Lots of people have seen the full video. Some of them have posted here, and there are many people elsewhere who have written about seeing it. I have not seen it myself, but I was living in L.A. at the time and remember the news reports mentioning that jurors would see the full video.
Are you contending that the video doesn’t exist? It does, as there are people who have seen it and it was shown at the trial. Or are you contending that the parts of the video not generally seen still do not justify the beating? In that case, it’s open to interpretation. I can’t interpret it myself, since I haven’t seen it.
As a (former) reporter I just want to qualify this a bit (though not to make fun of **Lakai[b/]).
It’s not a matter of ‘in this day and age’. It’s been well-established for a long time that all citizens may gather and present information obtained legally and that being a reporter or a member of the media confers no special right at all. Public records are just that, public records, and are open to all comers.
So it’s not that all have become journalists but that we have always been so. You, me, that guy down the hall. All have the right to public information and to record and disseminate information.
So I’m in a park, taking pictures of my kid on the swings. Your kid walks in frame and is now captured on my memory card. Am I now prohibited by force of law from posting those pictures online in your scenario? How does that work?
I have also seen the video. There is a popular conspiracy theory that several seconds from the beginning of the recording were cut off. Further, it is claimed, King’s activity in those edited-out several seconds shows why beating the living snot of the guy was called for.
This is not true. I remember Andy Rooney on Sixty Minutes showing the whole tape, it showed the inside of the apartment, camera walks to the patio and the police are doing their thing. Rooney showed this just to disprove the conspiracy theories.
The full tape shows King trying to stand at the two-second mark. The police contend this was a 'lunge.'But then again, the court, prosecutor and chief of police all saw it differently. In any case, after the lunge at two seconds, the tape show one minute and forty-one seconds of brutality by several officers.
The tape commonly shown on TV, the one etched in our minds, is the complete video. There is no ‘full version.’ There is no version that shows a reason for the police doing what they did. Saying there is is simple foolishness.
AIUI, the portion normally seen on TV comprises the first couple minutes of the entire tape–the violent beat-down. The remaining seven or eight minutes take place after King is in handcuffs.
What do you speculate the post-abuse footage adds–particularly to the discussion?
True dat. The printing press itself was the object of destruction, not those using it. Of course they were also considered criminals and scum, but it was the replication and distribution of information that was feared, hated and attacked by the powers that ruled.
As I read the decision, the court is careful not to posit either of those things. On the first point, the fact that the persons being recorded were public officials is emphasized often. How they would treat a case involving private citizens is unclear. On the second, the court says at p.13, “To be sure, the right to film is not without limitations. It may be subject to reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions. See Smith, 212 F.3d at 1333.” After discussing a few other points, the last third of the opinion discusses how Glik’s recording didn’t violate the Massachusetts wiretap statute because it was open rather than secret. If they thought the First Amendment permitted secret recording in public places, at least of public officials, it would have been easy to say that and shorten the opinion considerably. Arguably, they were using the narrow ground of no statutory violation to avoid reaching the constitutional question, but they don’t say so.
There aren’t any hard and fast rules saying they can’t punch and kick. It’s very rare that proper LEO tactics would come to that, but it does happen. There is a video out there in which a cop books a suspect into jail and then sits down at a computer to write up the incident report, he has removed the suspect’s handcuffs and turned his back on the suspect to write the report. Most likely this is something he has done many times before with no trouble, most suspects don’t desire to go after a police officer in a station, unless they are a terminator it is madness to think you can fight your way out.
However in this case the suspect jumps up on the cops desk and attacks him, the police officer responds in the same way he is attacked, by punching and then grappling with the suspect and eventually he wraps both of his hands around the suspect and starts choking him. Is that normal police procedure? No, but the cop was blind sided and had no time to go for any of the tools he had to go about it in another way, he was essentially in a fight for his life and just like if me or you were in a fight for our lives, we can reasonably defend ourselves by striking and doing violence to our assailant.