Police beating videos amplify trauma
Right now, Americans face a difficult choice of whether to watch video footage of Memphis police officers brutally beating Tyre Nichols.
It may seem inescapable: The footage is everywhere on the news and online. But you do have a choice, and the decision is clear.
Unless your work requires otherwise, or you are in a classroom or other educational environment where an appropriate context has been set, look away. Do not post it to your social media. And in light of warnings from those who have already seen it, do everything you can to make sure your child or adolescent doesn’t see it either.
This isn’t 1955, when Mamie TillMobley, grieving the brutal murder of her only son, Emmett, insisted on an open-casket funeral. Her brave decision forced the world to see the barbaric brutality of white racism — photos revealed the 14-year-old boy mutilated beyond recognition — and the nation’s conscience was rightly shocked by what it saw, helping to galvanize the civil rights movement.
This also isn’t 2020, when video of a Minneapolis police officer suffocating George Floyd inspired the #BlackLivesMatter uprising across the U.S. and all over the world.
Documenting human rights abuses is indeed important, and Memphis officials are right to make the Nichols video public.
However, for the sake of our individual and collective mental health we need to recognize how today’s media environment is vastly different from the one that existed in 1955 — when there were no screens in cars, airports or elevators, and no smartphones in nearly everyone’s briefcase or backpack.
Today, instead of getting our news in several discrete doses — say, once at breakfast from the morning paper and again at night while watching the evening news — many of us are exposed to information throughout our waking hours. There is no escaping the continual onslaught of news of natural disasters, terrorism, warfare, epidemics, street crime, subway crime, political corruption, melting glaciers, and mountain lions, coyotes and bears encroaching on the suburbs. (See also: doomscrolling).
And it’s not just verbal information, it’s images, which can have an even more powerful psychological impact. An estimated 95 million pictures and videos are uploaded per day just to Instagram, more than 1,000 each second. Even if most of them are of cats enjoying a brushing, that leaves many terabytes of potentially traumatizing images.
When it comes to police violence in particular, unfortunately, there has been no shortage of horrifying footage in recent years. That has helped expose the otherwise too-often-hidden scourge of systemic police brutality.
Still, we must weigh the importance of documentation against the trauma of
civilians who repeatedly view such violence. Mutilated human beings are the stuff of nightmares. Whether we witness this in person or in the media, the impact on our hearts and minds is similar in that our sympathetic nervous system is activated, with serious neurobiological consequences that scientists are only beginning to document.
Excessive exposure to violent images has a cumulative effect and can result in an array of psychological problems. Professionals such as journalists, human rights workers and law enforcement authorities, routinely exposed in the course of their duties, have experienced everything from changes in mood to debilitating trauma and even posttraumatic stress disorder.
The era of social media has brought these problems to the masses, with a higher cost to some groups.
Alissa V. Richardson, a journalist and author of “Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones, & the New Protest #Journalism,” said watching videos of police brutality creates additional trauma for Black folks who directly empathize with the victims. “Many Black people see themselves lying on the ground, they see a relative, someone who looks like them — it could be them,” Richardson told Vox.
Our children are also deeply affected, and especially vulnerable.
Following the Sept. 11 attack, researchers documented how young children had developed acute stress reactions and PTSD from cumulative exposure to media coverage of the
event, even though they didn’t personally know any victims.
Media exposure to the terrorist attack at the 2013 Boston Marathon similarly precipitated PTSD symptoms in children and adolescents with those who already suffered from various stressors most likely to be affected.
Meanwhile, screen use seems only to be increasing: From 2015 through 2021, screen use by tweens and teens went up 20% and 28% respectively, according to Common Sense Media.
From 2016 through 2019, anxiety and depression in children and adolescents increased by 27% and 24%, respectively, according to a study by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services researchers.
By 2020, 5.6 million kids had been diagnosed with anxiety and 2.4 million had been diagnosed with depression. Today, a 10-year-old child in the U.S. is more likely to die by suicide than from cancer or other diseases.
In short, there is a cumulative, traumatic effect of our current media landscape, and protecting mental health requires that we make careful distinctions about what type of media is appropriate to consume in various settings, by specific audiences.
There is a time and a place for viewing videos of human rights violations: Settings like a museum or classroom where the content can be viewed with advance warning and in community with others, help separate the experience of the encounter from ordinary life, and help us process and make sense of it.
But posting videos of violence online — next to cat videos and party photos — makes it more likely that someone might encounter the video unexpectedly at a time or age when they are unprepared or ill-equipped to process it. Even as it spreads an important message, it minimizes its significance, turning the death of a human being into a spectacle, something we watch on a screen. The artist Questlove, responding to the release of the Nichols video, posted a warning message to his Instagram followers: “Do NOT Watch It. Do NOT WATCH IT !!!!! ” he wrote. “For The Love Of God. Torture P*rn Is Not Going To Serve Your Soul.”
Police misconduct should be a priority for every single American. If our law enforcement doesn’t make each and every one of our communities feel safe, and instead, is a source of threat, it undermines the social contract at the heart of democracy.
To honor Mr. Nichols’s life, we need to do the work of making change by insisting that elected officials improve training protocols, hold wrongdoers accountable and build communities with the resources to manage the wide spectrum of human problems without overreliance on police.
Those things don’t happen as a result of watching a video.