Philando Castille
This is one of the cases that has torn America apart and caused the Dallas shooting of 11 police officers killing 5. Philando Castille. As Philando Castile's head slumps backward while he lies dying next to her, Diamond Reynolds looks into the camera and explains a Minnesota police officer just shot her fiancé four times.
The nation is, by now, accustomed to grainy cell phone videos of officer-involved shootings, but this footage from Falcon Heights, outside Minneapolis, is something different, more visceral: a woman live-streaming a shooting's aftermath with the police officer a few feet away, his gun still trained on her bloody fiancé.
"He let the officer know that he had a firearm and he was reaching for his wallet and the officer just shot him in his arm," Reynolds said as she broadcast the details of Wednesday's evening shooting on Facebook.
Facebook is offering few answers about a live video that shows the aftermath of the fatal police shooting of Philando Castile in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota.
Diamond Reynolds, Castile’s girlfriend, broadcast the graphic footage with a smartphone after an officer shot Castile during a traffic stop. In the video, he can be seen bleeding to death while police officers shout orders at Reynolds, who narrates the situation as it unfolds.
Reynolds’ video disappeared from Facebook for about an hour after the stream concluded, a Facebook spokeswoman told The Huffington Post, making it impossible for users to access or share the footage in the moments following the shooting. The video was eventually reinstated with a graphic content warning added by the social network’s community organization team.
The way the traumatic encounter unfolded on the world’s largest social network communicates a lot about Facebook’s difficult position in modern media today.
Facebook isn’t a news organization, technically. It’s a tech enterprise. But its products ostensibly exist to help users tell stories. So, when something happens with those stories, where does Facebook’s responsibility to the public begin and end? The police had it removed. Watch the video below.
READ MORE ON THE FACEBOOK PART
With files from CNN
