More crime videos posted on social media
3 local cases involving livestreaming of gun use have led to arrests
Police catch criminal acts every day by way of surveillance cameras in convenience stores, dash cameras on patrol cars and body cameras on the officers themselves.
But a newer way of nabbing criminals has emerged, and it hasn’t come about by any concerted effort from law enforcement agencies. Instead, it’s through a more ubiquitous public setting: postings on social media. In the Houston area, three cases involving guns have cropped up on social media in recent months and resulted in criminal charges. One of those instances, where a woman allegedly shot a man in the face while playing with a gun on Facebook Live, horrified online audiences as the video spun out into viral territory.
In the clip, the woman adjusts the camera and makes a show of handling the semi-automatic pistol. She points it at the camera, and Devyn Holmes, a 26year-old man in the passenger seat, holds his hand out to the weapon.
“Hey man, you’re making me nervous,” he says.
The woman can be seen pointing the handgun at Holmes before a gunshot sounds. She has said the shooting was an accident and that she didn’t know the gun was loaded.
Holmes’ shooting, along with two other active cases in the Houston area, could be classified as something called “performance crime,” said Raymond Surette, a criminal justice professor who researches crime and the media at the University of Central Florida.
The term refers to content created for an audience on the internet and involving people who may or may not know they’re being recorded, he said. Even if it proves not to be intentional, the shooting was still published for an audience and contains both elements of a performance and crime, Surette said.
Holmes’ family has publicly taken issue with the video, although they declined to discuss the shooting with the Chronicle.
His mother, Sheree Holmes, is now not only watching him recover in local hospital — where he was taken off a ventilator just this week — but with the video, she is able to witness the shooting that landed him there.
“It’s hard to erase,” Sheree Holmes told reporters outside of a Harris County courtroom earlier this month. “People are accidentally seeing it. Children are accidentally seeing it. You can’t erase that from a child’s mind. It’s stupid people that’s sharing that video, and I don’t understand why.”
Performance crimes aren’t frequent, but when they happen, public interest is high, Surette said. Between December 2015 and June 2017, at least 45 instances of violence had been streamed on Facebook Live alone, according to an analysis completed by BuzzFeed News.
“It used to be that people would either leave the digital
equivalent of suicide notes or leave a pre-crime justification,” Surette said. “The livestreaming of it is probably the most recent shift.”
Performance crimes can range in severity. Some so-called internet challenges, such as dares for teens to lob mostly harmless items through fast-food drivethru windows, can be performance crimes.
But so can homicides, torture and revenge porn, Surette said.
In the Houston case, Holmes was left critically injured after he was shot. The accused shooter, 25year-old Cassandra Damper, told police the gun discharged accidentally as she was handling it. She is currently out on bond on charges of aggravated assault causing bodily injury and tampering with evidence.
Damper’s lawyer, Monique Sparks, declined to comment on the nature of the shooting or her defense strategy, but said, “Obviously I don’t like the way that (performance crime) sounds.”
Another Houston performance crime involving guns, currently under investigation by Houston police, occurred several weeks ago, although it wasn’t believed to have caused any injuries.
Houston police were notified of a Snapchat video that showed a man recording himself shooting an assault-style rifle roughly half a dozen times from a moving car the night of April 6, and officers put out a call for the public to help law enforcement find the man.
“Let’s get these reckless fools off our streets today before someone is shot or killed,” Houston Police Department Chief Art Acevedo tweeted on April 10.
Once these videos are posted, the crimes are easier to investigate, said William King, professor at Sam Houston State University’s College of Criminal Justice. The main exception is determining a location of the crime, he said.
That was the case with the Snapchat video shooting. HPD first investigated the incident, and after pinpointing the location to northwest Harris County, police realized it was out of Houston’s jurisdiction.
The Harris County Sheriff’s Office investigated, and on April 13, prosecutors accepted a felony charge of deadly conduct against Brandon Lee Hicks, 21, accused in the shooting. He posted $40,000 bail the next week.
‘Motion picture of the crime’
Prosecution efforts can also be affected by the social media documentation of crimes, especially with more violent incidents that stir intense emotion from viewers, King said.
“I can imagine a public outrage, and I think prosecutors respond to that,” King said. “They might be more likely to charge.”
And those depicted in the videos are more likely to cut plea deals with prosecutors because the evidence is hard to disprove, Surette said.
“These sorts of things make the police’s jobs and the prosecutors’ jobs much easier because you have the case hand wrapped and delivered to you,” he said. “You have a motion picture of the crime.”
Houston law enforcement agencies have dealt with performance crime before.
Sierra V. Tarbutton, 27, and Michael Anthony Cuellar, 29, were ultimately arrested and charged with felony criminal mischief and felony deadly conduct after they were allegedly seen in another Snapchat video shooting guns from a moving car. Tarbutton pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison Dec. 19. Cuellar is due back in court April 25.
The Harris County District Attorney’s Office declined to comment about how they handle investigations involving performance crime, as did the Houston Police Department.
It’s not usually difficult to guess why people broadcast crimes for live audiences to see, said Pamela Rutledge, director of the California-based Media Psychology Research Center. Many perpetrators in these cases are younger than 25, meaning the parts of their brains that assess risk aren’t fully developed, she said.
‘Performance stupidity’
They could be thinking that their friends will find it funny. Initiating a dangerous situation is a means of exhibiting bravado, Rutledge said.
“It’s showing off; it’s trying to look a little bit powerful, a little bit important,” Rutledge said. “It has more to do with, ‘I’m laughing in the face of this weapon, ha ha ha.’ ”
Surette called the occurrences simply “performance stupidity.”
“The participants have usually have a narrow, limited audience in mind when they post these things,” Surrette said. “The reality is, when you put it out there you have this worldwide audience. These things can take off.”
Once a post is up, it’s out there forever for almost anyone to see, said Angeline Close Scheinbaum, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She curated and edited a book, “The Dark Side of Social Media,” which analyzes social media’s unintended consequences on society.
Livestreamed videos can give criminals an involuntary audience, Scheinbaum said.
“(Facebook Live) is just the wild, Wild West of the internet,” Scheinbaum said. “There are certain things as parents we don’t want our children to see. I think that every child has that right to go through their lives not having to see a murder.”
Parents need to provide their children with a moral framework about what they find online in live videos, especially to prevent children from repeating these incidents themselves, Rutledge said.
“Social media isn’t going to make people do things they wouldn’t do, but it allows information to leap to places where people wouldn’t have otherwise seen it,” Rutledge said. “What you don’t want that to be is where that (violence) becomes cool.”
Despite her criticism of Facebook Live and other livestreaming websites, Scheinbaum said she knows it’s unrealistic to call social media either “good or bad,” because it’s just a platform for human behavior.
“Maybe it’s not social media’s fault,” Scheinbaum said. “Maybe these things would happen anyway and we’re at a point where we can see these crimes and we see people more exposed.”
And in the case of the Holmes video, that wide sort of exposure can only be good for preventing similar incidents from taking place in the future, Sheree Holmes said.
“Maybe it’ll help the next person know not to play with a gun, because you can’t come back from it,” she said. “Once the bullet is out of that chamber, you can’t take it back.”