Analysis by Brian Stelter, CNN
(CNN) — When the Trump administration immediately blamed the victim in Saturday’s shooting in Minneapolis, Gov. Tim Walz reacted by saying, “Thank God, thank God we have video.”
The unrest in Minnesota is further evidence that we live in an era of ubiquitous video, both for better and for worse.
Almost every recent altercation involving federal agents has been captured by multiple cameras, providing angles that sometimes contradict President Donald Trump’s incendiary claims.
At least four videos showed moments before, during and after Saturday morning’s killing of Alex Pretti, 37, an ICU nurse in the city.
Some of the clips show that residents heeded Walz’s recent advice to “hit record” whenever they see federal immigration officers.
One of Pretti’s neighbors, Chris Gray, told CNN that Pretti was “taking film of somebody getting abducted” when the confrontation began. In one of the eyewitness videos, Pretti was seen holding a phone in his right hand while a person was being detained.
A short time later, when agents tried to subdue Pretti, people up and down the street used their phones to record the scene.
CNN’s analysis found that an officer removed a gun from Pretti as the pile of other officers tried to subdue him. “Just over one second after the officer emerges holding the weapon, a shot rings out, followed by at least 9 more,” CNN reported, citing videos.
The Trump administration claimed an agent “fired defensive shots” and cast Pretti as a threat. Deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller called him a “domestic terrorist” who “tried to assassinate federal law enforcement.”
But that depiction was picked apart by a vast array of online onlookers, from law enforcement experts to ordinary Instagram users, some of whom replayed the videos frame by frame and zoomed in to show the episode in frightening detail.
The Minnesota Star Tribune reported on Saturday evening that “some details of the federal government’s account of the shooting aren’t supported by footage captured by bystanders.”
When the shooting happened, the videos quickly moved from individual smartphones to Reddit threads, YouTube channels and social media feeds. News outlets scrambled to ingest the clips and make sense of them for viewers and readers.
It’s “really important to get analysis of events like today out to the public quickly, especially when it’s clear the US government, ICE, and DHS are willing to immediately start lying about what’s happening,” said Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat, an online investigative outfit.
On Saturday, Bellingcat immediately synced up three of the videos and showed them side by side to viewers.
“People who are out here from Minneapolis, people who have been protesting, are saying,
‘Don’t believe the lies. Believe your eyes,’” CNN’s Sara Sidner reported from the scene of an impromptu memorial for Pretti on Saturday night.
Recording as resistance
Minnesota officials, sensing that residents feel relatively powerless amid the ICE surge in the state, have urged residents to bear witness, suggesting that the phones in their pockets are a form of power.
“Carry your phone with you at all times,” Walz said in an address last week. “And if you see ICE in your neighborhood, take out that phone and hit record. Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans — not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution.”
Many residents were already doing that. Almost every TV segment from Minnesota has featured viral video footage. Almost every written article has cited the footage, too. Professional photographers, social media influencers and ordinary Minnesotans have all captured indelible videos and photos in recent weeks.
In some ways, the eyewitness videos have been a rebuttal to ICE’s formidable video production machine, which some commentators have likened to propaganda.
Residents have responded to those flashy, militaristic videos with their own TikToks and Reels. Pointing the camera at ICE agents, they have documented arrests and heated clashes. Talking straight to camera, they have described what it feels like to live in Minneapolis.
New Instagram accounts and YouTube channels have popped up to promote this content, creating a whole ecosystem of on-the-ground type content about the tensions.
And some political analysts have drawn a connection between the videos and the polls showing disapproval of the federal immigration enforcement effort. CNN reported earlier this week that some Trump officials have expressed concerns “over the optics of the immigration crackdown as Americans grow alarmed by the chaotic scenes” streaming out of Minnesota.
When seeing isn’t believing
In Minnesota, and around the world in conflict zones like Ukraine and Iran, a torrent of video has made it easier for investigative journalists to reconstruct heavily contested incidents — and harder for any single official narrative to go unchallenged.
But the abundance of video is just a starting point, not an end point. While video might establish that something disturbing happened, competing angles and interpretations can stoke debates about what it meant and who was at fault.
“We now have parallel information systems that interpret the same images differently,” veteran filmmaker and media entrepreneur Steven Rosenbaum wrote in a recent column.
Rosenbaum cited the January 7 killing of Renee Nicole Good, also in Minneapolis, as an example. The shooting was captured from multiple directions, including one from the perspective of the ICE agent on his own phone. CNN and other news outlets used the videos to reconstruct the events.
But some people with different ideological positions saw different videos, from different angles, and reached totally different conclusions about what happened — partly due to cues from political leaders.
The Trump administration’s portrayal of Good as an attacker “tried to define reality before reality could be independently established,” Rosenbaum wrote.
More broadly, on the topic of ICE enforcement, “We’re reaching our conclusions inside completely different algorithmic universes and data silos,” CNN political commentator Van Jones wrote last week. “Different videos. Different headlines. Different ‘facts.’ Different emotional cues. So, of course we can’t agree. We are not even watching the same movie.”
Still, “it’s been incredibly helpful to have the footage,” to let people see incidents for themselves, Higgins told CNN.
Day by day, videos from eyewitnesses can also show “patterns of behavior,” he said, but it takes substantial effort to collect, verify and archive all the content.
Higgins said he has been thinking about how to scale up the video-sifting operation “so every lie can be challenged in as close to real time as possible.”
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