Cambios de medio en rejilla

This thesis is organized around various aspects of an evolving digital landscape in which

adopters of media technologies view, understand, and contribute to narratives

surrounding police brutality. Chapter two discusses relevant literature and includes

discussions of citizen-journalism and its role in contemporary society, the role of

vicariously viewing police-citizen encounters on perceptions of police, and Critical

Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA), the method in which I will complete this

analysis. The next three chapters will each be a case study of a different viral video of

police brutality in America, and this analysis will end with a discussion on my findings,

limitations, and my recommendations for future research.

Case Study 1: Mike Brown

Chapter 3 will discuss the fatal shooting of Mike Brown and the resulting protests and

discourse that emerged from the case. The citizen-generated video created by Piaget

Crenshaw recorded the aftermath of the shooting, which I argue gives less weight to the

video for two reasons. Firstly, the police were able to help shape the narrative of this case

by withholding Piaget Crenshaws video initially, enabling them to control the news

narrative through their statements and Darren Wilson’s accounts of what happened.

Secondly, Ferguson Police Department ordered a timely release of video footage of Mike

Brown allegedly robbing a local convenience store that would later be shown on

newscasts across the country and worked to criminalize the victim. This video would

later be used by many as evidence that Brown was a ‘bad kid’. I use a critical

technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) to analyze how the shooting and subsequent

protest was conceptualized on Twitter and how emerging technologies enabled people to

participate in citizen journalism on a large scale. Additionally, I demonstrate how citizens

used Twitter and videos as tools to share their opinion and to form an active community

of engaged citizens who sought justice for Mike Brown.

I use two main sources of data for this first chapter: Tweets from responses to

@DeRay uploaded videos between August 9, 2014 -August 31, 2014, and from Nov 24

to December 2nd. DeRay McKesson is an American Civil Rights activist that emerged as

a significant source of citizen-driven journalism through using his mobile phone camera

to document, record, and disseminate information during and throughout the Ferguson

protests. I chose to use his videos in this chapter because he was the most central node

and highly retweeted activist account during the Ferguson uprising, as found by the report

Beyond the Hashtags. I use the timeframe from the day Brown was shot on the 9th of

August, 2014 until the end of the month in order to collect initial responses to the videos

generated via citizen journalists, and the second time frame was chosen due to high

#Ferguson hashtag activity after the non-indictment of Darren Wilson. These two

separate time-frames were accessed through Twitter's advanced search page.

Case Study: Dajerria Becton

The second case study will consist of a discourse analysis of the comments surrounding

the citizen-generated video of 15-year-old Dajerria Becton, who was violently slammed

to the ground by a male officer after attending a pool party with friends in McKinney

Texas. The widespread, systemic, and violent culture of police violence against women

and girls remains largely overlooked in the public sphere, including sexual violence. A

2015 investigative report by the Buffalo News found that “In the past decade, a law

enforcement official was caught in a case of sexual abuse or misconduct at least every

five days." Additionally, an investigation by The Intercept and WNYC found that women

visiting loved ones in a Rikers jail described a pattern of invasive strip searches by prison

guards, where some women were booked for not allowing the inappropriate treatment by

guards. This chapter will continue to relate the emergence of social media and individual

use of technology to the viral video that brought widespread acknowledgement to this

case, but it will go further to explore why the movement against police brutality hasn’t

been constructed to include women.

For instance, I found that there were fewer protests, less hits for the search term

‘Dajerria Becton’ than ‘Mike Brown’ or ‘Philando Castile’ on Google, and fewer calls for

reform that resulted from this case specifically after this brutality took place. I argue that

the lack of public outrage and acknowledgement is due in part because Becton was not

fatally injured during her violent encounter with the officer. I use this case to explore the

specific kinds of violence by law enforcement that women and girls of color face, that

often goes unnoticed due to the limiting definition of police brutality. Finally, I argue that

citizen-generated videos have not been able to be as effective for women affected by

police violence as they have been for men.

Case Study: Philando Castile

The final case study will be an analysis of the live streaming video of the shooting death

of Philando Castile and the subsequent public discourse that it catalyzed. Philando Castile

was shot and killed by Jeronimo Yanez, after being pulled over in Falcon Heights, a

suburb of Saint Paul. Castile was in the car with his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, and

her four-year old daughter when he was pulled over by Yanez and another officer for a

traffic violation. After being asked for his license and registration, Castile told the officer

that he was legally carrying a firearm and then proceeded to reach for his ID.

Counternarratives that followed this case centered around ‘driving while black’ and

‘crimes of poverty’, the second amendment, and connecting multiple cases of police

together. I argue that these narratives begin to position police brutality as a structural

issue endemic to being Black in America, a shift from previous chapters where responses

focused more on the individual case or officer.

Additionally, this case study extends my research to include how the news

media has begun to regularly use citizen footage in their newscasts. I opt to use a

breaking story from ABC news that was uploaded to their Youtube account the day after

the fatal shooting of Castile. The video is just under two minutes long, and combines

footage from Diamond Reynolds recording of Castile's death and another citizens footage

of a Black man being fatally shot by police the day before. The incorporation of

citizen-generated videos into mainstream news casts across the country, provides additional

evidence to my argument that citizens now have more power in creating narratives related

to cases of police brutality. Rather than the media relying on police accounts and

interviews of police-citizen encounters, the media has begun to rely on witnesses and

their personal footage of events.

CHAPTER 2

LITERATURE REVIEW