On September 11, police in Washington, D.C. shot and killed Terrence Sterling, a 31-year-old unarmed black man. What we know, so far: Sterling was driving a motorcycle around 4 a.m., which police say he was doing “recklessly.” A witness, Kandace Simms, saw police pull in front of the motorcycle in a maneuver she sensed was an effort to block Sterling, after which the police car and Sterling’s vehicle collided. According to Simms, the cop in the passenger seat, who we now know as Officer Brian Trainer, rolled down the window, stuck out his gun, and shot Sterling two times. Her account conflicts with the police narrative. The medical examiner has since ruled his death a homicide.
The body-camera footage released Tuesday, though, did not depict any of this. The cops’ cameras were turned on only after the shooting, and what was released does not show us what transpired beforehand. Instead, it is a clip of an officer—Trainer or his partner; it’s unclear—performing CPR on Sterling as he bled out, shot through the neck, and dying before his—and our—eyes. “Keep looking at me buddy, keep looking at me,” the officer gulps.
DC Mayor Muriel Bowser ordered the release of the video after Sterling’s family had viewed it, ostensibly to assert some level of transparency in a year full of demands to increase body cameras on cops, and to provide the public with some semblance of truth—that is to bolster the illusion that when citizens ask a police force for accountability, it will duly cooperate. Mayor Bowser, upon releasing the video, said as much, that she hoped to “create broader accountability between law enforcement and communities, and to maintain open and transparent government.”
And yet the video does not illuminate anything new about what happened to Terrence Sterling that night. We already knew that he was shot, and that he died. It does not depict the actions that led to his death. The video would not be meaningfully distinct from a “snuff film”—as writer April Reign once put it—had it not shown us the part where the police were doing their jobs, performing CPR, trying to save a life despite the fact that it was they who had snuffed it out. We cannot have accountability without an actual accounting, however: For what exactly happened before Sterling was shot, for what happened not in the moments when the police looked their best as they gave CPR to a dying man, but the moments when they likely looked their worst. This footage is not that. This footage is police propaganda being called transparency.
This video represented a blatant turning point, a time when video footage of the end of a black life at the hands of police was not just a document of the impact of racist police officers, but a way for them to use it to shift the narrative in their favor, despite the fact that the outcome is the same, CPR or no. Terrence Sterling is dead. Brian Trainer shot him. Its existence brings up once more the question of how much a person can bear—and more specifically, what is the point of seeing endless footage of black people dying, if the system doesn’t change? Black people are still killed at the hands of police at a devastating rate, and those police infrequently face consequences for doing so.
This topic has been covered before, reports and essays acting as markers for when individual writers, and a collective community, finally reach the extremities of their own trauma. In the New York Times, Jenna Wortham identified the “psychological toll of racism” as a likely culprit of her flagging physical health. PBS Newshour’s Kenya Downs interviewed Monnica Williams, a clinical psychologist and director of the University of Louisville’s Center for Mental Health Disparities, about the “vicarious” and “race-based” trauma of watching videos of black death—and how in the last 15 years, studies have shown that the effects of racism have directly led to increased health problems among black people, including PTSD and other anxiety disorders.
Downs also spoke to April Reign regarding her Washington Post piece about declining to share videos of the deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. “It is a dehumanization of black people, and we don’t see that with any other race,” Reign said. “It’s ingrained in us from our history. White people used to have picnics at hangings and at lynchings, bringing their children to watch black bodies suffer and die. We are not far removed from that, it’s just being played out through technology now. And it hurts.”
The images of Philando Castile dying in his own car while a cop trained his gun upon him and Diamond Reynolds captured the scene on her cell phone—not just as documentation but also as a precaution for the safety of her daughter and herself—was but one breaking point cited by several of the above pieces. Last week, another video emerged depicting cops arresting and pepper-spraying a 15-year-old girl in Maryland after she’d refused to go to the hospital after having a minor bike collision with a vehicle. The video, from police body-cam footage, is also terrifying; the girl is very clearly refusing to go to the hospital because she is scared, and she is “resisting arrest” because she didn’t do anything to be arrested. Any adult with even the tiniest semblance of emotional intelligence would have been able to accurately assess the situation—and yet these white cops, grown and meaty men, wrested a tiny black girl from her bicycle and threw her to the ground and, after she was finally inside their squad car, blasted a chemical developed to disperse riots in her face.
All of these incidents illustrate how the state’s supposed protectors devalue and disregard black citizens, but there is an important distinction between those and the video of Sterling. Until more information is released, the video of Terrence Sterling dying in real time is supposedly meant to illuminate but instead obscures, raising more questions than answers—including what the apparent purpose for authorities to release it now, two weeks after he died, might be.