Leonard Pitts has it right in most of his op-ed, but he’s completely wrong about the Rodney King beating. When he describes the King beating, he’s doing so out of ignorance of the facts or he’s deliberately misleading his readers. The only thing he got right was the description of the ex-con’s injuries. But what led to those injuries?
Rodney King was a huge brute of a man. After the traffic stop, King’s two companions obeyed all police commands and gave the cops no trouble. Not so with Rodney. He resisted arrest and lunged at the officers. The cops used the tactic of ‘escalating and deescalating force’ as was the policy of LAPD at the time. That called for the use of varying degrees of force depending on the actions of the person being arrested. Despite being tasered and struck with night sticks, King continued to get up and lunge at the officers.
The media had a heyday by showing the video taken by a nearby resident over and over again so that an incident that lasted only a couple of minutes appeared to be much longer than that, thereby making it look like King was struck 50 times. I do not believe the officer who broke his cheekbone when he struck King in the face with a nightstick was aiming there - he missed his true mark, King’s shoulder, when the crazed brute lunged at him.
As far as cops arresting citizens for videotaping police actions, that is uncalled for and just plain stupid. The problem with those video tapes is that they do not tell the whole story of the action, especially what led up to it, and they can be edited by the media – a la Rodney King - to make the cops look really bad. While I would not want someone to video tape me arresting a crook, in most states there is no law prohibiting that.
HYPOCRISY SURROUNDS POLICE EFFORTS TO AVOID CAMERAS
By Leonard Pitts
Miami Herald
August 3, 2011
This all started with Rodney King.
More to the point, it started with a plumber named George Holliday. Had he not been video recording from his balcony, that night in 1991 might have been business as usual for Los Angeles police who struck King, a harmless drunk, 50 times with their batons, breaking his leg, his cheekbone and his skull. Had Holliday not captured video proof to the contrary, they might have gotten away with some lame excuse: Oops, he slipped on the stairs. But thanks to Holliday's camera, we all knew better.
Twenty years later, cameras have become ubiquitous. They have captured entertainer meltdowns, crashes, tasings, deaths and a seemingly endless carnival of police misbehavior: questionable beatings, controversial shootings and unprovoked violence by those we hire to protect and to serve.
Perhaps not surprisingly, many police now identify cameras as the enemy.
Last week, news photographer Phil Datz was arrested on Long Island for videotaping a police action on a public street. In June, a man named Narces Benoit said Miami Beach Police pulled him from his car by his hair, handcuffed him and stomped his cellphone (which police deny) after he used it to record video of a fatal police shooting. In May, a woman named Emily Good was arrested for recording a traffic stop from her own front yard in Rochester, N.Y. In March, a Las Vegas man was beaten and arrested for videotaping police from his own driveway. In March of last year, a motorcyclist was arrested for recording his own traffic stop on a Maryland highway.
According to a 2010 report on the technology blog Gizmodo, at least three states have made it illegal to record an on-duty officer. Other states use existing wiretapping laws to support their arrests, a novel and selective interpretation of those statutes. What makes it novel is that such laws are typically invoked when telephone conversations are recorded; they require that both parties are aware of, and approve, the recording. What makes it selective is that one never hears of people being roughed up and arrested for recording videos that flatter the police.
The only thing more outrageous than the behavior is the excuses used to justify it. One of the cops in Rochester claimed, obviously for the benefit of the camera, that he did not feel safe with Emily Good recording him. Miami Beach Police claimed they confiscated videos only to safeguard the evidence.
Oh, please.
That stench you smell is the reek of official hypocrisy. Because the same police who so violently and vividly resist being recorded in the performance of their duties have no compunction about using the same technology against you and me, from the speed camera that catches you when you go flying through the school zone to the new gizmo that reads your license plate and checks for warrants.
If it is OK for police to use cameras to catch us in our misdeeds, why is it not OK for us to use cameras to catch police in theirs?
There is something chilling and totalitarian about this insistence that cops have the right to do as they wish without what amounts to public oversight. What is it they fear? After all, the officer who is being videotaped can protect himself by doing one simple thing:
His job.
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