Page 70 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

The Fate of the Iconic Sign: Taser Video 61

range. The video that we find posted on the web, taken from deputy-sheriff
Jonathan Rackard‘s dashboard camera recording, begins after Buckley has
gotten out of his car and ends before a second officer arrives to render
assistance. We see cars passing on the two-lane highway on the left side of the
picture and the rear of Buckley‘s car and the grassy embankment where much
of the action unfolds. We cannot really see his face and can barely see the
effects of tasing, although we can hear the weapon go off each time it is
discharged. The person tased in the tasercam example looks like a youth who
might be scary if encountered on the street where Jesse Buckley does not seem
to pose a threat at all. In both these examples, the officers appear to be calm
and clear and managerial in their orders in contrast to other recordings where
officers seem to lose control. The most famous example of this is the Rodney
King beating caught on Richard Halliday‘s amateur recording where viewers
worldwide focused rather more on the police batons than the stun gun used
against King [Shanahben].
As a non-police viewer, it is hard to understand why the officer, under no
threat from Buckley, and having stopped him on a traffic violation and not in
pursuit of criminal activity, needed to be in such a rush. Where would the
harm have been in letting Buckley have his cry? And why did he proceed to
tase him multiple times when any properly trained officer should know that it
is impossible to follow an order to stand up shortly after receiving a tasing?
Taser stuns produce immobility immediately in most people, so a police
officer who demands that someone move/stand up after tasing is producing an
involuntary disobedience which is then subsequently punished with repeated
tasing if the officer loses control, prolonging the inability of the person to
comply.
Both of these video sequences depersonalize the recipients of the tasing
because of the particularities of the recording and because of the truncated,
only barely suggested narratives they report. Of course it is not ―I came, I saw,
I tased‖ but there‘s not much more than ―I saw something that I had to put a
stop to‖ or ―someone I thought I had to gain control of.‖ From the video itself,
we know little more. This maps onto the new penal system where ―the
offender is rendered more and more abstract, more stereotypical, more and
more a projected image rather than an individuated person.‖[Garland, p. 179].
Similarly, due to problems of file size, resolution, hurried taping, much
surveillance camera footage presents relatively undifferentiated persons who
are hard to categorize. We have to take someone‘s word for it; the video data
are just an information token encouraging us to believe an account expressed
with words.