Experts: Cellphone cameras provide ‘another narrative’ to race-related confrontations
STAMFORD — A white dog walker announces she’s telling police a Black bird watcher is threatening her life in Central Park. A white woman reports a group of Black people using a charcoal grill in a California park.
A white man calls police claiming he’s “being harassed by a bunch of Black men” at a Stamford boat launch.
In years past, such occurrences might have been relegated to the heap of “he said-she said” skirmishes that come into police complaint lines every day.
But these and other recent incidents like them have added one crucial detail: Someone held up a cellphone and posted the incident online.
“Now we all have these devices,” said Yohuru Williams, founding director of the New Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota’s Twin Cities. “People are hyperaware that the camera doesn’t lie.”
Experts like Williams, a former Fairfield University dean who was raised in Bridgeport, say these and other self-made videos — from the 1991 Rodney King beating to George Floyd’s death on a Minneapolis street in May — show the sheer power of documentation when it comes to racial
confrontation. In fact, the need to record potentially volatile situations has become a regular part of “the talk” Black parents have with their children about dealing with the police and others out in the world.
The videos showing people of color being attacked, verbally or otherwise, are a phenomena experts expect will continue — and not just because so many individuals carry smart phones these days.
As norms continue to be challenged by Black Lives Matter and other progressive movements, society might see more examples of “policing behavior,”
white people trying to preserve what are neutral spaces — such as a public park — for themselves and others they deem as “safe,” said Renée White, a former Fairfield University sociology professor who is now provost at Wheaton College in Massachusetts.
“You double down,” she said of those who feel threatened by the unfamiliar. “There are white folks seeing themselves as having the right to take claim to spaces.”
After sorting through witness statements, videos and photographs of the incident, Stamford police earlier this month charged the man caught on camera here, Steven Mike Dudek, 57. He faces four counts of second-degree assault,
first-degree intimidation based on bigotry or bias and falsely reporting an incident to police.
The assault charges stem from an alleged part of the incident in which police say Dudek sprayed four of the five young men of color he encountered with pepper spray. Police have said Dudek has complained in the past about people using the boat launch at Cove Island Park (the men he confronted in the video incident have said they did not intend to use the launch that day), but this event escalated into a racial one.
With marches and protests happening in small towns and big cities across the nation, four faculty members of the Africana
Studies Institute at the University of Connecticut participated in a recent panel discussion and podcast touching on unfolding events and their aftermath.
Some brought up the widely circulated video of Amy Cooper, the New York dog owner who told birdwatcher Christian Cooper, “I’m going to tell (the police) there’s an African American man threatening my life” during the Central Park dispute. She now faces charges in the matter, which was recorded by the victim, who is no relation to her.
It’s an example of how the cell phone is changing a power structure that has diminished Black people, the professors said.
“And so I think the way
police or citizens, white supremacist citizens, for example, can just make all kinds of claims knowing that their version of events is going to be the version that’s validated . ... And so that way that black voices are just, are disempowered — I think the cellphone technology helps to throw, a piece of metal in that cog and really disrupt that,” said Melina Pappademos, a history professor and director of the institute.
The cellphone provides another voice to bolster or counter police reports and media accounts, said David Embrick, associate professor of sociology and Africana Studies.
“Here we have cellphone technology that’s capturing this and then we have another narrative,” he said. “So the good news is that as we sort of expand that media platform, through other social media outlets, we can have other voices being disseminated.”
While the quest for social justice appears to be gaining steam and mainstream support, Pappademos said, “white supremacy is real” and the tipping point of the current Black Lives Matter movement won’t come without a struggle.
“As Frederick Douglass said, ‘Power never concedes power. It never has. And it never will,’ ” she said. “So people in the streets right now is absolutely what we need and, you know … let’s see what comes of it.”