Bank of America, whose headquarters is the tallest building in this picture, asked one of its vendors to investigate and take action in the matter of one of its employees possibly being involved in the McKinney pool party fight.
Bank of America, whose headquarters is the tallest building in this picture, asked one of its vendors to "investigate and take action" in the matter of one of its employees possibly being involved in the McKinney pool party fight. Jill Lang/Shutterstock

The pool party story has been mainly preoccupied with (recently resigned) McKinney police officer Eric Casebolt's rampage, which was captured on video by a teenager. But there is another part of the story that has been less reported and discussed, that being the fight at the heart of the whole bad business, a fight between a young black girl and two middle-aged white women. A bit of this fight was captured on video, and one of the white women in it has been identified as Tracey Carver-Allbritton. Initially, it was thought she worked for Bank of America, but the banking giant did an investigation and found that Carver-Allbritton did not work for them but for one of their vendors, CoreLogic Inc., a financial firm that performs data collection and analysis for the housing market. (So much in this story is related to the economics of housing.)

It did not take much pressure from internet activists and also the bank for CoreLogic to place Carver-Allbritton on administrative leave. The statement made by CoreLogic: “As a result of these pending allegations, we have placed the employee in question on administrative leave while further investigations take place.”

The pool incident led to Eric Casebolt's resignation, but no arrests or charges have been made concerning the fight at the pool. However, one of the teens who fled when Casebolt drew a gun on him, 18-year-old Adrian Martin, was arrested and booked. The department "dropped the case against him," but for a moment he was treated like a violent criminal and feared for his life:

Finally, I want to point out that surveillance is not a one-way street. If the story of Tracey Carver-Allbritton's involvement in the pool fight proves to be true, then we have before us the fact that an ordinary American woman in a shoddily shot video can be identified within hours by the public, have her work information made public, and become a serious concern for the public relations department of one of the biggest corporations in the world. What this means is we live not in a surveillance society of concentrated control and discipline but one that is much more diffuse and dynamic. Keep in mind that the chief of a considerable police department had to make an important judgment based on a video shot by a high school kid.