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Erdem Arda Güneş is an Istanbul based political analyst. After graduating from University of Ankara's Political Sciences Faculty, International Relations department he started working as a politics/diplomacy reporter for Hürriyet Daily News. He received journalism education at the Berkeley and Minnesota Universities in 2013. He did interviews for various national and international media outlets focusing on diplomacy, politics and arts. Now works as a press advisor and political analyst for an international organization.
Police brutality is a global problem. Officers beat – even torture – citizens, and citizens actually pay for the torture with their taxes that are being used to pay the cops’ salaries.
In Russia, where 99 people were killed in custody only in 2016 according to the reports, people have paved a new way to combat the police violence: posting it online.
Statistics show the Russians are increasingly posting videos on YouTube to expose the abuses and hold the cops accountable for their actions. Of course, they do it anonymously.
This Vocativ piece shows 47 percent of Russian videos detailing police brutality posted in the last year had only been uploaded in the last 30 days, which means 19,450 videos were uploaded in the past year and 9,232 of them were uploaded in the last month alone.
There is even a YouTube channel used by Russian human rights activists aiming to train people about what to do when they face an illegal act coming from the officers.
As a human rights activist and journalist living in Turkey, I, myself pretty well know the power of social media to fight police violence. Officers, when they know eyewitnesses record what is going on, suddenly decide to do their work right.