On the night of July 26, 2013, Martin Baron had a late dinner at Cafe Diplomatico in Little Italy. It was midnight by the time he reached his intersection — Bellwoods Ave. and Dundas St. W., near the Ossington strip.

A streetcar was stopped in the middle of the road. Approaching from the north, Baron assumed it was broken down. But as he got closer, he noticed police officers clustered near the front doors. Two of them had guns drawn. Baron pulled out his iPhone 4s and started filming.

A minute and 36 seconds later, a teenager named Sammy Yatim had been shot eight times with a Glock handgun and shocked with a Taser. Yatim would not survive.

We know this in part because of Baron’s video, which he uploaded to YouTube before going to sleep that night. Twelve months after the 18-year-old from Aleppo, Syria, was killed, Baron’s footage of the tragedy has emerged as a character in its own right, stoking public outrage, shaping legal tactics and raising questions about the power of technology to shape the relationship between governments and the people they govern.

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If eight shots killed Sammy Yatim, 245 megabytes kept his story alive. That’s the size of Baron’s video file, seemingly the first footage of the Yatim shooting to make it online.







The Toronto architect, who had returned from a business trip at 10 p.m., had no intention of committing an act of citizen journalism when he took out his iPhone, with its powerful 30 frame-per-second video camera. “My reason for filming was nothing more profound than showing my friends on Facebook what a crazy thing had happened outside my house,” he said last week. “I wasn’t trying to document or be altruistic.”

As Baron readied his device, he remembered a friend who had taken a helicopter ride in Hawaii and had been so intent on filming the experience, he forgot to actually look at any of the natural splendour passing through his lens. So instead of watching the streetcar confrontation through his iPhone viewfinder, Baron held the device aloft and watched the drama with his own eyes.

When officers tried to resuscitate Yatim after the shooting, Baron was baffled. “We just thought, ‘What can there possibly be left to perform CPR on?’ ”

Within an hour and a half, he had uploaded the video to YouTube and sent the URL to a couple of TV stations. At about 8 a.m. the next morning a crew from Citytv was at Baron’s door on Bellwoods Ave. In the rush to answer, he didn’t have time to put on socks, and did his interview barefoot.

Uneasy in the spotlight, Baron soon stopped accepting media requests. But his video has taken on a life of its own. A combination of exposure from social and mainstream media helped the 96-second clip capture Toronto’s attention for weeks. More than 40,000 people watched the footage in its first two days online. By July 30, it had reached nearly half a million views.

Among those viewers were members of Yatim’s family. His mother, Sahar Bahadi, and his sister, Sarah Yatim, declined to comment through their lawyer.

But Nabil (Bill) Yatim, Sammy’s father, highlighted the power of the cellphone footage in a statement to the media Saturday. “The YouTube videos captured what happened in the last few moments of his life. Those videos show what happened that night, how his situation was mishandled, and the excessive response to those horrifying few moments,” he wrote. “Why was he shot so many times? Why was he Tasered as he lay dying on the floor of that streetcar? These questions continue to haunt me.”

Also affected by the stark video was Ian Scott, then-head of the Special Investigations Unit (SIU), which probes incidents involving police where someone dies, is seriously injured, or alleges sexual assault. On the morning of the shooting, Scott was playing tennis; another player told him about the Yatim video. When the SIU director got home, he opened YouTube on his computer and watched the “disturbing” footage, he said in an email.

Many Toronto residents were also disturbed — and angry. On July 29, hundreds of protesters marched from Yonge-Dundas Square to the site of the shooting, some of them calling police “murderers.” There was another protest on Aug. 13, when more than 500 people gathered outside police headquarters, some taunting the phalanx of cops by dangling doughnuts in front of them.

Julian Falconer, the high-profile civil rights lawyer hired by Yatim’s family after the shooting, attributed the public outcry over Sammy’s death to the YouTube footage. (Another video of the incident taken by Toronto resident Markus Grupp begins about 30 seconds before Baron’s clip. Grupp declined to comment Thursday, saying, “The video really speaks for itself.”)

“I’m confident that the kind of public outrage over the shooting of Sammy Yatim would not have occurred but for the videos,” Falconer said. “Increasingly, the public is aware that there is a serious police failing in this area. And they’re now getting a first-hand view without the filter of a police account or the filter, frankly, of lawyers.”

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The citizen videographer’s quandary

Baron’s video has figured prominently in the SIU investigation of the shooting and the subsequent court case, too. On Aug. 19, Const. James Forcillo was charged with second-degree murder in Yatim’s death, just the second time an on-duty Toronto police officer has faced such serious charges in more than 20 years. (Peter Brauti, Forcillo’s lawyer, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) Forcillo’s case has yet to go to trial.

Scott wrote to the Star on Friday that the YouTube “footage was an important but not determinative part of the investigation.”

“As disturbing as it was,” he wrote of the video, “I waited until the investigation was completed before making the decision to lay a criminal charge related to this incident.”

Others believe the footage played a bigger role.

“In my view, the video is absolutely crucial,” said Peter Rosenthal, a Toronto lawyer who represented the family of Michael Eligon, the 29-year-old shot dead by police in February 2012. “Most of the time when people have been killed by police, there aren’t witnesses other than police, and bystanders who don’t see very well . . . Police officers don’t often testify against each other . . . so there might well not have been charges had there not been a video.”

Police spokesperson Mark Pugash said he could not comment on a case before the courts. “You can’t divorce the video from the case — the video is at the heart of the case, and it’s before the courts,” he said.

When Martin Baron watched the video again recently, it differed slightly from his memory of it.

“I realized the vulnerability of memory and the value of video,” he wrote in an email. “The differences were relatively minor, but in a murder trial, even the most minor detail can be important.”

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Amateur video of alleged police abuse is not a new genre. It goes back at least to March 3, 1991, when a Canadian-born plumber named George Holliday heard sirens just after midnight and took a brand-new Sony Handycam onto his balcony, where he filmed four Los Angeles Police Department officers brutally beating Rodney King by the side of the road. When a Simi Valley, Calif. jury failed to convict any of the officers the following year, riots engulfed Los Angeles, causing 53 deaths and more than $1 billion in property damage.

But the practice of “citizen journalism” has changed drastically since the King tape. For one thing, “tapes” have been replaced with ethereal digital files that can be transported, reproduced, and manipulated much more easily than camcorder cassettes. Holliday had to physically deposit his footage at the office of the TV station KTLA, which broadcast it the next night. Today, he could have uploaded the video to YouTube in a matter of minutes.

The prevalence of mobile phones with sophisticated cameras has also made the likelihood of filming police violence much greater. A 2013 report by Google estimated that 56 per cent of Canadians use a smartphone, and that eight in 10 smartphone owners don’t leave the house without their device.

That growing ubiquity has led to a spate of damaging revelations for police in recent years. Cellphone video helped secure an involuntary manslaughter conviction for a former California transit cop who fatally shot 22-year-old Oscar Grant on the platform of a Bay Area train station on Jan. 1, 2009.

And bystander video seemed to contradict RCMP claims that Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski had run at officers screaming before being fatally Tasered at the Vancouver airport in 2007, leading to perjury charges for the men.

Even the Rob Ford story has benefitted — or suffered, depending on your perspective — from the constant presence of personal recording technology in public places. Many of the mayor’s most damaging episodes of public belligerence have been captured on cellphones, from January’s patois-inflected Steak Queen rant to the original crack video first reported by the Star in May 2013.

In some ways that has sparked a golden age of accountability for public officials. “The existence of videos is an assurance that police officers have to act in a transparent fashion,” said the Yatim family lawyer, Julian Falconer. “They’re behaviour modifiers for the police.”

Some, including retired Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci, have called for police to wear body-mounted cameras in order to increase their accountability. It’s unlikely, however, that these devices would create the same instantaneous transparency as citizen video — police dashboard camera footage of the Michael Eligon shooting was first made public at a coroner’s inquest nearly two years after the fact.

Still, even some who back the use of mobile technology to hold governments accountable warn that putting too much faith in cellphone video can be irresponsible.

“There are more people filming more video and under different circumstances than ever before,” said Matisse Bustos-Hawkes, communications manager for WITNESS, a New York-based organization that supports the use of video to protect human rights. “Witnesses are so plentiful these days that what is sometimes missing from the citizen journalist vocabulary is how to film things safely and ethically.”

“Sometimes things that happen before the camera is rolling — whether it’s an iPhone camera or a film camera — are just as important,” she added. “And that’s not necessarily a deliberate action by a citizen — it could just be the moment when they show up on the scene and decide something’s not right.”

The question of what videos leave out bears heavily on the Yatim case. Martin Baron’s video begins, significantly, about 10 seconds before the officer opens fire on the teen. At first, the viewer sees Yatim standing eerily still, his forearm extended limply, as if holding an ice-cream cone instead of a knife. Then we see the young man begin to shuffle forward drowsily, like a sleepwalker. We hear officers uttering what seems like a perfunctory command to “drop it.” Then pop-pop-pop: three shots that put Yatim on his back. And then six more shots.

Markus Grupp began filming about 30 seconds before Baron. Those 30 seconds of footage show something that can’t help but alter a viewer’s understanding of the shooting. At the beginning of Grupp’s video, Yatim looms in the streetcar’s front doorway, baiting James Forcillo: “You’re a pussy. You’re a pussy. You’re a pussy. You’re a f-----g pussy. You’re a pussy.” Five times he insults the officer whose Glock is drawn and poised.

Then officers begin yelling “drop it” and “drop the knife,” insistently and loudly. A second officer draws his gun. One of the officers says, threateningly, “You take one step in this direction . . .” and then something inaudible. Yatim wanders back a few steps, pauses, and then starts moving back toward the front doors. That’s when the fatal shots were fired.

The first video gives the impression of a much more intemperate, unprovoked shooting; the second shows Yatim acting in what seems to be a reckless manner and ignoring clear orders from police.

Police union president Mike McCormack said that ambiguity was troubling. “That’s why, thank God, we do have a justice system, and people aren’t tried by video, they’re tried by the justice system,” he said.

Still, both clips show the tragic death of a young man much beloved by his family, and much mourned since. Without Baron and Grupp, the public, the police, and the courts would know much less about what happened that night one year ago.

Baron has rarely viewed his footage from beginning to end since he took it. It’s too hard to relive those terrible 90 seconds. “I can’t really watch the video,” he said.

Still, he thinks all of the upheaval — legal, political, and emotional — was worth it.

“I’m glad I did it,” he said. “I’m glad I filmed it.”

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