The truth of the matter about the Rodney King beating is that even though to most people it's symbolic of this police brutality, it is a very atypical incident.
Rodney King had done all of these things before the videotape. He'd resisted the officers, he'd charged the officers, he'd thrown four officers off his back, he'd been shot twice with a stun gun, which keeps most people down. 50,000 volts of electricity each time, it didn't keep him down. This was a case where a great effort was made to take Rodney King into custody without hurting him, believe it or not.
There are many other instances where people were injured or in some cases killed in encounters with police where shots were fired or the baton was used or other things were done with very little provocation.
If you look at what had happened in the years before the King incident, the number of lawsuits against the city was steadily mounting.
Most of these cases had been settled out of court because the city attorney would look at these cases and say, "Hey, if this goes to court there's going to be huge damages." So I think that had it not been Rodney King, there would've been some other incident that would have come along, and somebody else would have had a camcorder. And maybe it would have developed differently but we would have had some incident.
In the book you describe the King video as Rashomon: a story that has multiple sides and no single clear narrative. More specifically, there are segments of that tape that, though it was shown around the world, most people never saw. What was the significance of the omissions?
The videotape that was broadcast around the world and that most people have seen is 68 seconds in length.
The actual King incident is 81 seconds long. he took the tape to KTLA. after the police showed no interest. First, by the way, he called CNN and CNN at that time did not have any phone on in the middle of the night. They do have now, they've got round the clock service because of that incident. And then he called KTLA and he took it in. And the KTLA people gave the tape unedited to the police department because they wanted to make sure that it was authentic, and the police confirmed it. And then they put on in their newscast 68 seconds of this 81 seconds. The first 3 seconds are critical because they show Mr. King lunging in the direction of Officer Laurence Powell, who then responds with this baton blow.
Holliday moved his camera slightly after these first three seconds, trying to get a better look at what was going on. So the next 10 seconds are blurry. And what the television station did was just take out the first 13 seconds.
And in doing so sacrificed meaning to clarity, so the viewer just sees these police wailing away at King for apparently no reason.
The significance of these first three seconds are not that they make the videotape look nice.
It's brutal in any version, but the first three seconds that were omitted by the television station are a window into all of the things that have happened before the videotape begins. So what the viewer is seeing is a partial record of a partial record. [The King incident began with a 7.8 mile car chase conducted by California Highway Patrol officers, one of whom drew a gun on King before the LAPD took over.]
