“How Many Weren’t Filmed?!” These words appeared on a cardboard sign held by a camo-clad man at a recent protest in Decatur, Georgia, against the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.

The words were also printed in block letters on a banner carried by demonstrators in Manchester, England, scrawled in pen on a woman’s face mask in New York City, and Sharpied on poster boards in towns and cities elsewhere.

The question captures the complex reality of police brutality in the age of smartphones. It alludes, on the one hand, to how smartphones have been repurposed as a tool to fight the police, and on the other, to the limitations of smartphones as a tool to fight a mammoth, militarized, decentralized institution with a deep-rooted history of violence against poor people, particularly poor people of color.