Like a lot of people, Michael, Sierra, or Revelo 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 gang 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 clear and clear it 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 incidents.

He says, a lot of cops, look at this footage, and they see civilians who aren't

complying. They say stuff like, if citizens had just done what the police told them to do,

then they would still be alive. Even with a 13-year-old with his hands in there? Well, again,

...