CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — Saing Chhoeun was locked out of his Charlotte, North Carolina, home Monday as law enforcement armed with high-powered rifles descended on his yard and garage, using a car as a shield. encountered a hail of gunfire from the direction of his neighbor’s house.
As bullets flew a few meters away, Chhoeun took out his phone and started live stream the standoff between officials and a man wanted for possession of a firearm by an ex-felon and fleeing to escape.
By the end of the ordeal, five people, including four police officers and the shooter, were dead and others injured. The deadliest incident in a single day for American law enforcement since 2016.
THE fatal shooting also illustrated how smartphone-wielding spectators don’t always run for cover when the bullets start flying. Increasingly, they are seeking to broadcast their views on the attack live. Experts say this reaction reflects the new role that spectators play in the age of smartphones.
“It’s become kind of a social norm,” said Karen North, a professor of digital social media at the University of Southern California Annenberg.
Humans have always struggled to define the responsibilities of a bystander in a crisis situation, North said. It is not always safe to intervene, as in Charlotte’s case, and people can feel helpless when they do nothing. Social media offers a third option.
The “new responsibility of the viewer” in the digital age is to record what happened on their phone, she said.
“It used to be, ‘If you see something, say something,’” North said. “Now it’s, ‘If you see something, start recording.'”
Chhoeun was about to leave for work when U.S. police officers blocked his driveway and he was forced to huddle for safety in his garage, his keys in the ignition of his truck. He crouched by the door, knocking for his son to let him in with one hand and recording with the other.
Chhoeun said he would never have risked his life to shoot a video if he hadn’t been locked out. But since he was, he thought, “I could just experience it, you know, make everyone see that I witnessed it too.” I didn’t see it coming. »
Rissa Reign, a youth coordinator who lives in the neighborhood, said she was cleaning her house when she heard gunshots and went outside to find out what was happening.
She started recording when she heard sirens, thinking she’d share the video with Charlit, a Facebook group with 62,000 members where locals post news and events. She had no idea how serious the situation was until a SWAT vehicle pulled up behind her.
“Once we got there, it was, ‘Oh, no. It’s an active situation,” she said. “And the next thing you know, you’re in the middle of something much bigger than you thought.”
Reign saw live streaming as a way to keep the community informed, she said.
“Seeing this really puts things into perspective and lets you know that this is really real, not just reading about it or hearing about it on the news,” she said of the livestream video . “When you really see it, you can, you know, you know it’s real.”
Mary Angela Bock, a media professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said there are many reasons why someone might take away their phone in a situation like Charlotte’s. There will always be people who try to shoot videos due to a human attraction to violence or to catch someone in an embarrassing situation.
“There are also good reasons for good people to respectfully record, from a safe distance, police activity or any type of government activity for the sake of citizenship: testifying on behalf of other citizens, testifying on behalf of the community. ,” she said. “We’re all in this together.”
Bock, who studies people who film law enforcement, said police leaders often tell him they support the idea of socially distanced citizen video because it creates more evidence. But this is sometimes easier said than done on the ground in a crisis situation.
“Police officers often explain that, and it’s true, video doesn’t always show the whole story. The video should start and stop. Maybe someone wasn’t there at the beginning, maybe someone didn’t see everything. One perspective is not a comprehensive perspective,” she said.
“That’s why I recommend people record respectfully from a distance, because the more perspectives the better when we triangulate. When we have more than one view of a scene, we have a better idea of what happened,” Bock said.
Many federal appeals courts have upheld the right to record police work in public.
Stephen Dubovsky, professor emeritus of psychiatry at the State University of New York at Buffalo, said that for someone in this situation, connecting with others through live streaming could give them a sense of security.
“You go out there and you might be at risk, but you’re watching it through your phone,” he said. “You watch it through the video, you’re a little detached from it.”
In Chhoeun’s video, two officers can be seen taking cover behind a vehicle. Another officer is shown near a fence in his yard, falling to the ground as what appear to be bullets spray the area around him.
“It was so sad for law enforcement,” he said. “I know they are not choosing to die in my backyard, but are just doing their job. And that’s what happened to them, they left their families behind.
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Willingham reported from Charleston, West Virginia.
