The videos of the brutal police killings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota have reinvigorated the Black Lives Matter movement.

But the bystanders who filmed and distributed the videos of the shooting of Alton Sterling say they have been detained and harassed by police for exposing the incident to the world.

Moreover, the man who filmed the killing of Eric Garner, an unarmed black father who died after being placed in a chokehold by an NYPD officer two years ago this week, is heading to prison for four years on unrelated charges, after he says he has endured constant police harassment.

This bystander who recorded the viral video of Garner’s death is the only one connected to the incident who is being locked up; none of the officers involved have faced jail time. While the city’s medical examiner determined Garner’s death to be a homicide, the Staten Island district attorney declined to press charges.

In Baton Rouge on July 5, Abdullah Muflahi, the owner of the convenience store where Alton Sterling was killed, filmed the fatal police shooting on his cell phone.

His video shows a white police officer pinning Sterling to the ground and shooting him point-blank in the chest multiple times, killing him.

Muflahi is now suing the city of Baton Rouge, the city’s police department and four of its officers.

In his lawsuit, Muflahi says police confiscated his entire surveillance camera system, including the equipment and the footage, without a warrant. The suit also accuses the police of taking his phone, locking him for four hours in the back of a hot police car, detaining him for two hours in the police headquarters and preventing him from calling his family or an attorney when he was detained.

Democracy Now has done very detailed coverage of these stories. The news outlet interviewed Muflahi and his attorney, Joel Porter.

Muflahi recalled that, before he started filming the attack on Sterling, the police officers were “slamming him on top of a car and were tasering him. That’s when another officer ran and tackled him onto an SUV, then both cops slammed him on the floor.”

After shooting Sterling, one of the officers then shouted out, “Just F**k him. Just let him lay there,” Muflahi said.

“After they had killed him, one of the officers got up and grabbed me,” Muflahi narrated. “And when backup had arrived, he grabbed me and pushed me towards another officer and told him to put me in the back of a car.”

“I was in shock. I didn’t know if it was real or if I was in a nightmare,” he added.

The police then asked Muflahi if they could go into his store and copy the surveillance footage. Muflahi said that he would like to be present if they were going to do that. The police told him that he was not allowed to do so, and entered his story anyway, without his permission and without a warrant.

Since releasing the video to the media, Muflahi has received death threats.

Joel Porter, Muflahi’s lawyer, also told Democracy Now that the police “violated his rights in many ways.” Porter accused the police of illegally detaining Muflahi for six hours and for commandeering his business during that time.

Porter says the police did not know Muflahi filmed the shooting on his cellphone. Otherwise, they would not have given it back.

In an interview with local media, Muflahi, who was born in Yemen and raised in the U.S., said, “We just need to stick together — no matter what race we are, no matter where we are from.”

Muflahi was not the only one who says he has been harassed by police. Chris LeDay, a U.S. Air Force veteran and musician who distributed the other video of the police shooting of Sterling, also says he was detained.