Page 65 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

56 Christina Spiesel

officers or members of the public) to document unfolding events of uncertain
outcomes. Uses where cameras are fixed and simply record what appears in
their field of view as determined by the installation offer, whatever the angle, a
fixed gaze with its own implications, whether bird or worm‘s eye view,
whether eye level to the action or not. We have other expectations as well: for
instance, we expect that surveillance film will be low resolution and grainy,
for that is what we have been accustomed to seeing in films and on television
or in stores where we shop and catch ourselves in the screens of camera
surveillance installations. In fact, these cameras, like our cell phone cameras,
are getting better and better. Compare the now famous Columbine High
School cafeteria footage from 1999 [Klebold] with the Salt Lake City, Utah,
surveillance footage released by the police in April 2009 [Salt Lake City].
In contrast, hand held devices (cameras, video camcorders, still photo and
video cell phone cameras, audio recording devices) are often pulled out in a
hurry, subject to amateur deployment with shaking hands and wandering gaze
leaving data confusing at best. These ―informal‖ video fragments will become
evidence, sometimes requiring courts to sort out different and partial accounts
of the same event as evidenced by the products of different ―observers‖ – there
may be surveillance camera footage, cell phone footage, dashcam video from
police vehicles, and footage from passersby on the street -- all relevant to the
legal determination to be made. Police are ambivalent about citizens‘ use of
technology for public purposes. On the one hand, they create websites where
citizens can send text messages containing tips, and, now, cell phone video,
and on the other, they will attempt to confiscate cameras and camera phones if
they believe that they will be caught on them in ways harmful to their interests
[Baker] [Hauser].
An example of how complicated this new visual environment can be for
law enforcement is a story concerning the shooting at point blank range of a
young man in the wee hours of January 1, 2009, at a BART Station (Bay Area
Rapid Transit) by a uniformed officer of the transit police [La Ganga, &
Dolan]. Presumably there was surveillance camera footage from the station.
Some travelers managed to hide their devices from police collection and later
posted clips to YouTube, forcing authorities to deal with a problem that
wouldn‘t go away. Potential problems of authenticating these kinds of video
fragments, and then relating them to one another as decision makers must, in
order to construct coherent narratives of the events, abound.
So, like it or not, decision makers are going to have to become adept at
fitting these video pieces together in sensible ways. They will need to
understand that the video they are asked to use in judgment requires reading