The Reel Story

 

It wasn’t what “he said” or “she said”, it was what IT said. Darnella Frazier’s video wasn’t a reel of film (as my anachronistic title suggests), a tape, or footage of anything, even though those terms still abound. But it was history, right up there in impact  with the famous Zapruder film documenting the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. The murder of George Floyd at the knee of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was captured on a cellphone by a teenager.

We heard the young woman’s testimony at Chauvin’s trial, in which she was beating herself up for not having done something to save Floyd’s life, just pressing a button on her phone, but there was no other role she could have played. Maybe the fates assigned her to be there and do exactly what she did. George Floyd’s little daughter said her daddy changed the world. Not quite! George needed Darnella and her cellphone camera to do that.

Ms. Frazier wasn’t the only one in the small group of bystanders with cellphones, and some of them also took photos or videos too. But it was she who captured, from beginning to end, those 9 minutes and 29 seconds that were critical for Chauvin’s conviction.

Think of the presence of mind it took for that young woman to keep recording that video. At any moment, one of the other officers at the scene could have forcefully shooed her away, confiscated the phone, even arrested her. Think of the additional courage it took for her to post what she recorded.

Most of all, think of all the circumstances that put that little recording device, just like the ones many of the rest of us use for cat videos, in those particular hands at that moment in time last year. We can argue about whether or not it was fate. But what is crystal clear is that it was necessary.

These little cameras are everywhere now, so much so that we take them for granted. They have turned many of us into reporters in times of disaster, and in some cases, witnesses to crime. But I think there are very few Darnellas among us, at least, so far.