alkemical
12-01-2006, 10:26 AM
http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=4675&IssueNum=182
The Rise of Citizen Video
How YouTube and other video streaming sites have democratized the news
~ By ANDREW GUMBEL ~
ow different the history of the LAPD might look, if YouTube had existed half a century ago. Consider: on Christmas Day, 1951, a group of about 50 officers beat the crap out of seven young men in their custody, five of them Mexican-American, whom they had earlier arrested for fighting outside a bar in Elysian Park. It was as shocking an abuse of police power as any in the force’s checkered history.
It took three months, though, for first word of the assault to reach the public domain. And even then, Chief William Parker successfully warded off any independent investigation, publicly ridiculed his critics, and refused to discipline even those cops who had manifestly lied in their accounts of the episode. L.A.’s Mexican-Americans seethed with resentment about the outrage they came to call Bloody Christmas, but most of the rest of the city’s population remained blissfully unaware of it.
Parker solidified his reputation as a reformer bent on professionalizing the LAPD – thanks in large part to the spectacular propagandizing effect of Jack Webb and Dragnet on TV – and Bloody Christmas sank into popular oblivion, where it stayed until James Ellroy delivered a lightly fictionalized version of it in L.A. Confidential, published in 1990. That, in turn, led to Curtis Hanson’s celebrated movie version of the Ellroy novel in 1997, which at last gave the episode visual form – 46 years after the fact.
Compare that timeline to the case of William Cardenas, a suspected gang member who was apprehended on a Hollywood street corner last August, pinned to the ground as one of his arresting officers pressed a knee against his neck, and punched repeatedly in the face. In the official version, aired in court in September, Cardenas was accused of resisting arrest – the crime for which he was duly charged and confined to pre-trial custody.
That, though, was before a neighbor’s amateur video surfaced on YouTube, and cast serious doubt on the police version. Resisting arrest is, at the very least, an interesting definition of a man flailing helplessly on the ground and gasping “I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” as he’s punched in the head. Now a new court hearing has been convened, the FBI has opened an investigation, and the LAPD is learning whole new meanings of the word “accountability.”
The power of YouTube, and its competitor video streaming sites, has grown ever more striking in the past few weeks. In the immediate wake of the Cardenas tape, we witnessed two more graphic instances of possible police excess in our city: first, a video, shot in 2005, of a transient on Venice Beach getting pepper-sprayed even after he had been handcuffed and bundled into a patrol car, and then footage of an Iranian-American student getting Tasered over and over after he failed to produce a student ID card in UCLA’s Powell Library.
The phenomenon stretches far beyond the issue of police brutality. Senator George Allen might well have won his nail-bitingly close Virginia reelection race were it not for his YouTube “macaca” moment. Michael Richards, the not-so-lovable alter ego of Cosmo Kramer, might still have a career in stand-up – it’s certainly striking how the Laugh Factory had him back on stage the night after his race-baiting tirade, and only started distancing itself from him after video cell phone footage of the incident surfaced on TMZ.com.
L.A. is as good a place as any to observe the radical change in our culture. This is, after all, a city where visual imagery has always held a rare power – whether as a check on reality or as a way of creating a mythological alternative to it. Now we are being super-saturated by that imagery, first because of the ubiquity of digital video cameras, video cell phones, and video settings on digital still cameras, and second because of the ease of uploading that footage to the Internet.
The change in the way we record and observe our world has come about in a couple of stages. The first came 15 years ago with the emergence of mass-market camcorders and that new media’s first signature moment: the videotaped beating of Rodney King just off the 210 freeway. That episode now seems almost quaint and slow, like a distant memory of dial-up in a definitively broadband world. George Holliday, the Lake View Terrace resident who shot the footage from his balcony, first tried to take it to his local police station. Then he knocked on CNN’s door, but got no reply. It took him a couple of days to find a taker – KTLA can take credit for that one – and for the rest of the world to sit up and take notice.
Holliday, in other words, was at the mercy of someone else’s editorial decision-making – something nobody needs to worry about any more in the Internet age. But the Rodney King episode was still hugely influential. Without the Holliday footage, there would have been no trial of the four white cops who beat and Tasered King, and thus no acquittal to trigger the L.A. riots a year later. Nobody would have been inspired to set up new video-conscious watchdog groups like Copwatch. Peter Gabriel wouldn’t have had the idea to set up his group Witness, which distributed video cameras to human rights activists around the world, all the better to shed light in dark places.
The journey from video recording to public airing has, most obviously, accelerated enormously. And the footage has a tendency to be a lot more raw. The Holliday tape may have cut into the Rodney King beating late, and the first few seconds in which King is seen charging Officer Laurence Powell may have been considered too blurry for KTLA and the networks to use (even though they were subsequently deemed crucial at trial). But it is also a model of clarity and filmmaking professionalism compared with the partial views and cacophony of voices that have showed up on YouTube.
For some people, this is grounds for complaint. The LAPD itself, not surprisingly, argues that the citizen videos offer only a partial view of what might be a highly complex situation, and that police use of force is not in and of itself a deviation from proper practice. The department’s intriguing response is to start installing its own video recording devices in patrol cars so it can, in certain cases, offer a contrary view of the same set of events.
This all seems remarkably healthy to me. If we’re going to live in a media-saturated world, better that the power of that media be dispersed among ordinary citizens than concentrated in a single Big Brother-type source. A few years ago, it was fashionable among certain intellectuals and filmmakers to bemoan the diminishing importance of the written word and the rise of the image as the prime defining force of our culture. The film director Godfrey Reggio (of Koyaanisqatsi fame) once argued to me that it was impossible to engage critically with images. He might feel differently if he saw the footage of Mostafa Tabatabainejad yelping out in pain as he is Tasered over and over again on the UCLA campus. Is Tabatabainejad provoking the officers, or is he screaming in protest because they made the first wrong move? Is it reasonable for the officers to tell him repeatedly to get up, when Taser guns are designed to make the suspect’s muscles go limp?
These are hardly easy questions to answer, especially since the student video cell phone gets no clear view of the action and cannot distinguish one yelling voice from another. We need to bring a critical intelligence to these images to make sense of them, which is reason alone to welcome them – the more the merrier.
The Rise of Citizen Video
How YouTube and other video streaming sites have democratized the news
~ By ANDREW GUMBEL ~
ow different the history of the LAPD might look, if YouTube had existed half a century ago. Consider: on Christmas Day, 1951, a group of about 50 officers beat the crap out of seven young men in their custody, five of them Mexican-American, whom they had earlier arrested for fighting outside a bar in Elysian Park. It was as shocking an abuse of police power as any in the force’s checkered history.
It took three months, though, for first word of the assault to reach the public domain. And even then, Chief William Parker successfully warded off any independent investigation, publicly ridiculed his critics, and refused to discipline even those cops who had manifestly lied in their accounts of the episode. L.A.’s Mexican-Americans seethed with resentment about the outrage they came to call Bloody Christmas, but most of the rest of the city’s population remained blissfully unaware of it.
Parker solidified his reputation as a reformer bent on professionalizing the LAPD – thanks in large part to the spectacular propagandizing effect of Jack Webb and Dragnet on TV – and Bloody Christmas sank into popular oblivion, where it stayed until James Ellroy delivered a lightly fictionalized version of it in L.A. Confidential, published in 1990. That, in turn, led to Curtis Hanson’s celebrated movie version of the Ellroy novel in 1997, which at last gave the episode visual form – 46 years after the fact.
Compare that timeline to the case of William Cardenas, a suspected gang member who was apprehended on a Hollywood street corner last August, pinned to the ground as one of his arresting officers pressed a knee against his neck, and punched repeatedly in the face. In the official version, aired in court in September, Cardenas was accused of resisting arrest – the crime for which he was duly charged and confined to pre-trial custody.
That, though, was before a neighbor’s amateur video surfaced on YouTube, and cast serious doubt on the police version. Resisting arrest is, at the very least, an interesting definition of a man flailing helplessly on the ground and gasping “I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” as he’s punched in the head. Now a new court hearing has been convened, the FBI has opened an investigation, and the LAPD is learning whole new meanings of the word “accountability.”
The power of YouTube, and its competitor video streaming sites, has grown ever more striking in the past few weeks. In the immediate wake of the Cardenas tape, we witnessed two more graphic instances of possible police excess in our city: first, a video, shot in 2005, of a transient on Venice Beach getting pepper-sprayed even after he had been handcuffed and bundled into a patrol car, and then footage of an Iranian-American student getting Tasered over and over after he failed to produce a student ID card in UCLA’s Powell Library.
The phenomenon stretches far beyond the issue of police brutality. Senator George Allen might well have won his nail-bitingly close Virginia reelection race were it not for his YouTube “macaca” moment. Michael Richards, the not-so-lovable alter ego of Cosmo Kramer, might still have a career in stand-up – it’s certainly striking how the Laugh Factory had him back on stage the night after his race-baiting tirade, and only started distancing itself from him after video cell phone footage of the incident surfaced on TMZ.com.
L.A. is as good a place as any to observe the radical change in our culture. This is, after all, a city where visual imagery has always held a rare power – whether as a check on reality or as a way of creating a mythological alternative to it. Now we are being super-saturated by that imagery, first because of the ubiquity of digital video cameras, video cell phones, and video settings on digital still cameras, and second because of the ease of uploading that footage to the Internet.
The change in the way we record and observe our world has come about in a couple of stages. The first came 15 years ago with the emergence of mass-market camcorders and that new media’s first signature moment: the videotaped beating of Rodney King just off the 210 freeway. That episode now seems almost quaint and slow, like a distant memory of dial-up in a definitively broadband world. George Holliday, the Lake View Terrace resident who shot the footage from his balcony, first tried to take it to his local police station. Then he knocked on CNN’s door, but got no reply. It took him a couple of days to find a taker – KTLA can take credit for that one – and for the rest of the world to sit up and take notice.
Holliday, in other words, was at the mercy of someone else’s editorial decision-making – something nobody needs to worry about any more in the Internet age. But the Rodney King episode was still hugely influential. Without the Holliday footage, there would have been no trial of the four white cops who beat and Tasered King, and thus no acquittal to trigger the L.A. riots a year later. Nobody would have been inspired to set up new video-conscious watchdog groups like Copwatch. Peter Gabriel wouldn’t have had the idea to set up his group Witness, which distributed video cameras to human rights activists around the world, all the better to shed light in dark places.
The journey from video recording to public airing has, most obviously, accelerated enormously. And the footage has a tendency to be a lot more raw. The Holliday tape may have cut into the Rodney King beating late, and the first few seconds in which King is seen charging Officer Laurence Powell may have been considered too blurry for KTLA and the networks to use (even though they were subsequently deemed crucial at trial). But it is also a model of clarity and filmmaking professionalism compared with the partial views and cacophony of voices that have showed up on YouTube.
For some people, this is grounds for complaint. The LAPD itself, not surprisingly, argues that the citizen videos offer only a partial view of what might be a highly complex situation, and that police use of force is not in and of itself a deviation from proper practice. The department’s intriguing response is to start installing its own video recording devices in patrol cars so it can, in certain cases, offer a contrary view of the same set of events.
This all seems remarkably healthy to me. If we’re going to live in a media-saturated world, better that the power of that media be dispersed among ordinary citizens than concentrated in a single Big Brother-type source. A few years ago, it was fashionable among certain intellectuals and filmmakers to bemoan the diminishing importance of the written word and the rise of the image as the prime defining force of our culture. The film director Godfrey Reggio (of Koyaanisqatsi fame) once argued to me that it was impossible to engage critically with images. He might feel differently if he saw the footage of Mostafa Tabatabainejad yelping out in pain as he is Tasered over and over again on the UCLA campus. Is Tabatabainejad provoking the officers, or is he screaming in protest because they made the first wrong move? Is it reasonable for the officers to tell him repeatedly to get up, when Taser guns are designed to make the suspect’s muscles go limp?
These are hardly easy questions to answer, especially since the student video cell phone gets no clear view of the action and cannot distinguish one yelling voice from another. We need to bring a critical intelligence to these images to make sense of them, which is reason alone to welcome them – the more the merrier.