A New Video Medium
One of the newest forms of on-the-spot video recording that has legal significance, is video made by Tasers when they are activated. For a detailed discussion of these pieces of equipment, see a major report by Amnesty International [Amnesty ii] [Taser International].
They are referred to as Electronic Control Devices (ECDs) and are intended to incapacitate briefly an out of control person by disrupting their ability to control their gross motor capacities. In December 2008, an Amnesty International report stated that there have been 334 deaths from the use of Taser guns in the United States [Amnesty i] [Rawstory]. As the use of these stun guns expands, we can expect that video records of deployment will enter both as evidence of crime and crime control and also as evidence in cases litigating over the effects on people who have been injured or killed from being tasered.[4]
What are we looking at in Taser video? First, it is plain vanilla video — we are not looking at MTV – we are looking at something that appears documentary and “unedited,” if by “editing” we mean complex juxtapositions that arise from putting together video clips to tell a story or clips that have been stylized through the use of video effects generators, whether aided by transitions or not; the cut itself is a carrier of meaning. This is a data stream with moving pictures and sound [Tasercam]. While it may run continuously from the moment the video is turned on, it does not provide much context about what was going on prior to deployment and nothing about what happens after the Taser is turned off. The camera is attached to the gun so that viewers are treated to what might be touted in another context as the ultimate immersive first-person shooter experience, where the point of view the viewer assumes is not that of the eyes of the officer above the gun, but that of the gun itself — lower down in the visual field, more a part of the action and less connected to the head of the operator. Viewers can feel this disconnection from the head, it is a visceral view. This point of view puts us in the action, not just standing back and thinking about it; it seems to turn the standard trope of photographic observation, particularly photojournalism, as non-intervention, on its head. [Sontag, p.11]
Looking with the barrel of the Taser, we are not only there but our looking itself is carrying out the action — extreme action; pain is being inflicted. Beings are subdued and brought under control, seemingly with the glance of our eyes. We can see them fall and hear them cry out. Subsequent events do not appear on the video snippets that are currently available. The actual wounds, the actual pain, from the use of the Taser (or other stun devices) for the most part leave no marks. It is what Darius Rejali has termed “violence you can’t see.” “Out of sight is out of mind. Niccolo Machiavelli once advised princes to use stealthy violence because people will get less alarmed. He said, ’in general, men judge more by sight than by touch. Everyone sees what is happening but not everyone feels its consequences.’” [Rejali]
So on the one hand the viewer is invited into the action as its agent and on the other oddly distanced from the consequences of that action because the viewer sees no visible wounds on the body, no blood, no broken bones, no sounds of direct body contact that would be made if someone was hitting or stomping on the victim. The person deploying the Taser can stand back without personal risk as the other is temporarily immobilized and seemingly unhurt. There is, however, a typical ratta-tat-tat, a bit like raccoons calling to each other erotically on early spring nights that can be heard on YouTube videos of tasing, some 4,000 posted so far as of 8/4/09.
When the arena is video game play we might be inclined even to value the catharsis of harmless violence by representation, hoping that it would deflect the need for actual acts of violence in the world. When the video in question has been recorded during real action and becomes a document of legal interest, this is a problematic perspective, because it is untrue that Tasers cannot cause long lasting harm or even death. Will finders of fact be seduced by the voyeuristic participation in what seems to be harmless action in these videos or will they be able to step back and think critically about them as evidence? For instance, if we see the police tasing a man in the back, will we assume that the shooter is acting egregiously aiming at a receding non-threatening person or will the viewer be moved to ask whether that same receding figure hadn’t just before threatened the shooter with physical harm? Or if the shooter maintains the story of threat to explain his actions, will the viewer be moved to ask whether that account is credible, or not, and look for external evidence to corroborate one version or another, especially if one is a police officer in uniform? [Miller ii]
While the camera possibly will record a lot of detail, it may or may not be meaningful for understanding the unfolding events because of the narrow view. So we may become occupied with the clothing or hair of the person being tased, and see stains on the floor, but we probably will not see much of the full scene at all. The camera is intended to document the deployment of the weapon, neither to tell the story of the events that caused the gun to be fired nor the aftermath of its use. So the figure is ripped out of context, in contrast to dashboard camera video that may show the tasing episode from some distance and where the context overwhelms the picture of what is happening to the person being tased. One of the few examples of tasercam (in contrast to tasting) involves a dark and relatively unspecified interior of perhaps a small commercial establishment and a young African-American man, with short dreadlocks and otherwise undistinguished clothing. [Taser Cam] Contrast this with the dashboard camera video of the tasing of Jesse Buckley, mentioned above. He was a twenty-three year old very large man [US Court of Appeals] stopped on a speeding charge. He submits to being handcuffed and when he gets out of his car, he drops down to a seated position on the ground and begins to weep at his situation – not just the moment of being pulled over but perhaps over all the destitution in his life. When he refuses to get up and go to the police car, after repeated warnings, he is tased at least three times at close range. The video that we find posted on the web, taken from deputy-sheriff Jonathan Rackard’s dashboard camera recording, begins after Buckley has gotten out of his car and ends before a second officer arrives to render assistance. We see cars passing on the two-lane highway on the left side of the picture and the rear of Buckley’s car and the grassy embankment where much of the action unfolds. We cannot really see his face and can barely see the effects of tasing, although we can hear the weapon go off each time it is discharged. The person tased in the tasercam example looks like a youth who might be scary if encountered on the street where Jesse Buckley does not seem to pose a threat at all. In both these examples, the officers appear to be calm and clear and managerial in their orders in contrast to other recordings where officers seem to lose control. The most famous example of this is the Rodney King beating caught on Richard Halliday’s amateur recording where viewers worldwide focused rather more on the police batons than the stun gun used against King [Shanahben].
As a non-police viewer, it is hard to understand why the officer, under no threat from Buckley, and having stopped him on a traffic violation and not in pursuit of criminal activity, needed to be in such a rush. Where would the harm have been in letting Buckley have his cry? And why did he proceed to tase him multiple times when any properly trained officer should know that it is impossible to follow an order to stand up shortly after receiving a tasing? Taser stuns produce immobility immediately in most people, so a police officer who demands that someone move/stand up after tasing is producing an involuntary disobedience which is then subsequently punished with repeated tasing if the officer loses control, prolonging the inability of the person to comply.
Both of these video sequences depersonalize the recipients of the tasing because of the particularities of the recording and because of the truncated, only barely suggested narratives they report. Of course it is not “I came, I saw, I tased” but there’s not much more than “I saw something that I had to put a stop to” or “someone I thought I had to gain control of.” From the video itself, we know little more. This maps onto the new penal system where “the offender is rendered more and more abstract, more stereotypical, more and more a projected image rather than an individuated person.”[Garland, p. 179]. Similarly, due to problems of file size, resolution, hurried taping, much surveillance camera footage presents relatively undifferentiated persons who are hard to categorize. We have to take someone’s word for it; the video data are just an information token encouraging us to believe an account expressed with words.