It Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story: Discourses of and About Police Accountability Video

• In Event: Visual Epistemologies and Human Rights

Abstract

Videos of police activity are changing public debate about law enforcement in the United States. The limits of what a camera can convey about reality through de-contextualized images are well-established among communication scholars, but for the most part have not been a mainstream concern. That is changing, in part because of the role of video in police accountability activism. This paper examines how two opposing stakeholders, police accountability activists and law enforcement officers, discuss the evidentiary value of such videos. Based on ethnographic material and a small case study, I argue that the interpretation of video evidence relies simultaneously on its indexicality and contingency, enabling discourses of and discourses about “what happened.”

Author

• Mary Angela Bock, U of Texas - Austin