Mobile video is changing the way we witness crime, from live footage of a mentally disabled man tortured by four assailants , to a recording that led to the manslaughter conviction of an Israeli soldier , to the body cameras designed to keep police accountable.<\/p>\n
\nWe\u2019re all still wrestling with the implications.<\/p>\n
In theory, such videos should make it easier to hold criminals, including police officers who violate the law, accountable. In practice, that hasn\u2019t always worked out the way proponents had hoped, although smartphone video played a big role in elevating public awareness of police violence.<\/p>\n
And sometimes the presence of a camera might actually encourage criminal activity, or at least deter bystanders from helping victims.<\/p>\n
Scene of the crime<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s not clear how any of that might have played out in an incident on this week, when attackers used Facebook Live to stream the beating and torture of a man with mental health problems. They threatened him with a knife, cut off his clothing and forced him to drink from a toilet.<\/p>\n The assault went on for up to two days, according to police, though it\u2019s unclear how much of it was streamed on Facebook Live. Police have arrested four people in connection with the crime.<\/p>\n Last year, an Ohio woman plead not guilty to charges of rape, kidnapping and other crimes for live-streaming the rape of a friend on Periscope, Twitter\u2019s live-streaming app. Prosecutors said Marina Lonina continued to film the assault despite the victim\u2019s cries for help, caught up in the attention the livestream was getting. Lonina\u2019s attorney said she was recording the attack as evidence.<\/p>\n During a Thursday press conference about the Chicago assault \u2014 itself live-streamed on Facebook \u2014 Chicago Police Cmdr. Kevin Duffin noted, \u201cI can\u2019t understand why anyone puts anything on Facebook.\u201d<\/p>\n Facebook’s role<\/strong><\/p>\n Facebook says it does not allow people to \u201cto celebrate or glorify crimes\u201d on its site. It has already removed the original video of the Chicago incident for that reason.<\/p>\n But the social network does allow crime video when people share it \u201cto condemn violence or raise awareness about it,\u201d the company said in an emailed statement.<\/p>\n That can lead to tricky assessments of intent. Facebook, for instance, wrote in a blog post that it would allow a violent video posted by someone who used it to help find the shooter, but would remove it when posted by another person who mocked the victim or celebrated violence.<\/p>\n Facebook generally tries to avoid making such judgments, preferring to rely on algorithms that automatically filter out banned content such as pornography. When it makes exceptions, it often wades into difficult territory \u2014 such as the time it was forced to restore the Pulitzer Prize-winning \u201cnapalm girl\u201d photo after removing it because it features a naked child, blind to the photo\u2019s historical context and significance.<\/p>\n \u201cWe understand the unique challenges of live video,\u201d Facebook wrote in its July blog post after footage of a dying Philando Castile, bleeding inside a car after he was shot by police, went viral . The social network says it keeps a team on-call 24 hours a day to respond to reports of inappropriate video \u2014 though its reactive approach means that some material could easily go unreported.<\/p>\n Facebook Live is an important product for Facebook, and in recent months the company has gone to great lengths to promote it with notifications, sidewalk ad displays and TV commercials. The vast majority of live streams don\u2019t involve crime, and Facebook is unlikely to rein back the product just because of a few difficult situations.<\/p>\n It\u2019s \u201cunfortunate\u201d that acts of violence and terror have come to represent live streams, said Benjamin Burroughs, a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas focused on emerging media, in an email to The Associated Press.<\/p>\n More civic-minded streaming lets people \u201cbypass traditional media and connect directly with their social networks and the general public,\u201d he said. Live streaming is powerful, he added, because it \u201cproduces really strong emotions in viewers, which can be used to unify or divide people.\u201d<\/p>\n Ready for your close-up<\/strong><\/p>\n Online crime footage has been around much longer than live streams. While live broadcast gives them a sense of immediacy, many live videos only go viral well after the fact. So it may not really matter whether a video is live or not, just that it\u2019s a concrete record of a crime that happened, visible to all who dare to click.<\/p>\n Even then, video evidence doesn\u2019t necessarily lead to criminal convictions. In South Carolina, a white police officer was charged with the 2015 shooting of an unarmed black man after a traffic stop. A video shot by a bystander clearly shows Keith Scott being shot eight times in the back. But the jury was unable to reach a verdict and forced a mistrial.<\/p>\n In another case in Ohio, the two sides in the trial clashed over a video from a police officer\u2019s body-worn camera that showed him shooting an unarmed man following a traffic stop. That case also ended in mistrial. The officer, Ray Tensing, will be retried.<\/p>\n As for users, a quick trip down memory lane confirms that some people will do almost anything in front of a camera to get online attention. Before Twitter gutted its quirky video-sharing app Vine, a popular phrase among users was \u201cdo it for the Vine,\u201d the idea that people will do anything \u2014 usually weird, comical things \u2014 just for the sake of a six-second Vine video.<\/p>\n But it wasn\u2019t just fun and games. Fights and violence also found a home on Vine under the hashtag (hash)SmackCam \u2014 a 2013 \u201cinternet trend\u201d that had people recording and posting videos of themselves hitting people in the face.\u2014AP<\/p>\n Image: AP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mobile video is changing the way we witness crime, from live footage of a mentally disabled man tortured by four assailants , to a recording that led to the manslaughter conviction of an Israeli soldier , to the body cameras designed to keep police accountable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2285,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[49,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2284"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2284\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}