Arlington shooting shows how Twitter is a game changer

Hip-hop and R&B singer/songwriter Keri Hilson didn’t know Christian Taylor, but she had a lot to say about his death on Twitter.

She was rolling with the social media storm that raced across the nation as activists reacted to the news that Taylor, another unarmed black teen, had been fatally shot by a white police officer at an Arlington car dealership.

Professional tennis player Serena Williams was agitated.

“Really??????!!!!!!!!!!? are we all sleeping and this is one gigantic bad nightmare? #ChristianTaylor how many hashtags now?” @serenawilliams tweeted.

A steady dose of misinformation only fueled the fire.

Especially when Hilson and others tweeted this: “#ChristianTaylor shot w/in 2 secs of interaction?!!! Listen all the way. + assessment of car crash makes sense to me” @KeriHilson tweeted.

In her tweet she shared a YouTube video from a heavily edited recording of the interactions between dispatchers and Arlington police during the Aug. 7 shooting of Taylor, 19, a burglary suspect and college football player.

The Arlington Police Department, known around the social media block as the cool kid, took notice. Its officers have been active since 2011 and regularly live-tweet incidents ranging from car wrecks to shootings. The department has over 42,000 followers on Twitter and 57,000 likes on Facebook.

The afternoon of the shooting, Arlington police sent out a detailed news release, with the name and photograph of officer Brad Miller, the rookie who fired four times at Taylor, who had driven his SUV through the glass window of the showroom of the Classic Buick GMC dealership.

At a news conference the evening of Aug. 8, Police Chief Will Johnson took issue with some of the speculative comments being passed around.

On Aug. 10 Arlington police released the full unedited dispatch recordings of the incident.

The man who first posted the altered recording, T.K. Connor of Brooklyn, N.Y., told the Star-Telegram that he received the audio from a member of the Internet hacking group Anonymous.

In the video, Connor says Taylor was killed after interacting with police for less than a second, whereas the confrontation was nearly two minutes long.

“That’s what caused us to put out the radio traffic,” said Lt. Chris Cook, an Arlington police spokesman.

On Aug. 11, Johnson held another news conference and announced that Miller had been fired, saying he “exercised poor judgment” that led to “cascading consequences.”

Miller’s “unilateral decision to enter the building alone and to pursue [Taylor] helped create an unrecoverable outcome,” Johnson said.

The social media game

When people with social media clout — whether celebrities like Hilson and Williams or activists like Shaun King — start offering comments (sometimes inflammatory) on officer-involved shootings, their followers are often spurred into action.

Protests and rallies are organized. Movements are created, such as “Black Lives Matter,” which came after the shooting of Michael Brown, 18, in Ferguson, Mo.

All the social media interaction, as well as nonstop media reports, puts pressure on police to react. Quickly.

“Social media forces police departments, who are often very slow and very private, to be much more efficient and transparent,” King, a justice writer for the Daily Kos blog whose Twitter handle is @ShaunKing, wrote in an email. “Just a few years ago, I honestly believe that Christian Taylor would’ve simply been labeled a car thief, killed, and almost no questions would’ve been asked.

“Social media not only made him human, because he posted a lot himself, but it made the true story of his life and character widely known.”

Throughout its investigation, the Arlington Police Department has used Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and even a standalone page on its website to counter “rampant misinformation that existed on social media.”

“With the proliferation of social media, when a controversial police use of force encounter occurs, there can be widespread misinformation that rapidly spirals out of control,” Cook wrote in an email. “We know that the public wants the facts and the appetite for information is huge within the first few hours of such an incident.”

But Cook said it is important that police agencies are the ones to publish “vetted facts” as soon as they are available so the public understands the “real story.”

“Relying upon unofficial sources can cause some major issues and lead to unnecessary rumors and erroneous information,” he said.

Denton police spokesman Ryan Grelle, who recently had to deal with a viral video of an arrest recorded by a bystander, said police now find themselves playing catch-up to clean up unverified information that is sent out into the Twitterspehre.

“Some are wanting to cause issues,” Grelle said. “That’s all they are wanting to do is start a Twitter war with law enforcement. They want to stir the pot. They don’t really care about the actual issue.”

‘Dispel rumor and innuendo’

Phillip Vallejo was celebrating his 30th birthday at the Ojos Locos sports in downtown Fort Worth on July 31 when he was shot to death by a veteran Fort Worth police officer with the bicycle patrol unit.

Police said officer M.J. Ochsendorf, a 23-year-veteran, fired at Vallejo after he turned toward him with a gun during an altercation outside the bar.

The family’s lawyer, David Cantu, said witnesses told him Vallejo was shot in the back.

A day later Fort Worth police wrote this on the deparatment’s Facebook page:

“There have been several accounts regarding this shooting circulating throughout social media that are not supported by available video and physical evidence collected by police.”

Fort Worth police use social media to inform and promote, Sgt. Steve Enright, a spokesman, wrote in an email.

Enright said the department also used social media to “dispel rumor and innuendo” while being transparent.

Authorities need to be thoughtful when releasing information, criminal justice experts say.

Social media can get “extremely complicated” when police are dealing with an ongoing high-profile case and the public starts to expect “too much,” said Kent Kerley, chairman of the department of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Texas at Arlington.

“It gives you the ability to connect with people quickly, but it also creates that expectation that you will respond to everything immediately,” Kerley said.

Texas is one of the pre-eminent states for police use of social media to inform and interact with the public, said Lauri Stevens, a social media strategist for law enforcement.

Stevens, a former reporter, founded the go-to social media conference SMILE: Social Media the Internet and Law Enforcement after she saw a need to teach first responders how to communicate with the public.

She views social media as a tool for police instead of a burden — a way to connect rather than just clean up.

“It’s more of an opportunity,” Stevens said. “They didn’t used to have that opportunity. We [reporters] didn’t cover what they wanted us to cover. We didn’t tell the story the way they’d like us to. Now they have the control. I see it as an opportunity to do this and get it right.”

‘A lying snake in the grass’

Videos posted on social media, whether from bystanders’ cellphones or officers’ body cameras, can both ignite and defuse digital firestorms.

Two videos did just that during a recent arrest in Denton.

Police responded quickly in July when an 18-year-old posted a snippet of cellphone video showing a Denton officer deploying his Taser on a man on a motel balcony.

Jeremy Jones said he shot the video the afternoon of July 22 as he walked by and saw police stun a man who appeared to be trying to help a woman who needed help.

Jones’ tweet: “After actually witnessing police brutality I look at that s--- a whole different way bro smh #DentonTx,” had over 15,000 tweets for @BTP_TACO, with many asking what happened.

Denton police released the officer’s body-cam video the next day, while local NAACP members were preparing for a protest.

The video shows the officer commanding Marcus Coleman 30 times to back away as police tried to restrain a woman believed to be in “an altered state because of alcohol or drugs,” Grelle said.

Police believed the woman was going to jump over the second-story balcony.

Willie Hudspeth, president of the Denton County NAACP, said the protests were called off after police released the video.

Coleman, 26, was arrested and accused of interfering with public duties.

“Was the gentleman’s Twitter video one of the reasons we put the body cam video out? Yes, because it was incorrect information,” Grelle said.

Still, Grelle said, he caught grief on Facebook.

“I’ve been called a ‘lying snake in the grass,’ Grelle said. “… That I doctored the video somehow — that I’m just backing up the officer. No, I’m showing what really happened.”

Phillip Lyons, interim dean of the College of Criminal Justice at Sam Houston State University, has told the Star-Telegram that police are more aware that people are watching and asking questions.

The emergence of video, Lyons said, is a game changer.

Lyons said he hopes videos “will show that the cops were doing what they are supposed to do, which is what we have been assuming the whole time.”

But he acknowledged that sometimes, the opposite happens.

“It may very well be that videos will show that police are behaving badly, that the police are using excessive force, and if that’s the case, there will be an impact on indictments,” Lyons said.

Managing Editor Lee Williams contributed to this report, which includes material from the Star-Telegram archives.

This story was originally published August 16, 2015 at 4:23 PM with the headline "Arlington shooting shows how Twitter is a game changer."