One of the most chilling through-lines in this story is how central citizen documentation has been, and how quickly officials tried to discredit it. In both killings, the government’s narrative unraveled because ordinary people filmed what they saw. That is why the quiet criminalization of recording matters so much. When filming the government is treated as provocation, when a cell phone is framed as a threat, accountability is strangled before it can breathe. A democracy cannot survive if witnessing state power becomes too dangerous to attempt.