ST. LOUIS– As never-before-seen video footage emerges, fresh questions surround a new documentary that claims Michael Brown did not rob a convenience store minutes before he was shot dead by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, two years ago. And the documentary filmmaker is receiving pushback from police-reform activists, who say they were deceived by the filmmaker’s misleading edits.
While the documentary claims that Brown didn’t rob Ferguson Market and Liquor and instead was doing an amicable drug deal with store staff, law enforcement officials say an unedited version of the new video shows that Brown was indeed trying to remove un-purchased items from the store.
Now the attorney representing Ferguson Market tells Heat Street the documentary filmmaker owes the store an apology and explanation for “deliberately manipulating” footage to trash the businesses’ reputation.
The documentary film, Stranger Fruit, which premiered this weekend at SXSW in Austin, has swiftly reignited tensions in Ferguson: Nearly 100 protesters gathered outside Ferguson Market on Sunday night to express anger at the store for what many there perceive as a cover-up, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
It first piqued the attention of The New York Times, which detailed the new-found footage and the explosive claims it seemed to support in an article later the same day.
Stranger Fruit director Jason Pollock said he acquired the footage after he discovered public St. Louis County police records that reported Brown had visited the store twice the day he died.
The videos, shot by four security cameras, seemed to show Brown trading a package, which Pollock says was marijuana, for the store’s cigarillos when he visited Ferguson Market at 1 a.m. on Aug. 9, 2014.
Pollock accused police of releasing footage of Brown’s later encounter at the store to discredit Brown’s family, (it was actually released by the City of Ferguson) while withholding the earlier video because it showed “Mike did not rob the store.”
“They destroyed Michael’s character with the tape, and they didn’t show us what actually happened,” Pollock told the New York Times, “So this shows their intention to make him look bad. And shows suppression of evidence.”
Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, says in the documentary that the video proves that her son was killed over an incident stemming from a “misunderstanding” between Brown and a store owner hours after he visited the store earlier that night.
But in a news conference Monday afternoon, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch called the video “another big lie.”
The time stamps show that Stranger Fruit omits 40 seconds of recorded footage: There’s a gap between when Brown tries to exchange what the film claims is marijuana for merchandise and when he leaves the store.
However, footage released by the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney in “unedited” format includes the entire three-minute encounter with Brown, as well as several minutes following. It shows that despite Brown offering the store clerks marijuana, “no drug exchange occurred,” McCulloch said.
The unedited video appears to show Brown was attempting to leave the store with un-purchased goods when clerks demanded he return them. The surveillance video does not contain sound, but the Ferguson Market staff’s body language suggests Brown was an unwelcome presence. The surveillance video also shows clerks did their jobs by refusing to accept drugs as payment, said Jay Kanzler, a lawyer for the convenience store at a news conference later on Monday.
“I dare anyone to tell me that looked like a friendly interaction between people that knew one another,” Kanzler said.
In a phone interview on Monday, Kanzler told Heat Street that store clerks characterized the earlier encounter with Brown as a “theft,” not a “trade.” He said the video footage supports the account clerks gave to law enforcement after Brown was killed.
Pollock’s misrepresentation “put lives at risk” at a violent protest outside Ferguson Market on Sunday night, Kanzler told Heat Street.
When Kanzler engaged with protesters outside the shop one protester threatened to “beat” the man during an on-camera interview with the Post-Dispatch’s David Carson.
Police made four arrests, according to the Post-Dispatch, including one who was charged Monday with felony counts of attempting to cause catastrophe and resisting arrest after he allegedly attempted to set fire to a police car. A police officer was also injured.
“The filmmaker owes an apology not only to the Ferguson Market owner, but the employees and especially the city of Ferguson for mischaracterizing this video,” Kanzler said.
Pollock did not immediately respond to a Heat Street inquiry asking for an explanation for the film’s editorial choices. However the film director took a brief pause in between interviews Monday afternoon to accuse St. Louis County officials of planting fake news about him.
“As much as I believed the video, we have to be careful about the language we use that divides the line between fact and fiction,” said Ben Keller, a reporter for the police-accountability blog, Photography is Not a Crime. “Perfect example here. I could have tried to take this to the bank and had egg on my face like … Pollock does today. Pollock is done, as far as I’m concerned.”
— Kayla Schierbecker contributes to PINAC.