'Whose Streets?' documentary revisits Ferguson riots with social media journalism

A single tweet runs across the screen near the beginning of the documentary "Whose Streets?"

"I just saw someone die"

On Aug. 9, 2014, in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, white police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed unarmed black teenager Michael Brown Jr. Brown had his hands in the air when killed.

The shooting sparked the fuse on the longtime buildup of African-American rage against the Ferguson legal system.

The riots and community outrage that followed is chronicled with alarming clarity and surprising depth by social media clips and personal accounts in director Sabaah Folayan's documentary, codirected by Damon Davis.

Without any voice-over narration, "Whose Streets?" supplies structure and context to the collage of camera-phone videos and news clips showing a virtual ground war in the streets of Ferguson.

On one level, "Whose Streets?" confirms the value of local citizen journalism through social media, understandably the bane of authoritarian governments struggling to control information.

On a bigger level, "Whose Streets?" serves up a blistering indictment of the American news media for its primarily shallow, spectacle-chasing showbiz priorities in covering the lootings, fires and destruction while ignoring the more significant story of the community most affected by the killing of Brown.

"Whose Streets" with its messy clutter of sound bites, video snippets, tweets and relevant quotations admirably corrects this massive journalistic lapse.