“The power of a camera. Use it.”

That’s what Selma director Ava DuVernay had to say last night about the South Carolina police officer charged with murder for firing at an unarmed Black man, Walter Scott, eight times as the man fled from him. 

The case has queasy shades of the Tamir Rice shooting, in which police were shown on video shooting Rice in an overreaction to the threat he posed, and then waiting a fatally long time to administer first aid. He died in hospital later that day. From the New York Times:

Police reports say that officers performed CPR and delivered first aid to Mr. Scott. The video shows that for several minutes after the shooting, Mr. Scott remained face down with his hands cuffed behind his back. A second officer arrives, puts on blue medical gloves and attends to Mr. Scott, but is not shown performing CPR. As sirens wail in the background, a third officer later arrives, apparently with a medical kit, but is also not seen performing CPR.

Scott died at the scene.

The video is utterly terrifying, but you knew that. It leaves you with the feeling that if Scott weren’t Black, he’d be alive — and that if the cop’s behavior hadn’t been caught on camera, he wouldn’t have been charged with murder. Given the lies the police told before the video came out, we likely wouldn’t know what really happened at all.

DuVernay seems to feel the same way. “The power of the camera,” she tweeted last night, sharing the video. “Use it. This murder charge is ONLY a result of video. Keep your cameras ready and shoot.”

On the other hand, as Darnell L. Moore wrote in response to being “forced to watch another act of police abuse,” “black people dying after being shot or choked by police should not be moments we must be on the ready to capture on smart phones. …None of this should be normal.”

Header image credit: Wall Street Journal