Tears came to my eyes watching Twitter last night.

I’m not an overly emotional person, but shared moments like the one above unlocked months of fear and worry that have been settling deep in my chest.

You see, my hometown is hurting too, but our police chief, mayor, and governor have yet to acknowledge the severity of the wounds, even in the face of a scathing Department of Justice report from April that described a “culture of aggression” within our police department.

With the exception of some of our city councilors, our leadership isn’t ready yet to publicly admit we even have a problem.

No one has said “this hurts all of our hearts, and affects all of us — Black, White, Hispanic, policymaker, citizen, police officer, child, adult, every single one of us, and we’ll do whatever it takes to acknowledge and fix the problem together, no matter how hard it is.”

Listening to Missouri Governor Jay Nixon speak yesterday, and watching images of Missouri State Highway Patrol Commander Ron Johnson (pictured above) and other local / state police officers walking with protesters yesterday made me wish that public officials here would do the same.

Even the simple act of walking beside each other seems to suggest that police and protesters have a chance at embracing each others’ humanity, and changing the destructive cycle that has played out in cities across the U.S.

But these moments almost didn’t happen, and I suspect the standard but misguided “angry rioters are destroying things” trope was very close to taking over.

Just 24 hours before, the images streaming across Twitter feeds looked more like this:

The situation was, of course, extremely complex.

Among the various pieces of context to account for:

• There had been actual looting in the days before the peaceful Tuesday protest.
• Police showing up with riot gear does not automatically equate to labeling crowds they are facing as rioters, even if there are a few troublemakers….something that both public officials and mainstream media have a mixed track record of reporting on.
• Race and class dynamics were at play in complicated, and, at times, unexplored ways.
• Though likely a very small number if at all, there may have been police who actually wanted to escalate the situation.

What was most interesting to me about the coverage on Wednesday night was that there wasn’t really much of it at all from mainstream media.

3–5 hours after the protests began, CNN had no story on its’ homepage.

There are also accounts that while the protests in Ferguson were being heavily covered by citizens on Twitter, it wasn’t showing up much on Facebook (this happened for me as well).

If you rely on Google News to see what’s happening, you might not have seen anything about Ferguson until the next day. The first major story I saw was from the LA Times, around midnight…well after protests had started.

In fact, for most of the night MSNBC was the only major news outlet besides The Huffington Post and Washington Post to cover the story at all, and they were mostly providing commentary on a livestream video of the scene from a local radio station.

Basically, Twitter and the hashtag #ferguson became the primary way of seeing what was actually happening on the ground, unfiltered.

Of course, what’s happening in Ferguson is only a start — while visibility is important it certainly won’t fix the problems there. An investigation must be completed, and they’ll need to consider reform in a number of areas, including law enforcement, the courts, public policy, private and public sectors, etc…

But it raises a critical question…

Who controls information? And how free / transparent should it be?

We hear all the time that social media is democratizing information. That we are more connected than ever, and that we have access to things like never before.

This is not strictly true, of course — there are plenty of filters in place that control what we see, and both government and private enterprise can and do make decisions about what’s appropriate, often behind the scenes.

This suggests something about the nature of information that I think we need to carefully consider: we are almost always safer with it out in broad daylight than we are with it hidden away in a dark room.

I say that because the photos, videos, and first hand accounts coming out of Ferguson give us a look at how open access pulls back the curtains to everyone’s benefit.

I don’t know if they did so publicly, but I wouldn’t be surprised if police officers went home after their shift last night and cried tears of relief and joy. Looking at the photos it seems obvious that neither protesters nor police officers wanted to be in the same, escalated situation from earlier in the week.

At the New Mexico Compass — a journalism startup that I run communications for — we’ve been grappling with these same kinds of questions around transparency for an interactive database we’re building with public records of fatal shootings by police.

We know that we have an obligation to tell the truth, and to share what we see, and how we see it, but we also know that comes with responsibilities.

A photo, video, or other primary source material always requires asking questions about context — in particular, what’s important that’s outside the frame, who authored the material, and why?

Sometimes the questions are easier to ask, like with this screengrab of an extremely racist Facebook post circulating Twitter two nights ago that was alleged to be a quote from the wife of Ferguson’s police chief:

Other times it’s more complex — for example, Propublica’s recent investigation into charity fraud revealed photos being re-appropriated without permission, which is a less obvious but just as troubling issue.

Critics of open data and citizen journalism often point to the dangers of rapidly disseminating misinformation — sometimes with lives at stake.

The hacker group Anonymous, for instance, named the police officer who allegedly shot Michael Brown despite the police department’s insistence that they were holding off identifying him in part due to death threats.

There may be reasons for privacy and anonymity — but they don’t exist in a vacuum, and they certainly don’t afford blanket coverage, nor do they deserve to be used on a regular basis simply because a publication or entity can do so.

If and when information truly deserves to be private, I believe that at a very minimum the public has the right to know why / how, and a timeline for when it’ll be made public.

It’s also worth noting that transparency and open access works positively, too — in fact, the falsely attributed Facebook quote from above was debunked by Politifact that same night.

This is one of the reasons why at the Compass we’ve designed our mission around not just telling better stories, but also educating citizen journalists so that they can help contribute to a healthier ecosystem overall for journalism.

I don’t know all the answers to how open access journalism should be practiced. But I think situations like Ferguson give us insight into how and why we should care deeply about transparency. Journalists and journalism organizations simply can’t afford to think any other way — and there’s an argument to be made that government and private enterprise can no longer do so either.

And for the record I also believe that open access and transparent journalism by both credentialed media and citizen journalists had a lot to do with why this:

Turned into this:

Long live open access. Let’s free all the datas.