Bystander videos of Minneapolis killings reveal larger trend : NPR

Protesters record Seattle police officers during a march against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Seattle on February 8, 2025. Bystander videos have become essential to the public’s understanding of many current events.

Jason Redmond/AFP via Getty Images

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Jason Redmond/AFP via Getty Images

Millions of people have seen videos on on social networks, from several angles, of the death of Alex Pretti, 37 years old. On Saturday, federal immigration agents shot and killed Pretti in Minneapolis.

Bystander videos, like Pretti’s, have played a key role for decades in informing the public when law enforcement kills or injures people.

Videos shared online are now key to shaping public perception and understanding of events, experts say.

“It’s still all about the videos,” said Darrell M. West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “People would say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, if that’s true, maybe a video is worth 100,000 words.”

It used to be rare to have a camcorder on hand at the right time. Now groups of activists and bystanders have phones at their fingertips and can quickly distribute video at scale and across multiple platforms.

Technological changes have led to real-time access and greater government transparency, but experts warn that videos still don’t tell the whole story.

A few notable examples highlight how spectator video has evolved over the decades.

A growing story of video evidence

In 1991, four Los Angeles police officers, including three white men, brutally beat Rodney King, a black man. George Holliday grabbed his Sony Handycam, recorded for about nine minutes and sent the video to KTLA, a local television station. News channels across the country picked up the images. The officers were acquitted, sparking the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

Nearly two decades later, in 2009, grainy videos showed Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old black man, shot and killed by a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) officer in Oakland, California, in what appeared to be an unprovoked attack. This time, the video came from multiple bystanders: several BART passengers filmed the fatal incident on their phones or digital cameras and broadcast it on the local news. The era of social media was just beginning and videos also went viral on YouTube.

In recent years, a bystander captured the 2020 killing of George Floyd after officer Derek Chauvin put his full weight on Floyd’s neck in Minneapolis. The video was posted to Facebook a few hours later and quickly gained attention. This propelled the Black Lives Matter movement into the mainstream.

Earlier this month, Renee Macklin Good was shot and killed by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis. In both Good’s and Pretti’s cases, observers were on hand to record: Both Good’s and Pretti’s murders were filmed from several different angles, and the videos were immediately posted to social media.

Social media is a simple distribution method

It’s not just that much more people record videos, it’s the opportunity for millions of people to see the videos of passersby, West said.

“There are distribution mechanisms that allow hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people to see them,” West said. “So for any event that happens today, there will be people recording.”

Viewer videos are now often posted shortly after a major news event on social media.

Mary Beth Oliver, a media studies professor at Penn State University, said that several decades ago, American audiences gravitated toward a few major broadcast channels and no content creators on social media, so most people saw the same images at the same time with fewer interpretations.

“That shared information has largely disappeared,” Oliver said.

In today’s media landscape, many Americans, especially younger Americans, get their news from social media, according to the Pew Research Center. Videos of Good’s shooting on social media were seen by 70% of Americans, according to a YouGov poll.

“We all have cell phones. We all have video recording capability,” West said. “People are really taking advantage of this fact to make history.”

During a statewide speech on Jan. 14, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz urged residents to register federal immigration agents.

“Help us create a database of atrocities committed against Minnesotans, not only to establish a record for posterity, but also to store evidence for future prosecutions,” Walz said.

Videos shape public perception

Dhavan Shah, a communications research professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said videos posted on social media are part of what fuels political protest.

“That’s what brings people into the streets,” he said. “It’s mobilizing, it’s engaging, it stimulates participation.”

In 2020, following Floyd’s killing and the video footage, the Pew Research Center found that two-thirds of American adults “strongly” or “somewhat” supported the Black Lives Matter movement, and nearly 70% of Americans said they talk about race or racial equality with family and friends. (Support for the Black Lives Matter movement has since fallen.)

Videos can force more government transparency

After the shootings of Pretti and Good, videos of bystanders immediately questioned the Trump administration’s rhetoric.

“It made it impossible to keep the original narrative of the administration, because people could see with their own eyes that there were several different sides of the administration’s story that just didn’t add up,” West said, noting that the public now has more information than it ever has during major news events.

Sometimes videos raise more questions than answers

Although bystander videos have allowed millions of Americans to see controversial events for themselves, they represent only part of the story, experts say.

“If there is any ambiguity, it just opens the door for people to interpret according to their own attitudes,” said Penn State’s Oliver.

The videos only show viewers a moment in time and can be manipulated or edited, West said. The shorter videos commonly seen on social media can also be misleading, he said.

“We don’t know what happened five minutes before, an hour before or three hours before,” West said.

For example, in 2019, a short viral video emerged showing a teenager mocking a Native American activist at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. Longer videos of the incident have called the original interpretation into question.

Experts say the rise of artificial intelligence and deepfake videos is making it even more difficult for the public to understand these events.

Shah, of the University of Wisconsin, said it’s increasingly difficult for people to tell the difference between AI and reality on social media. People can completely stop believing what they see.

“The idea of ​​image as truth is also deeply challenged,” he said.