the video that Diamond Reynolds takes of her boyfriend Philando Castile after he’s shot changes the world, changes our perception of these shootings, starts what ends up being one of the flashpoints around these issues where we go from beginning with Alton Sterling then Philando Castile and then to Dallas. And without that video it’s very unlikely that officer would have been charged as he has been now. And it’s unlikely we would even know the name Philando Castile. And so that tool, that ability for her in two taps of her phone to start sharing with the world the moment she was in is like I said it just has the capacity to change the world. It was that video was just so remarkable in that it was traumatic. As you watched it you felt like you were physically there, in the car and someone’s just been shot by the police. That was different than the feeling of the Eric Gardner video, even the Walter Scott video in part if only because we knew it had been live. And I think that was just a, like I said it was just a turning point I think in the way video has manifested and has played a role in these cases. Read Full Transcript Here: .