This man has collected nearly 500 videos of horrific police brutality and it's terrifying

Technology may now offer us the means to document police brutality, but the sheer deluge of videos and accounts now being shared has led to a new issue: not knowing where to look.

Which is why T. Greg Doucette, a Texan attorney, decided to begin compiling videos of police using force on protesters when Black Lives Matter demonstrations restarted in the wake of George Floyd’s death.

On 30 May, Doucette began a Twitter thread, writing:

To simplify following the criminal justice news of the last 36 hours, I posted a set of 10 links to police brutality videos on Facebook. 

Can't do that here, obvs.

So I'm putting them into a thread.

The thread can be seen here – trigger warning in place for graphic and distressing content.

At the time of writing, the thread now has 451 videos, which Doucette numbers to help viewers keep track.

Footage is shared from all over the US and ranges from video of NYPD officers intentionally running cars into peaceful protesters to a horrific photo of the split skull of a 24-year-old protester in Detroit, shot by police.

Doucette’s thread paints a complete – and horrendous – picture of the scale of violence used in police attempts to suppress the protests.

Doucette, a proud “Never Trump” Republician, says he started the thread to stop authorities being able to write off individual cases of police brutality.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Doucette said:

When I’ve shared this stuff in the past, when you do it one [video] at a time, you get the same responses: ‘the victim was no angel,’ ‘the officer was just one bad apple,’ blah blah blah. 

So I did it as just short of a dozen thinking, ‘Hey, this is everywhere. It’s a problem,’ and I decided to thread it onto Twitter. Once I started doing that, more people started sending me stuff. As the list got longer and more people tweeted it out and more people sent stuff in, you ended up with this feedback loop.

Doucette advocates for police reform to address systemic racism and violence within the institution, rather than forces being dismantled altogether and has penned threads on the topic.

Right now he’s taking a break from the thread (understandable given the wealth of extremely disturbing footage) but plans to continue exposing abuses of power and racism within the police.