Institutional violence in front of the camera
The images of an immigration agent fatally shooting a woman in Minneapolis are devastating: both for the gratuitous violence and the impunity surrounding the act. A witness recorded the scene on her cell phone from very close up. Shocked by what she had just witnessed, she can be heard screaming and rebuking the agents for their brutal conduct, which only intensifies the drama of the moment. There are other videos that captured different moments and that news outlets used to show the car's trajectory before and after the shooting, and to demonstrate how a doctor who was at the scene was prevented from attending to the victim. The Department of Homeland Security claimed that the woman intended to run over the agents and has charged her with "domestic terrorism," adding a clearly sexist adjective to the crime to justify the murder of a 37-year-old mother of three, whose car was full of stuffed animals and children's toys.
In most cases, both American and local television stations issued warnings about the graphic nature of the images before broadcasting them. As expected, the most sensationalist programs repeatedly showed the violent scene. Beyond the danger of decontextualizing events, this is a way of numbing the audience's sensibilities. Aggression and abuse become routine. Many networks explicitly verified the recording. This journalistic approach already highlights the bias in the news coverage. What we see is so brutal, and the abuse of power so blatant, that any doubt the images might create is already present. We no longer trust what we see. The scene resembles a sequence from a dystopian series, designed to shock the viewer by introducing extreme violence into everyday situations that everyone can relate to.
The media circulated several portraits of the woman to explain who she was. This wasn't without purpose. It implicitly suggests that the woman doesn't fit the stereotypes associated with this type of situation: a white, blonde, non-immigrant American woman in a residential neighborhood, making a low-speed maneuver in her car. If she is the target of ICE's actions, everyone feels threatened. The images were recorded with a cell phone, and it is television that validates the footage. In a case like this, the cell phone unintentionally becomes a tool for citizen protection. The phone's camera couldn't protect her body or prevent the violence, but it is proving useful in publicly discrediting the official version of events. If no one had recorded it, what narrative would have prevailed in the media and in court? The erosion of freedoms is evident when neither rights nor the presence of witnesses prevail, but only the chance existence of a cell phone recording from a privileged perspective. This won't always be the case.
