CHARLOTTE, NC– Saing Chhoeun was locked out of his home in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Monday when law enforcement officers entered his yard and garage with high-powered rifles, using a car as a shield, while being met with a hail of gunfire from the direction of his home . the neighbor’s house.
As bullets flew just a few feet away, Chhoeun picked up his phone and began live-streaming the standoff between officials and a man wanted by an ex-felon for possession of a firearm, fleeing to escape.
By the end of the ordeal, five people, including four officers and the gunman, were dead and more were injured in the deadliest single-day incident for U.S. law enforcement since 2016.
The deadly shooting also illustrated how bystanders with smartphones don’t always take cover when bullets start flying. They are increasingly trying to live stream their perspective on the attack. Experts say the response reflects the new role bystanders play in the age of smartphones.
“It’s become kind of a social norm,” says Karen North, a professor of digital social media at the University of Southern California Annenberg.
People have always had difficulty defining the responsibilities of a bystander in a crisis situation, North said. It is not always safe to intervene, such as the situation in Charlotte, and people can feel helpless if they do nothing. Social media offers a third option.
The “new responsibility of the bystanders” in the digital age is to record what happened on their phones, she said.
“It used to be, ‘If you see something, say something,’” North said. “Now it’s, ‘If you see something, start recording.'”
Chhoeun was about to leave for work when U.S. marshals blocked his driveway and he had to crawl into his garage for safety, with his keys in the ignition of his truck. He crouched at the door and knocked on his son with one hand to let him in and answered with the other.
Chhoeun said he would never have risked his life to record a video if he had not been locked outside. But when he was, he thought, ‘Maybe I’ll live it, you know, so everyone in the world can see that I witnessed that too. I didn’t see that coming.”
Rissa Reign, a youth coordinator who lives nearby, said she was cleaning her house when she heard gunshots and walked outside to find out what was happening.
She started recording when she heard sirens, thinking she would share the video with Charlit, a 62,000-member Facebook group where residents post about news and events. She had no idea how serious the situation had become until a SWAT vehicle pulled up behind her.
“Once we got there it was, ‘Oh, no. This is an active situation,” she said. “And before you know it, you’re in the middle of something that’s much bigger than you thought.”
Reign saw livestreaming as a way to keep the community informed, she said.
“Seeing that really puts things into perspective and makes you know it’s actually real, and not just when you read it or hear about it in the news,” she said of the livestream video. “If you really see it, you can do it, you know. , you know it’s real.
Mary Angela Bock, a media professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said there are many reasons why someone would pull out their phone in a situation like the one in Charlotte. There will always be people who try to record videos because of a human attraction to violence or to catch someone in an embarrassing situation.
“There are also good reasons for good people to respectfully record, from a safe distance, police activity or any form of government activity for the sake of citizenship: testifying on behalf of other citizens, testifying on behalf of the community,” she said. “We are all in in the same boat.”
Bock, who researches people who film law enforcement officers, says police leaders will often tell her they support the idea of respectfully distanced citizen video because it provides more evidence. But that is sometimes easier said than done on the ground during a crisis situation.
“Police officers will often talk about how, and that’s true, video doesn’t always tell the whole story. Video should start and stop. Maybe someone wasn’t there at the beginning, someone might not have seen everything. One perspective is not the whole perspective,” she said.
“That’s why I advocate for people to respectfully record remotely, because the more perspectives the better when we triangulate. “If we have more than one view of a scene, we have a better idea of what happened,” Bock said.
Numerous federal appeals courts have upheld the right to publicly record police work.
Stephen Dubovsky, professor emeritus of psychiatry at the State University of New York at Buffalo, said that for someone in that situation, connecting with others through livestreaming can give them a sense of security.
“You go out and you may be at risk, but you’re looking at it through your phone,” he said. “You watch it through the video, you’re one step away from it.”
Chhoeun’s video shows two officers taking shelter behind a vehicle. Another officer is shown standing at a fence in his yard and falling to the ground as what appears to be bullets spray the area around him.
“It was so, so sad for law enforcement,” he said. ‘I know they don’t choose to die in my backyard, they just do their job. And that’s what happened to them, they left their family behind.”
___
Willingham reported from Charleston, West Virginia.