Like a lot of people, Michael Sierra or Revolo doesn't watch those police videos anymore.

You know the ones.

The body cam footage and the cell phone pictures.

Last week there was one showing a police officer killing 13-year-old Adam Toledo in Chicago,

even though he had his hands up.

And then there was one showing a cop in Minneapolis, confusing her gun for her taser, before shooting

20-year-old Dante Wright during a traffic stop.

I stopped watching last summer, so I to date have not watched the entirety of George Floyd's

murder.

Why?

I spent a lot of time watching videos like that actually throughout most of my time in

graduate school.

I was working on game violence reduction at the time.

So I thought that it was important for me to watch this video as an exercise in quote-unquote

understanding the facts.

And the more videos I watched, the clearer and clearer became to me that the empirical

observable reality of the video was actually not that important for what was happening in

the world outside.

Michael teaches at UT Austin now, he studies policing, which is part of why it struck me

that even he has stopped pressing play when these videos pop up.

He's spent hours observing the way cops speak to each other about the work they do.

Over the last week, he's watched on social media as officers have processed these latest

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