Millions of people have seen videos on social media, from multiple angles, of the death of 37-year-old Alex Pretti. On Saturday, federal immigration agents shot and killed Pretti in Minneapolis.
Bystander videos, like the ones taken of Pretti, have played a key role for decades in informing the public when law enforcement kills or injures people.
Videos shared online are now central to shaping public perception and understanding of events, experts said.
"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, a video might be worth 100,000 words."
It was once a rare occurrence to have a camcorder on hand at just the right moment. Now, groups of activists and bystanders have phones at the ready and can quickly disseminate video widely and across multiple platforms.
The technological changes have led to real-time access and greater government transparency, but experts caution that videos still do not tell the full story.
A few notable examples highlight how bystander video has changed over the decades.
A growing history of video evidence
In 1991, four Los Angeles police officers, three of them white men, savagely 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 TV station. News stations around the country picked up the footage. The officers were acquitted, which spurred the 1992 LA riots.
Almost two decades later, in 2009, grainy videos showed Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old Black man, being shot and killed by a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) officer in Oakland, Calif., in what appeared to be an unprovoked attack. This time, video came from multiple bystanders: Several BART passengers took video footage of the fatal incident with their phones or digital cameras and it aired on local news. The era of social media was just beginning, and the videos also went viral on YouTube.
In more recent years, a bystander captured the 2020 killing of George Floyd after officer Derek Chauvin put his full body weight on Floyd's neck in Minneapolis. The video was posted to Facebook hours later and quickly gained attention. It 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 officer in Minneapolis. In both Good and Pretti's cases, observers were on hand to record: Good and Pretti's killings were both captured from multiple different angles and the videos were immediately posted on social media.
Social media is an easy distribution method
It's not just that more people are recording videos, it's the ability for millions of people to see the bystander videos, West said.
"There are distribution mechanisms out there that allow hundreds of thousands or millions of people to see them," West said. "So any event that takes place today, there is going to be people recording."
Bystander videos are now often released shortly after a major news event on social media.
Mary Beth Oliver, a professor of media studies at Penn State University, said that decades ago, there were a few large broadcast channels that the American public turned to and no content creators on social media, so most people were seeing the same images at the same time with fewer interpretations.
"That shared information is largely gone," Oliver said.
In today's media landscape, lots of Americans, especially younger people, get their news from social media, according to the Pew Research Center. The videos of the Good shooting on social media have been viewed by 70% of Americans, according to a YouGov poll.
"We all have cellphones. We all have a video recording capability," West said. "People are really taking advantage of that fact to record history."
During a statewide address on Jan. 14, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz urged residents to record federal immigration agents.
"Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans, not just to establish a record for posterity but to bank evidence for future prosecution," Walz said.
Videos shape public perception
Dhavan Shah, a professor of communication research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the videos on social media are part of what's driving political protest.
"It is what's getting people out in the streets," he said. "It's mobilizing, it's engaging, it's driving participation."
In 2020, following the killing of Floyd and the video footage, the Pew Research Center found that two-thirds of U.S. adults either "strongly" or "somewhat" supported the Black Lives Matter movement, and almost 70% of Americans said they were talking about race or racial equality with their families and friends. (Support for the Black Lives Matter movement has since fallen.)
Videos can force more government transparency
After the Pretti and Good shootings, bystander videos immediately challenged the narrative of the Trump administration.
"It made it impossible for the administration's initial narrative to hold because people could see with their own eyes that there were several different aspects of the administration's story that just didn't add up," West said, noting the public has more information now than they've ever had in major news events.
Sometimes videos raise more questions than answers
While bystander videos have allowed millions of Americans to view controversial events for themselves, they are only one part of the story, experts said.
"If there is even the slightest bit of ambiguity, that just opens the door for people to interpret [video] according to their own existing attitudes," said Oliver of Penn State.
Videos only show viewers a moment in time and can be manipulated or edited, said West. Shorter videos that are commonly seen on social media can also be misleading, he said.
"We don't know what happened five minutes before or an hour before or three hours before," West said.
For example, in 2019, a short viral video appeared to show a teenager mocking a Native American activist at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Longer videos of the incident brought the original interpretation into question.
The rise of artificial intelligence and deepfake videos adds another complication to the public's understanding of these events, experts said.
Shah, from the University of Wisconsin, said it's becoming more and more difficult for people to differentiate between AI and reality on social media. People may stop believing what they're seeing altogether.
"The idea of image as truth is also deeply in question," he said.
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