Why Videos Don’t Always Portray the Truth - The George Floyd Effect
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Just because something's on video doesn't mean it is the absolute truth. In this episode, Bill Stierle and Tom discuss the George Floyd incident and how different the outcome would have been if we didn’t have the video footage. In this video-based society we live in, we have different messages coming in from different directions. As a result, our perception and our perspective get skewed depending on the media we’re feeding on. What we need is to have awareness of how videos affect our society. With that in mind, we need to bring our best selves forward at all times.
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Bill and I decided we are going to discuss truth and our video-based society. I'm sure it comes as no shock to any of you reading that everyone, practically in America, over the age of 10 or 12 has a video camera in their pocket with their cell phone. In addition to that, police now have body cams that are recording video of pretty much everything they do. It's revealing some things about our society that are in some ways unsettling and important that these things are being revealed. There's an awful lot to break down and discuss here, Bill.
The thing that I'd like to get our readers to focus on is video as a means of communication. How is this message being communicated? We have the verbal audio, radio medium, audiobooks we’re reading, now we have video that's tacked on top of it and is increasing its influence on communication, beliefs, biases and the impact it's going to have on businesses and the society. The police stuff is front and center. It's also trying to figure out how to communicate with truth when we got all these different messages coming in different directions. Our perception and perspective gets skewed because it depends on when you're turning the radio on or watching the video that you're watching, that your perspective and your perception can shift.
There can be one bad customer service experience in a company. If it's broadcasted the right way both video, audio and it picks up as a tweet that then goes viral because it was done by a famous person and that many people pass it on, somehow it became a truth. It wasn't a full truth. It was a customer service experience where one employee did something junky and it has a major impact on that brand or as the company. Specifically, the one that comes to mind is the experience in Starbucks in Philadelphia, which we have talked about in the past. It's important here when we talk about truth and our video-based society because it's moving more to people getting messages and news.
People are turning on the radio at the start of the day and letting it run all day while somebody is in the kitchen or at work. We're digesting information on a video communication, cell phone and then we're recording the same things as it goes too. Tom, we're teeing this up pretty good because we've got to take a look at these different perceptions, perspectives and call it into question about how it is going to impact business, society, policing and many other things. We've got a lot of work mentally to do to make sure that we keep things in perspective, which is where the stick is. How do we keep things in perspective when we are speaking about truth when we see something?
I appreciate that, Bill. There are many perspectives as well. It's important to keep all this in perspective but also to recognize the gravity of certain situations. We've come off of a week where Derek Chauvin, the police officer, was on trial for the murder of George Floyd. There was a 9-minute, 29-second video shot by a bystander of Derek Chauvin having his knee on his neck and tragically ending his life for an alleged crime that didn't deserve for anybody to lose their life over it, for sure. Can you imagine, Bill, if we didn't have that video?
If this was many years ago and there was not a video camera in everybody's pocket and their cell phone, there would have been a different trial with likely a different outcome because the police officers involved, the four of them probably would have banded together, defended their actions and minimized what they did to impact the life of George Floyd. The people that were bystanders maybe would have testified and talked about it but we wouldn't have this video. It would have been hard to determine who do you believe here.
We do push a lot of trust, rightfully so, towards the police. We push a lot of integrity towards the police. We are counting on them to get it right, to have that next level of integrity and live by the laws that are on the books. The only trouble is that if you have a group of police officers and they've all got to look for each other's back, the need for supporting, loyalty and community that they need to share with each other because they got to work like a team. They can't think, “If I make a mistake, who's going to report me in?” They got to think like, “We're in the unit. We're staying together like this.” This happens in all kinds of situations in business. This happens by somebody not speaking up. I did a mediation several years back where somebody brought a database in from another company. They got sued over it.
Nobody said anything about it for nine months because it was an advantage. Their intuition was off. In the company setting, this thing can happen all the time. It's the cashier that says no big deal or it's the stalker that says no. We can go down the line of people going like, “I don't want to make a ruffle on this. I don't want to be called out. I don't want to stand up for what's right. I just want to get my paycheck, go ahead because I got to work with these people the next day. I'm not going to stand up here.” Even though there are HR issues all over the place, Tom, it’s difficult to say the truth. There have been people fired over video footage for taking stuff out of a company.
I even remember this incident that we saw took place in New York City in 2020, where there was a young black boy with his father. This woman, all of a sudden, couldn't find her iPhone. She accused this boy of stealing her iPhone. That was unfortunate and a terrible thing to happen to that boy because he didn't steal anything since she accused him of it. The father, what did he do? Turns on his video camera on his cell phone and starts recording it, her behavior, how she treated him. It later turns out that she left her iPhone in the Uber she had been in prior to this incident taking place. There probably was a time before everybody had a video camera in their pocket that she would have accused that boy of stealing whatever it was that she believed was stolen. Police would have been called and they would have looked at that boy differently if the father did not have that video camera to eliminate what she did. The news came out that she later got her phone. It’s a terribly tragic situation. It reveals bias.
The bias and belief influences the truth. Where did these beliefs come from? A lot of times, beliefs come from over messaging. They're not even real. All you got to do is keep messaging the belief. The most famous one is to get women to smoke. They call the cigarette the torches of freedom to get women to smoke because women's rights were coming in and all the suffragettes. It's a trickery of language to put something that I value freedom next to a product when the product doesn’t give you freedom anyways, it affects your health. Those kinds of things are problematic, as well as the story you mentioned is. Here's a woman coming in with a bias. Clearly, the person over there, “That kid stole it.” It couldn't have been, “I forgot it.” It couldn't have been, “Something in my memory.” This is where the video is going to be used and utilized as a broader range to communicate stories and to create impact not necessarily all for good. It's going to be this evidence looks this thing but it's not this thing.
This is our point that led us to talk about this in our show, Bill, is that the technology and our video-based society now is revealing these biases and some of the ugly realities of people's beliefs and how certain people treat other people. It's holding up a mirror to ourselves as a country, as a society in a way that has not been done in the past. I'm talking decades ago and prior. I'm remembering the white woman with her dog in Central Park and there's a black man that she felt was threatening him and she calls 911. That video got her in trouble with dog abuse or animal abuse too a little bit because she's practically choking that dog while she's calling 911. He's like, “I'm threatening you?” I forget what she accused him of but she literally accused him of assaulting her.
He was calm. The video showed and he recorded her. I always tell my kids, “You're always on video. When you're out of your house, you are at school, even walking down the street or you're in a store, you're always on video. Understand that now.” Talk about freedoms and liberties. I'm sure many people don't like the idea that in our video-based society, we're on video all the time. It's amazing to me, people don't have the awareness that they should, that they're almost always on video. Derek Chauvin should have had awareness. He's on video as those bystanders are holding up their phones at him and he continued with what he was doing anyway, shockingly.
There's a fear that goes with it. The awareness has to do with how to bring your best self. Bring your best self, not walk around in fear. Bring your best self is the message instead of being fearful that you're going to get caught. Tom, maybe you have recognized this at one time. We're also human beings too. If you can recognize that we're human beings and we’re going to make mistakes. Is the repercussion going to be catastrophic? In business, it's a brand injury. Is it a brand damage? Is it a brand slaughter? The difference is that what does the company do about it? For example, the Starbucks, what they did after that case where the woman called the police on an African-American sitting and waiting for their person to get there and not ordering anything. All of a sudden, there's this big kerfuffle and the guy's getting handcuffed for waiting in a space. There's nothing defiant going on at all except for a guy waiting in a space. What the Starbucks folks did is they shut down and did team training for a morning. It was a four-hour thing. This is not something we do here.
They want to work here on their laptop, buy one coffee and sit here the whole day? God bless them. They're filling our store and they look like we're providing them a space for them to have a comfortable place to sit, work and be creative. We want creative people to be in our store, not we don't want them to buy coffee all the time. There's something to be mindful that human beings make mistakes and it's going to be shown on video. We've got to also have the compassion and completely clean it, not come back around to say, “Starbucks people, you better buy something at Starbucks or else.” We don't want the negative message to come back and we don't want the video to be shown over and over again. That's not the strongest piece of it either.
This truth in the video-based society is going to be interesting to see how it plays out both in business and the politics that we're seeing with videos of about anything, Ted Cruz going to Cancun or Nancy Pelosi saying the thing that she said. It's like, “Can you have a script writer to work with you a little bit?” All of them struggle with this. This is not biased at all. You are being videotaped. There is the formation of truth that's taking place based on what you're being seen and doing it. Can you stand by that? Is it going to be taken in context or out of context? You've got to have some awareness about that. Bring your best self. Bring compassion and kindness.
I like that message a lot, bring your best self. That's a great way to reframe this because I know a lot of people tend to look at it as there are consequences for not behaving properly and being recorded on video for it. As parents, we tend to err on the side of instilling that fear in our kids to scare them straight to do the right thing. When the message should be, be your best self, bring your best self forward and it won't matter that you're on video. In fact, maybe it'll matter in a positive way because when you're on video, people are going to see how you brought your best self to the situation.
Bring your best self. Don’t walk around in fear.
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That immediately flashes me to during one of the protests. It was in Los Angeles, they were going down the street and this one guy was going to look to break in or vandalize a store. This other protestor stood in front of the door and didn't let him do it passively. She kept putting herself in front of the store. He tried to push her away. She kept coming back. She came back 3 or 4 times in front of the guy saying, “We're protesting here. We're not damaging this store.” That's an example of bringing your best self. She literally saved that store, the store owner and that business $100,000, $200,000. She saved it. Why? She brought her best self. She showed up at a place where it’s like, “Is this junky thing’s going to take place? It's not. I'm going to step in.”
We have been in fear of the press. We have been in fear of newspapers, cartoons, radio articles, TV, phone, internet, cell phones, body cams. There's going to be a fear in how we're going to be recorded, video. Even for you and I, Tom, this is putting our voice out there in the world. There is a fear that somebody could take a snippet and put it somewhere. I may have said that sentence but at the same time, having awareness of that is significant. I've gotten emails of people saying, “You were a little too left on that one. Here's the right part of it. You may want to acknowledge all these facts that are outside the loop.” I appreciate that because it's like, “I would never have seen it that way. I would have never looked at it as that perspective is how much is enough social service? How much is enough instead of people carrying their own weight and being a part of this society in a productive way.” It's literally on both sides of it in the video nowadays is bring us to eliminate these biases and beliefs. There are all kinds of videos, Tom, that we had talked about before that probably can go into the segment pretty cleanly.
Police incidents are front and center in our news and social media existence now, whether it's the video of George Floyd or Daunte Wright from Brooklyn Center, Michigan, who was shot by a police officer who mistook her pistol for her taser. She forgot she had her pistol in her hand. That video reveals she made a terrible mistake. Most people believe that she didn't intend to shoot him with a gun, made a terrible mistake and thought in that moment she had her taser in her hand. There was a moment of heightened tensions and a lot had happened.
She's been charged with manslaughter. It'll be surprising if she's not convicted of manslaughter and serves time. At the same time, the video also provides some other perspective that we have to acknowledge. We have to acknowledge that Daunte Wright, when he was pulled over, I'm not at all speaking about the merits of pulling him over. I know that's going to be looked at whether he should have been pulled over or not. Once they did, they ran his license and plate it and found there was a warrant for his arrest on some other misdemeanor charge. They proceed to start to arrest him.
This is what we have to acknowledge is that Daunte Wright had the ability to bring his best self in that moment and not resist that arrest. I know that's easy to say, Bill, when he at the moment is in this fight, flight and freeze mindset. As he's being arrested, he resists arrest. He wiggles his way out of them attempting to put handcuffs on him and starts to drive away. It's in that moment that he starts to drive away that the officer shoots him. He would be alive if he had not resisted arrest. We have to acknowledge that. There are so many things to acknowledge here. I agree, Bill, that his mindset in that heightened tension situation was probably not one of, “I need to comply or I might lose my life.”
The physiology that takes place. I've demonstrated this many times in lectures. I could take somebody in, start down a tragic narrative and watch them get angry, helpless and compliant. Also, depending on what the person's background is, our language, tone and our experiences cause the person to do fight, flight and freeze. This is for the police officers and the person that they're arresting. The escalation of fear. We never know the experiences of the person from the past. Whereas somebody says a simple sentence, it triggers these entire cascade memories that come forward into this moment. All of a sudden, it's like, “I got to out of here because this is a time when I felt helpless before. I am feeling helpless now. My strategy was run out of the back door of the house to escape my uncle that was angry.” We don't know where the fight, flight and freeze is coming from. This is how observations help.
They're not running from me. They're running from danger. That scenario is hard. That perspective is hard to hear because the police officer then says, “They're running from me. They're running from the law. They're running and they may hurt somebody else. We need to stop them before they do that.” These are the rules and the protocol that go with this. I clearly know the level of difficulty it is to have a rule and then also to be able to shift it to observation versus to preventative judgment action. It's hard to do that because of what is happening physiologically in our bodies. We know that we're going to be watched. The fun part of this, Tom, is you found a video from the movie 1984. Maybe you could set that on the tee. We can stick the landing here because this is where it cumulates into where is our businesses, society and mindset is going because videos are not going away. They're going to be amplified. This is something that we've got to have some awareness about.
Thanks, Bill. I did have an experience where I had a ditch of the moment and I had to go look it up to see if my recollection was correct. On a weekly basis now, for more than 2020, twice a week I participate in a cardio exercise class. It's cardio kickboxing. I love it and enjoy it. It's all done over Zoom. Twice a week for an hour, I set up my computer and I have all my gear for exercising. I'm exercising with a dozen to two dozen other people over Zoom. We can all see each other if we want to, if we have it in gallery mode or we can pin the person who is teaching the class and make them big and you don't see anybody else. I had this déjà vu. I'm like, “I remember a scene from 1984, the movie and the book, which I have both read it as a teenager at some point after I saw the movie.” The main character, he's woken up in the morning. The society portrayed by George Orwell is a totalitarian society and militant.
You're in the military. There's reveille. You will get up now. It's not like you have a choice, “I'll stay sleeping in for another 45 minutes.” You're going to get up now. The first thing you're going to do is some basic exercises. The main character’s standing in front of the TV. There's a person who is running the exercise drills. Quickly, they call out his name and his number, “You're not doing it right. I'll show you.” She demonstrates and then has him again. She says, “You're not doing it right. You must do this.” Somebody’s talking to him through his TV, can see into his home watching what he's doing. This wasn't voluntary. I want to be the first to acknowledge. I've chosen to join this class in Zoom. I want to do it.
No one’s making you comply or conform to the exercise. You're doing it by yourself.
I'm in the best shape I've probably been in several years. I choose to do this. I enjoy having the group I'm doing it with, especially during the pandemic because we haven't been able to go into a gym and do it together so we can do it together virtually. In 1984, I had this déjà vu to this. I went and looked at the video and it was pretty much how I remembered. I bet when George Orwell wrote this, he might've thought, “I know this is a real stretch because with television, it's a one-way medium that something's being projected into your home but they can't see what you're doing coming back.” I can imagine the writer thinking about that as well. I can imagine a time when that's going to be different. Here we are. How many devices do each of us have in our home that not only allow us to watch things going on elsewhere but have the ability to see us in our home and what we're doing? We do have some choices.
You and I purchased this video camera to put in our home to transfer energy back and forth and to have conversations. We choose to have different devices in our house. We choose to have our phone talk to us. We choose a lot of that stuff. Many of those things are default saying, “This is cool.” Never looking at the other side of it is like we are given a tad bit of privacy up on this one. We are creating a surface of exposure of saying the wrong thing and doing the wrong thing at the moment as one of my colleagues said as we were talking over Zoom like that.
She goes, “Bill, what you said turned out to this on my text that I was about ready to send. This is what it was about ready to say.” I was going like, “I didn't know it was going to say that because it interpreted it the way it did.” This is that awareness that we need to have and being able to be mindful of our communications. One of the things that is in direct opposition of the way the last several years have went is the amount of silence out of the president and the amount of exposure on social media. It's almost like it's measured like it's more of a freeway than it is this mountainous road that you never know what is going to come out of the leader's mouth.
Getting into a place where we can have a healthy perspective of the expanded role of video exposure in our lives as we move forward. There is an expanded role and not go too far that our messages of conformity dominate the space. We also don't go the other way, which is we’re going to be under surveillance the entire time. China has your social score. They're measuring that. How many times did you jaywalk? We've got to take some points off. As you get high enough, you can't travel. It’s like, “I don't think you want to keep points for those kinds of things.” There are things that people want to keep points for. Our law is like that too. It's got to reach the threshold from, this is something morally you're supposed to do or this is something illegal that you are doing and get the line that's clean between those two things to show up again. You never know when the camera is in the back of the room.
That's the thing, Bill, we all need to take for granted there is a camera in the back of the room. It's pretty naive in 2021 for people to think when they're out in a public space that they're not on camera. It's too easy with everybody having a video camera in their pocket on their phone.
I remember one conference that I went to. They had right when you signed in a release form, “We're going to be filming this. Sign this to have a release. If you choose not to sign it, there are a set of chairs on both sides that the camera will not go to. If you want to keep privacy, you've got to stay towards those areas. That might impact your networking. If you don't mind walking once in a while through this, we're going to be filming this and having an audience experience to do that. We're not going to be going back in our video world and trying to smear out your face.” It’s important to watch the expanded role in the video because it's all around us.
It's here to stay. I don't think it's going to change. Bill, maybe to stick the landing is one of the big messages now is awareness of how video is transforming our society. I love what you said about bringing your best self all the time because your true self is going to be revealed in this video probably at one time or another, mistakes and all, specifically with policing, among many other things.
One of the things too with that, Tom, is that what the police are seeing and the cameras being everywhere. The thing that I always do in and I have more information about this on BillStierle.com in the communication sections that I have there as well as how it applies to business about how you can get your employees to have that bring your best self forward mindset. Be the contributor that you want to be. Be the person that's working on your personal or professional development in the work site and trainings and strategies in order to do that. That’s where this thing is going is that there's an opportunity to have new languaging skills to do better at those kinds of tools.
I appreciate that because I'm always trying to improve my communication skills. I thank you for that, Bill. One last thing that’s important to acknowledge is that just because something's on video doesn't mean it is absolute truth. There are still perspectives. Even looking through that camera lens, it's not an omni perspective. It is one perspective. People can see that in a different way. I want our readers to understand we're not here saying that video is the arbiter of all truth and you better be on your best behavior because the truth will come out. It's one more perspective.
My request is to put it in perspective immediately. On a scale of 1 to 10, I am going to put this at a level five to start. Notice what I did is I put it right in the middle. When we're watching the police officer hold Floyd down, we don't have awareness of what happened before it's at that spot. There's a lot of problems with what he did but we don't know. By starting with the five, you then got to go like, “We've got to work on our own experience of surprise and try not to move it and try to rationalize what's happening.”
You got to start, “This is what I'm seeing. I need some more truth about this before I get pissed off. I am pissed off now. I've got to back it up to see where the truth is landing on this.” That’s what the idea in the court is being done. Here's what happened to him at first in the store. Here's what happened to him when he was first arrested. Here's what happened next. There was a sequence of all the things and then they put it together. Those things are to be done through the court system is to put all of the perspectives together, to broaden that perspective so that we can get a fuller engagement of truth.
That's a great place to leave it, Bill. That's what we're here for, trying to get a fuller engagement with truth.
Thanks, Tom. More to come.
Important Links:
- https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=C4Sb9dzro7U
- https://www.WFLA.com/news/national/police-release-body-cam-footage-of-officer-shooting-killing-16-year-old-girl-in-ohio/
- https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=CCfW6HFP5cI
- https://www.NYTimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-investigation.html
- https://www.Amazon.com/1984-Signet-Classics-George-Orwell/dp/0451524934
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