On September 4, a South Carolina state trooper named Sean Groubert was captured on his dashboard camera opening fire on an unarmed Black man, Levar Edward Jones, whom he had pulled over for a seatbelt violation.

The incident has come at a time when civil rights activists are calling on the White House to enforce criminal justice reformsthat would reduce the number of police brutality cases involving unarmed Black men and boys in the United States. It seems a day doesn’t go by without another report of a Black man being assaulted or killed by a white policeman. Beginning October 10, for example, thousands of people are expected to take part in a planned “weekend of resistance” to seek justice for Mike Brown, the teenager murdered by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Among the priorities of social justice advocates is the implementation of body and dashboard video cameras for officers across the country.

However, although the Groubert case illustrates the importance of video when it comes to issues of race and policing, it also reminds us of the complications inherent in crime-related imagery—especially regarding the degree to which people only see what they want to believe.