One of the first witnesses on the scene of a crash in East Vancouver that killed one person and injured several others says he was appalled to see bystanders recording video of the unfolding tragedy on their phones.
Luc Frost, who works as a bartender at a Main Street bar, was just leaving work around 1:50 a.m. Monday when he felt the ground shake and heard the sounds of crunching metal so loud it was “like a bomb going off.”
He sprinted a short block up Main Street to East 12th Avenue and saw an empty taxi cab, its airbags deployed. Two dazed young men were climbing out of a mangled red Cadillac, while a third was on the ground. They were screaming, he said.
Farther up, he could see a white car, nearly unrecognizable from his angle. “I just knew that whoever was in that car was dead,” said Frost.
Frost called 911, then noticed a handful of people filming from the gas station across the street, recording the aftermath, some of their devices directed at the three men lying on the ground in pain.
“It’s the most ridiculous thing,” said Frost. “It’s a sad state of affairs if the first thing a lot of people do is reach for their cellphone and not call the police but to film what’s around them.”
He saw another guy next to him with his phone out, zooming in on the injured. Then, a man in a white Tesla pulled up, got out of the car with his phone out and started filming “with a big smile on his face.”
With smartphones now ubiquitous, many people who come across emergency scenes are taking out their devices to photograph or record the dead, injured or the scene instead of offering aid.
Some of the graphic images end up online, turning tragedy into entertainment or social-media fodder.
Earlier this year, a video of the last moments of Paul Schmidt’s life before he was stabbed outside a downtown Vancouver Starbucks circulated widely on social media. His family had to plead with the public to stop sharing the video.
The instinct to reach for a cellphone at a crash site is something we as a society have to work to overcome, said University of sa国际传媒 psychology professor Azim Shariff.
He has two theories about why people reach for their phones.
The cynical view: To gain clout, eyeballs or followers online. “We are status-seeking creatures, and posting dramatic, emotion-evoking, out-of-the-ordinary videos and pictures online is one way to gain clout,” he said.
But the more charitable — and, Shariff believes, more accurate — view could be related to the bystander effect.
The well-studied theory posits that people are less likely to offer help if there are many other people around. It could be because they think other people are better-positioned to help, or because they do not know what to do in an unfamiliar situation and look to others for cues on the acceptable social response.
Shariff thinks in many of these instances, the gawkers simply aren’t thinking.
Most people are probably not being deliberately callous or thinking strategically about getting more clicks or followers when they film graphic content, he said. It’s just a mindless, almost knee-jerk, response.
Whipping out a cellphone has become a “ritualistic action,” said Shariff. “Sushi? A great sunset? Let me take a picture. Something is happening? I’ll take out my phone.”
Others might justify taking images to document an unfolding event authentically. There have been many instances of video footage proving useful, such as in the murder of George Floyd three years ago by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where a bystander video told a drastically different story than the official police statement.
Sgt. Steve Addison of the Vancouver Police Department said gawkers filming at emergency scenes has become a frequent occurrence.
“It’s the reality of the world we live in,” he said. “It’s second nature for people to pull out their phones.”
While it’s not police’s place to pass judgment on how people react, he notes that bystanders are considered witnesses and their videos could help police with their investigations.
But just because recording traumatic events with our phones has become automatic and widespread doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.
The costs of that behaviour — sensationalizing someone else’s trauma, turning tragedy into entertainment, invasion of privacy — are considerable and should be weighed against any positive benefits, said Shariff.
“What we can hopefully do is rejig our norms to catch up,” he said. “I hope people can learn what is appropriate, that they’d think it would be super unjust and cruel to get content out of this — that that’s not the appropriate response.”
Frost said seeing bystanders taking photos at the crash scene has left him feeling shaken and disappointed about humanity.
He hopes that should those who filmed the crash aftermath find themselves in a similar position again, they’ll ditch the phones and instead check to see if the victims are OK, offer help, call 911, or get out of the way.
Pointing a camera in their faces “is the worst thing you can do… when they’re having the worst day of their entire lives.”
