If you’re hanging around this Labor Day weekend anticipating all of the Republican National Convention (RNC) stories of protests and convention intrigue that’ll be covered by the local and national media next week, you need to be aware of the stories unfolding right now, covered by The Uptake using Qik, live streaming mobile phone video.
The UpTake is a media and technology services organization dedicated to advancing democracy through citizen journalism (more here) and I’ve only connected with Chuck Olsen (of Minnesota Stories vlogging fame and blogger at blogumentary), but while at Costco this afternoon I looked at the Twitter client on my iPhone and saw that “@Chuckumentary” (Olsen’s Twitter name) was heading over to 951 Iglehart Ave in St. Paul since the fifth raid was underway and 10 police were on site…and he was going to try and cover it live.
I proceeded to watch him interview the woman you see at the bottom of the screengrab. She talked about the warrant (issued for the wrong side of the duplex) and that police entered that side and broke through the attic to perform a search at the other address.
On one side of this issue are the protestors that may be organized, legitimate protestors with only legal actions and high visibility as their goal. On the other, they may be “anarchists” (as they’re being described in some articles I’ve read) with severe disruption, vandalism and who knows what in mind.
The police may be legitimately obtaining warrants and conducting legal search and seizure. Or they may be adhering to law enforcement’s zero disruption goal for the RNC thinking “it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission” and actually performing illegal search and seizure as claimed by the raided groups, expecting that they’ll be sued but work it out at some later date when the scrutiny of global, national and local media isn’t upon them.
That’s not the point of this article, however, but rather how incredibly delighted I am that The Uptake is paying attention along with Minnesota Public Radio (example here) and the local news stations (example here). The few videos I’ve watched show respectful, inquisitive, and objective news gathering, but doing so by leveraging the latest social media technologies in ways the more traditional news media is not.
It’s imperative that we all pay attention in a time of unprecedented surveillance, law enforcement tactics and other mechanisms in place to observe, disrupt and track anything outside the norm. Truth loves the light and The Uptake is leveraging social media technologies in innovative ways to do just that.