The Power of Citizen Witnesses

How WITNESS is Strengthening Their Impact

The power of the citizen witness was where we began. WITNESS was founded in the aftermath of the Rodney King incident in 1991, when an unarmed African-American man was beaten repeatedly by the Los Angeles Police. The incident was captured on video by George Holliday, a local resident, from his apartment window.

Screenshot of a citizen video taken at a Ferguson, MO protest in August 2014 following the shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer.

Helping citizen witnesses shoot better video

The best way to improve the chances that citizen video can achieve impact is to engage directly with the citizen-shooters on the ground, and with people who are in touch with them in particular situations. To that end, we’ve been developing training and guidance materials to help you to gather more effective material, including:

A selection of our resources on documenting forced evictions. Currently available at fe.witness.org/resources.

Building workflows between citizens, media collectives, journalists and lawyers

Workflows are not sexy but they are key in the fight for justice and human rights. We need to think about how footage and information travels between people who do not think of themselves as “human rights activists” and professionals/human rights groups. WITNESS increasingly has been looking at these flows in mass atrocity contexts. Examples include the ongoing abuses in Syria and civil protest situations like those in Brazil. Activists there are using a Google form to document instances of police brutality during protests. Through this work, we have been developing simple workflows to add additional information that enhances the possibility that citizen footage can be used in legal or journalistic spaces.

Finding and trusting citizen footage

In an age where the technology provides for constant information overload, it is important to focus on questions of how to both find patterns and also how to find and verify/trust the proverbial “needle in the haystack,” the one piece of media that is crucial evidence or makes an important argument about an incident. We need better and more rapid ways find that important image or critical pattern. Otherwise we have the potential for false images and stories to inflame, distort and jeopardize the credibility of many genuine, courageous witnesses on the ground; and for the material to be lost.

Managing, archiving and preserving the evidence

Invest in back-up hard drives to storing video footage.

Protecting privacy, enabling consent and ensuring ethics

In an age where cameras are everywhere, privacy is a huge issue. At the intersection of mobile video and the Internet, these issues are particularly important since each of these technologies is in and of themselves structurally privacy-compromising.

Still from a video uploaded by perpetrators of an attack on an LGBT youth in Russia, July 2013. This version of the video uses the YouTube face blur tool to obscure the victim’s face.

Using video to make a difference in advocacy and evidence

We continue to work on how citizen-generated video and new media is used by formal human rights groups for advocacy (for example, here at the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights), as well as how to manage a large volume of citizen footage of a singular incident or similar types of incidents and how this might come together for advocacy purposes. A recent example of this is one I shared above of groups in Brazil gathering many different citizen videos of police brutality.

Dealing with the ‘unseen actors’: tech companies, policy-makers and spies

So much of citizen witnessing relies on using the mainstream tools and platforms that we use to share cute cat videos, “like” our friends’ posts, and tweet our point-of-view. If we don’t pay attention to the unseen protagonists, the technology actors whose platforms and tools are used by millions, then the majority of people will still face structural blocks to easily and safely share human rights-related content. These are the companies and policy-makers whose decisions on mobile and Internet privacy set the ground rules for how people can use tools and others can inhibit them, watch them or suppress them. For example, in a situation like Ferguson, MO we need to vigorously protect the ‘right to record’ for both journalists and ordinary citizens.

Looking for new ways to make citizen video count

We need to find new ways of engagement such as using live video, co-presence and immersive media that move people to action in more powerful ways, and give viewers of footage concrete ways to act both in real-time (for example, as they watch a live streamed video) from a distance. And with all this volume of video, we need to make sure that these videos documenting injustice don’t fall into an accountability gap — neglected or dismissed by mainstream journalists and press, or ignored or not heeded by governments or judiciaries.

For posts on #technology, #video & #humanrights check out our publication, WITNESS Change: http://bit.ly/witnesschange. See it. Film it. Change it.

For posts on #technology, #video & #humanrights check out our publication, WITNESS Change: http://bit.ly/witnesschange. See it. Film it. Change it.