Of all the terrible consequences sure to come from the three-count guilty verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin, none is worse than the possibility that people start making emotional life-and-death decisions based on a misleading video snippet.
That’s exactly what happened here.
Democratic Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York repeated the ignorant, trite “we watched the video” mantra Wednesday on MSNBC. “When we all saw that video — members of Congress saw it. America saw it. The world saw it. I think it was obvious to everyone that this was a murder that took place in cold blood,” he said.
Making rash decisions based on a short internet video — what could go wrong?!
We’ve all seen videos that turned out not to be what everyone originally thought they were. It happens all the time. It’s depressing how common it’s become on issues both big and small.
A viral video last August appeared to show police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, ruthlessly shooting an unarmed black man in the back. It turns out he was defying police orders and entering his vehicle, where he had a knife. Oh, and the reason police were there is because Jacob Blake, who had been accused of sexually assaulting a woman, returned to the woman’s home and she called the police.
But we only found all that out after rioters took to the streets of Kenosha to burn buildings, loot small businesses, and attack innocent pedestrians. Oops!
Remember Nicholas Sandmann? The smiling high school student was seen on video in early 2019, face to face with an elderly Native American. Sandmann is white and was wearing a red Make America Great Again hat, so, of course, he was immediately characterized as an entitled little racist.
At least, that’s the version that the media told. CNN ended up settling a multimillion-dollar lawsuit by Sandmann because, as we found out, their version of the story wasn’t true. So did the Washington Post. The initial video failed to show that it was Sandmann and his classmates, minors, who had been subjected to verbal assaults from black activists, and that the Native American man had approached and confronted Sandmann and started banging his drum in the boy’s face.
Also in 2019, then-President Donald Trump was literally accused of enabling war crimes after ABC aired a video, both on its morning and evening newscasts, that purported to show an invasion of Syrian Kurds on the Turks. The footage was actually taken from a nighttime demo of tracer bullets and machine guns shot at the Knob Creek Gun Range in West Point, Kentucky.
Unfortunately for former Minneapolis police officer Chauvin, even after the facts came out, even after we saw that George Floyd had resisted arrest for an absurd amount of time, even after we learned that there was a lethal cocktail of fentanyl and methamphetamine in Floyd’s system, even after we found out that Floyd had a severely diseased cardiovascular system that was ready to give out under stress, the narrative about “the video,” that Chauvin’s knee choked out and killed Floyd, persisted.
Videos often go viral long before needed context can catch up with the appearances. In the case of Chauvin, a jury decided that context didn’t matter.
