Diamond Reynolds Talks to The View About Staying 'Calm' While Filming Boyfriend's Death

The motive and the burden—as with any of these police shootings—was to provide visual proof of a fatal incident police could easily spin into inaccurate reports. In this case, Reynolds did it with an alarming sense of calm and with her four-year-old daughter in the backseat. Reynolds says she immediately felt protective. “It was in my best interest and in my daughter’s best interest to stay calm. And I’m very in tune to social media, so it was in my best interest as well as my boyfriend’s best interest, and my daughter,” she tells The View. “I just wanted the people to know that these incidents do happen and we don’t bring them on ourselves. It’s just so that people could be aware of situations like this.”

Asked if anything happened before the livestream that would’ve justified the shooting (an unnecessary question), Reynolds says, “There was nothing that would’ve led to an officer gunning him down.” Tragically, Reynolds says her daughter talks about having not nightmares but “god dreams” and, “She wants justice as well as myself.”

Reynolds, naturally, tears up throughout the interview yet manages to get a point across about the unfair set of expectations on black people existing (and surviving) in public. “It’s not even the town that I live in. It’s the world that I live in. Being somewhere where you always feel like you’re being pointed out or you’re being stereotyped or you’re being racial profiled, you expect it,” she says. “So we always do what we’re ‘supposed to do’ so it doesn’t cause something so tremendous like this.”

Reynolds adds that before she started filming, Castile was polite with the officer and followed what many of us recognize as unofficial protocol. “He was so laid back. He was so cooperative. He was very patient,” says Reynolds.