Sheletta: Cellphones are a modern civil rights tool

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of material from 11 contributing columnists, along with other commentary online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

A cellphone video taken by an alert but horrified Minnesota high school student proved that a sworn, licensed police officer knelt on the neck of a prone subject to restrain him.

The teen that I refer to is not Darnella Frazier. Frazier, of course, is the young lady from Minneapolis who recorded the last nine-and-a-half minutes of George Floyd’s life. Her cellphone video sparked a worldwide protest movement and became a key piece of evidence in the felony convictions and subsequent prison time for Derek Chauvin and three other Minneapolis police officers.

This time, the incriminating images were captured by Woodbury High School students. They surreptitiously used their cellphones to get pictures of the egregious actions of their substitute teacher, Steven Dwight Williams.

A career law enforcement officer who has worn a badge for the Prescott, Wis., Police Department for the past two years, Williams was supposed to be teaching English to Woodbury high school sophomores and seniors.

Williams deviated from the lesson plan when he made the decision to allegedly tell lurid, racist and sexist stories from his law enforcement career. Even more disturbing was when he pinned a student — a child! — beneath his knee on the classroom floor. He used the student as a prop to represent George Floyd; Williams cast himself as Chauvin and re-enacted the actions that killed Floyd.

Almost immediately, students brought pictures and recordings of Williams’ actions to their principal. After taking in just a three-minute video of the moonlighting cop’s unhinged behavior, the principal escorted him out of the building. Williams has since been banned from district property.

The student cellphone images are part of the evidence against Williams. Now the police officer himself is under investigation.

Woodbury High School is in the South Washington County school district where my children attend school.

When I initially heard chatter about a no-phone policy in the classroom, I was all for it. As a mother, I’ve seen how my teenager is so distracted by his device that he doesn’t acknowledge me when he’s texting his friends. I know having access to his phone would prove an irresistible distraction during school time.

But what happened at Woodbury High School is forcing my change of heart on such bans.

It’s not the phone part of the device that I care about, it’s the camera attached to every one of them. When our kids carry these cameras in their backpacks and pockets, it protects them.

The cellphone has become a modern-day civil rights tool. It moves the needle on racial equity in the digital age in the way that sit-ins, marches and rallies did in a previous era.

The lens can’t lie.

“Cellphones have literally leveled the playing field. Video validates what our grandmothers and our grandmothers’ mothers said and what we knew intimately. We weren’t believed because we didn’t have evidence. Now we do,” said Yohuru Williams, distinguished university chair, professor of history and founding director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas.

Like me, Williams has recounted incidents of racial abuse and even brutality to white friends only to be told we must be exaggerating or misinterpreting.

But doubters can’t deny what recording devices show in sharp detail.

“When our kids have these tools they can record bad behavior to confirm what we have been saying. Cellphone video negates the narrative that there are two sides. Now we can see patterns of behavior,” he said.

“We feel this intimately in ways that white folks can never appreciate because they don’t deal with the same trauma or fear.”

On May 25, 2020, the day of Chauvin’s lethal action that the cop-turned-substitute-teacher mimicked four years later, the Minneapolis Police Department issued a news release that said, “Man dies after medical incident during police interaction.” The statement said George Floyd “suffered medical distress” and died.

Without Darnella Frazier’s damning video, it’s likely that no one but her and the handful of bystanders on the sidewalk outside Cup Foods would have known what really happened.

The reality that young Darnella captured so outraged people that they gathered to march to demand justice in a way that we haven’t seen since Martin Luther King Jr. was alive.

“That became the spark,” said Williams. “It was a Rosa Parks moment that reverberated around the world.”

Brutal incidents — whether they happen on an urban street or in a suburban classroom — don’t announce themselves. They happen suddenly and often with little provocation.

Having the ability and the tools to document these racially motivated incidents is crucial.

Steven Dwight Williams has been a dual public servant, working as both a police officer and a teacher. As a society, we give both law enforcement officers and educators great latitude and responsibility in jobs that are regarded as thankless.

Was Williams’ reprehensible conduct an isolated incident? Let’s hope so. But that’s what Black folks are always told when a public servant charged with protecting us fails to do so and harms us instead.

What didn’t fail was the cellphones belonging to the students in that Woodbury High School classroom.

Like Frazier, they were courageous enough to see something and young enough to know they should start recording to document the injustice immediately. These students understand the power that their cellphone cameras have to tell a story they might otherwise be afraid to share, fearing nobody would believe them.

I’m sure those students wouldn’t consider themselves freedom fighters any more than Frazier did. But their role and their goal are the same as those who stood up for justice during the civil-rights era. They are shining a light on the truth in hopes that justice will prevail.

You can’t be blind to justice if someone records it.