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On 10 July 2016, Facebook user Wesley Scott Alexander posted a video supposedly documenting Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters chanting a demanding dead cops three days after a shooting in Dallas during which five officers were killed and several more wounded: At the time the video was posted, tension between white police officers and black civilians was high, all the more so after three more officers were shot and killed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a week later. The clip began appearing in our inbox shortly after the latter event, suggesting that readers believed the chant and the incidents in Dallas and Baton Rouge were concurrent. In some instances, social media users asserted that protesters had chanted for dead cops outside a Dallas hospital: Alexander's plea for users to share the clip because the media won't furthered impressions that Black Lives Matter protesters had loudly called for dead cops, that at least two individuals had answered the call in the worst way imaginable, and that a media conspiracy sought to bury the ugly truth. Repeatedly, readers apparently unfamiliar with Baton Rouge and New York City asked if the clip was footage from July 2016 protests held in the former location following the shooting death of Alton Sterling. In fact, July 2016 wasn't the first time this particular bit of footage caused both confusion and consternation. A Fox News video uploaded to YouTube on 15 December 2014, just before the ambush shooting deaths of two New York City police officers, documents that the protest it captured occurred on or before that date: The earliest tweets about that video also appeared on 13 December 2014 (linking to a since-deleted page): Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were shot dead on 20 December 2014, five days after that news clip appeared on Facebook, showing that the video antedated even that event. Following the deaths of Officers Ramos and Liu, the group @MillionsMarchNYC sent a tweet disavowing the chanters depicted in the video and expressing condolences over the murders of those policemen: This clip and some background information about it were referenced in another video debunking Black Lives Matter myths that was posted online on 10 July 2016. At approximately the three-minute mark, the narrator notes that the dead cops clip captured a small group of protesters who hung around after the end of the Millions March in December 2014 and were disavowed by the organizers of that event, while video of the official Millions March event shows that it was a peaceful protest: The controversial clip was also misrepresented by some national news outlets as being a part of larger, mainstream protests: A separate video published around the same time involved a clip of protesters that had been deliberately misreported (or edited) to suggest that a crowd chanting we won't stop, we can't stop, until killer cops are in cellblocks (in reference to the Freddie Gray case) was really saying we won't stop, we can't stop, so kill a cop: The original video of New York protesters referenced at the beginning of this article was uploaded on 13 December 2014 by Manhattan resident Tom Dilello, who maintained that he shot and uploaded the clip in the span of six minutes, leaving no time for him to edit the raw footage of the dead cops chant. A few weeks later, Dilello spoke to BuzzFeed about the then-viral video: That outlet also consulted an audio expert about the clip's authenticity: On 23 December 2014 (ten days after Dilello shared the video, and three days after the NYPD officers were ambushed), the Daily Beast attempted to drill down on who was responsible for the chanting. Their annotated article maintained that the New York chapter of the Trayvon Martin Organizing Committee (TMOC), who were unauthorized by the Martin family to use Trayvon's name or likeness, were the sole faction of marchers using the chant. The Daily Beast highlighted the use of a unique protest banner to connect TMOC with the December 2014 footage: Such forensic reporting deemed the dead cops chant to be an aberration, one clearly smuggled in amid widespread peaceful protests involving tens of thousands of people (versus an estimated 200 dead cops chanters who were not part of Black Lives Matter): MSNBC similarly performed some digging into what had become, in the aftermath of the NYPD officers' shooting, a clip widely-shared as emblematic of protests occurring at that time: MSNBC reported that the Millions March protests officially concluded at One Police Plaza at 6:30 PM, when the permit to demonstrate expired. The nighttime clip was clearly unrelated to it, and while commenters in 2016 lamented that the media won't show the footage, it was clearly widely aired back in 2014: According to Tom Dilello the clip was shot an hour's walk away from One Police Plaza, at 32nd Street and Fifth Avenue. Presumably marchers move more slowly than individual pedestrians, making the chanters again unlikely offshoots from the official march that concluded three miles downtown: The clip in question involving chants about dead cops was shot in New York City in December 2014, but contemporaneous reporting widely and incorrectly identified its source as Black Lives Matter and Millions March demonstrations taking place in different parts of the city at different times. After shootings claimed the lives of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge in July 2016, the clip resurfaced and was often mislabeled as occurring in one of those locations.
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