What are You Recording For!?

08/24/2025

I responded to a Citizen App alert for a stabbing in my neighborhood "beat" of sorts, the Upper West Side. In a hit and miss routine, if I can hit it, I will. This was one such opportunity and actually an important one for my standing in the Citizen App ranking. One more coverage of an incident of which this was to be, I would become Team Leader.

The video is of me walking up to the scene just slightly behind most public safety response which is always risky. Ahead of a public safety presence, scenes can still be unmanaged in terms of perpetrators or associates of them; victim families, uncontrolled street traffic, and an agitated excited crowd where, particularly in underbelly concentrations, drugs and anger may mix to explode by the triggering presence of someone randomly casting themselves as an agent of the public broadcast eye.

You can't imagine public safety likes it, affected incident family members like it, and, at times even I myself, don't like it.  So given so, as the woman in the video who knocked the phone from my hands, as she well promised that she would, loudly remarks: "What are you recording for!?"

Putting aside the technical nuance (I wasn't recording first, I was broadcasting first, though a recording byproduct would result), there are some pretty banal reasons that could plunge one's initial disgust even deeper.

I like the views, I like the attention, I like the drama, I like feeling important, I like the chase.

Those things however only explain my attunement to the cause. Ask a cop or a firefighter why they love what they do and they might tell you they love the drama, the chase, the virtue, and so on. But that wouldn't explain a justification for them being on the city payroll.

Rather, the universe gave them the positioning and the DNA to love what they are doing. The wannabe just made it official with a job application before moving on to refine it with as much training any professional process bestows. Eventually they goe on to live the life of their nature and essence, doing the best that they can.

The old media was, too, a profession people like me might be drawn to. And it still is - kind of. It probably involves someone with the traits I outline for myself above, and it involves training, if you believe the collection and dutiful dissemination of civic news events actually requires that.

But *citizen* journalism isn't a conformity - it's a wildcard natural evolution bringing new protections against forces in this world that have nearly perfected what is called training and rationality on one hand, but, total control on the other.

There are stories around the worth of subscription fees and ads, and the power lunches of entrenched media moguls. The new digital media and the power bestowed among each of us, however random or outright flawed our individual morality may be in the execution of, gives these stories a world stage to loosen control and to enrage every effort to erase reality.

In the old Soviet Union, by example, a building fire amounted to little more than a wail of sirens in the background. But for all intent and purposes, that was it - the building fire "never happened" otherwise. Whether it was a drab old nut and bolt factory with unsafe worker conditions, or a nuclear power plant that happened to meltdown during a test - the perfected world of the trained and rational decided who/when/if the public ever knew of it. The control of news is not always a problem, of course, or, sometimes it's a big one.

More to the ground, even in Buffalo, the city is still reeling from one of the biggest coverup scandals involving a county detective busting up a chain of cars under highly questionable circumstances. It took maybe a year before the audacity of the obviously orchestrated coverup, one justified by the self-principle of the actors no doubt, to blow up in longer form journalism. Until so an entire machine of official personnel moved in to clean up, minimize, and even extinct any trace of it being a thing.

Citizen reporting is here. The individual reporter in this context is less perhaps the journalist but more the relay that, on balance, disrupts the march of control and certainty over messaging that often doesn't require the happenstance of a gadfly, but might.

As to this particular "routine" incident broadcasting, the young woman wasn't without her point or conviction, obviously. She was upset, calling the incident a "family" one. A point that needs to be acknowledged from her point of view yet is wholly off the point from mine. I firmly believe the factors here favored my position.

What the woman couldn't know was that my own natural father was stabbed to death. My efforts to cull the police records 3 decades later to learn how and why failed to the "secrecy of time". Too much data I didn't have was needed. Digital random media wasn't a thing in the 60s, but, had it, the offspring that I am today, might well have appreciated.

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  By BuffScan for BuffScan.

buffalopolice crime video

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