In the wake of the videotaped police attack on motorist Rodney King, the department has learned to embrace video scrutiny.More at the link.
It was shortly after midnight, 20 years ago Thursday, when George Holliday awoke to the sounds of police sirens outside his Lake View Terrace apartment. Grabbing his clunky Sony Handycam, he stepped out on his balcony and changed the Los Angeles Police Department forever.
The nine minutes of grainy video footage he captured of Los Angeles police beating Rodney King helped to spur dramatic reforms in a department that many felt operated with impunity. The video played a central role in the criminal trial of four officers, whose not-guilty verdicts in 1992 triggered days of rioting in Los Angeles in which more than 50 people died.
The simple existence of the video was something unusual in itself. Relatively few people then had video cameras, Holliday did — and had the wherewithal to turn it on.
"It was just coincidence," Holliday reflected in an interview a decade ago. "Or luck."
Today, things are far different and the tape that so tainted the LAPD has a clear legacy in how officers think about their jobs. Police now work in a YouTube world in which cellphones double as cameras, news helicopters transmit close-up footage of unfolding police pursuits, and surveillance cameras capture arrests or shootings. Police officials are increasingly recording their officers. Compared to the cops who beat King, officers these days hit the streets with a new reality ingrained in their minds: Someone is always watching.
"Early on in their training, I always tell them, 'I don't care if you're in a bathroom taking care of your personal business…. Whatever you do, assume it will be caught on video,' " said Sgt. Heather Fungaroli, who supervises recruits at the LAPD's academy. "We tell them if they're doing the right thing then they have no reason to worry."
Folks will tell different stories about this, but Rodney King resisted arrest. Was the police reaction excessive? Perhaps, although a federal court trial found otherwise, and the rest is history. I was more shocked by the Los Angeles riots than by the alleged police brutality in the beating. Of course, maybe I'm not in a good position to truly understand it, not being an oppressed minority, and all that, or a conflicted middle-class white feminist struggling to overcome her racial privilege, like Melissa McEwan:
Twenty years later, it's still the same victim-blaming I was hearing about Rodney King, even as he sat in a wheelchair convalescing from his physical injuries. (He has nightmares to this day, and, while currently sober, has struggled with alcoholism.) Twenty years later, same old shit.Somehow that sounds inauthentic to me, but that's progressives for you --- they're all FUBAR all the time.
But, twenty years on, I am a different person than I was then. Working through my privilege is an ongoing process—it always will be—but what happened to Rodney King was so much more difficult for me to understand and culturally contextualize then, and it's not just because I was a teenager; it's because I was a privileged white teenager who hadn't yet begun in any meaningful way to examine her privilege.
RELATED: At CNN, "Rodney King, 20 Years Later." (At Memeorandum.)