Researchers Examine Effects Of Viral Police Videos On Young Black People

Several viral videos that show graphic scenes of violence during police encounters have sparked the interest of researchers with the Anna Julia Cooper Center at Wake Forest University. They're conducting a study to find out how these images are impacting young black people.

Organizers are looking for more participants to interview and expect the results to be published sometime next year.

WFDD's Keri Brown talked with Professor Sherri Williams about some of the preliminary findings.

Williams says continued exposure to harmful images may cultivate heightened levels of anxiety, fear, and hopelessness among viewers.

Interview Highlights

What prompted this study?

The Philando Castile Facebook Live fatal shooting last July. I saw it up late one night just scrolling through Instagram, and I was traumatized by it. I'm a Gen Xer, a fully mature adult who has the emotional capacity to try to process something like this, but what I thought about were my younger cousins who were out of school for the summer who are also immersed in social media a lot. I thought it would be a good idea to look at how younger black people between the ages of 18 and 24 of all gender identities are processing these images that consistently circulate in social media. Younger black people are a demographic that is immersed in mobile culture and also social media and we know this is a time when mobile technology is being used a lot to shed a light on police brutality, so they're growing up in their formative years seeing this kind of violence, and we wanted to take a look to see what kind of impact it's having on them.

What types of questions are you asking participants?

One question that we're asking people is, of all of the images that they've seen of police brutality in the last maybe four years what are the top three that stick out in their mind? We're asking them if they've ever felt trauma when they've watched these videos. If they have, how has that trauma played out? How has that trauma manifested itself in their bodies, and what did they do with those feelings and that trauma? But we're also asking them, by the public constantly seeing these images, does this desensitize people to black death and black people's vulnerability to violence and black pain?

It seems there can be a conflict with seeing these images and then sharing them on social media. What are participants saying about this?

So what the participants are saying is that there's a push and a pull that they experience, so on the one hand they want to see the videos and they want to be informed, but on the other hand they don't want to continue to witness that kind of violence against people who look just like them. Because not only is it a reminder that it could happen to them, but it's also traumatic for them to constantly see that. They talk about when they see a video or notice there is a new killing, maybe not watch[ing] the video but maybe read[ing] a text story about it instead, so they're still trying to balance being informed about this police brutality but not constantly watching the images. But they do want to know what's going on.

Have you had any surprises in your research so far?

Not really, but sometimes I've been surprised by some of the people who have said that they think mainstream media does a better job at covering some of these social justice incidents than social media, because we know that people are capturing these images on mobile technology and sharing them through social media, but they're also saying they think they're manipulated sometimes. It's still pretty early in the research, but that's one thing that's surprised me with some of the people that I've talked to, is that they still want some of the context and balance from the traditional media, but they also feel some of the mechanisms that are embedded in traditional media that have shut out the voices of marginalized people, particularly black people, have really kind of given way to this whole type of social media revolution in the first place.

*Follow WFDD's Keri Brown on Twitter @kerib_news