7.14.00
Lou Cannon

7.11.00
The Oklahoman's Patrick McGuigan on Frank Keating

7.07.00
The Heritage Foundation's Baker Spring

7.05.00
Harry Browne

6.30.00
Nebraska Attorney General Donald Stenberg

6.29.00
Grover Joseph Rees Says...

6.28.00
Pro-Life Activist Clark Forsythe

6.22.00
Condoleezza Rice

6.21.00
Rep. Richard Baker

6.20.00
Pat Choate on the Reform Party

6.20.00
Law Professor Richard Epstein

6.19.00
Sekulow on the Supremes & Prayer

6.19.00
Nicholas Eberstadt on Koreas Summit

7/14/00 3:20 p.m.
Lou Cannon
“You need to see the video in context...”

By Kathryn Jean Lopez, NR associate editor--------------lopezk@ix.netcom.com

ou Cannon is author of Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD.

Lopez: How is this Philadelphia case different from other cases? Should it be looked at in light of other cases?

Cannon: In the first place, there's this tendency to compare any videotape to the Rodney King case — another video like the notorious 1991 beating of Rodney King. In my view, as a person who has taken a look at a lot of videos, every one of them should be looked at as a thing in itself, just as if you didn't have a video you would look at a crime or an alleged crime as a thing in itself. A video is just a tool, it's a very useful tool; it's not magic. But the incident has to be evaluated on its own merits, or lack thereof, not as a derivative of the Rodney King or any other case.

Lopez: Is there a net effect with all of these high-profile cases with videotapes on the news, right away talking about whether it is a race issue or not — is the media doing damage when we report on these cases like we do?

Cannon: Yes and no. The yes is, a video has a very emotional impact that a written report doesn't have. There's a current police scandal going on in Los Angeles. And as far as I can find out, it hasn't resulted in any widespread public outrage. It is certainly nothing of the magnitude of the Rodney King case and that's because there isn't a video to splash on the television every night.

I don't think it's damaging to see a picture of the Philadelphia incident or the King incident by itself. But what happens is that it tends to be used (as the King video was) as wallpaper, so that every time there is a report, every time there is a story you see this video clip and it has a cumulative effect on people, usually an emotional effect.

Now, where I say no is I think the videotape can be very useful. One of the reasons that the officers in the Rodney King case were able to be acquitted the first time and that they were also vindicated in civil proceedings, where they were found — although most people don't remember it — not liable for King's injury, was because the first part of the videotape showed King charging at one of the officers. If you had not had that first part of the video — as even the attorneys for the officers acknowledged — nobody would have believed it. So it cuts both ways. There have been numerous cases, which have not been well publicized, where videotapes have exonerated officers and there was a period of time — this was dropped for other reasons — when police officers in LA, for instance, wanted to have recording devices in their cars so they would have an answer if they were accused of brutality or insulting somebody. The video is a tool and it can be used for all kinds of purposes.

Lopez: Has there been a net effect on police departments nationwide of these kinds of incidents? For instance, has the media coverage of incidents in New York, all unique, led to the likes of the Central Park Puerto Rican Day Parade incident. Or is that to draw with too broad a brush?

Cannon: I think that is a fairly broad brush. I think that with the very big departments, these departments tend to have reputations of their own for good or ill — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia — and that when you see an alleged incident of police brutality it tends to be compared to other incidents in those cities. I think that the one thing that has happened, and I think that one would expect this to happen in the age we live in, is that a lot of police officers I know are sensitized to the idea that somebody may be videotaping what they are doing. Again, I think this can be useful or it can be harmful. It is certainly useful if it makes an officer think twice about doing something that he ought not to do. On the other hand, I think that in the situation that happened after the Lakers — to the immense pleasure of this correspondent — won the NBA championship, these officers were standing around the Staples Center afterward. And I know because I've talked to some of them, they were worried about moving against the crowd — because this was all on television — they were worried about being seen as too rough toward a demonstrator. I think that it is restraining in that case — the restraint in this case turned out okay, there was some vandalism, there were no serious injuries, but I don't like the idea that police officers are restrained from moving in on a mob because they might be videotaped doing it — and whenever that happens they are not going to look good. And I think it is fair to say that officers are usually — obviously Philadelphia is an exception — more afraid of being videotaped doing something offensively than they are of not doing enough or not moving quickly enough. There are usually greater penalties that attach to excessive force than to not doing anything. It's there, its part of the age, you're not going to change that.

Lopez: On Philadelphia, what can we see from the video?

Cannon: As the police commissioner there said, any fool can see that it doesn't look good. You cannot see from the video what is actually transpiring. You can see the swinging and kicking but you don't know exactly what damage they are doing to the suspect. What looks bad to my eye from that video is that nobody appears to be in control. It appears to be an almost unsupervised assault on this guy, and that's never good because any police action should be supervised. You cannot see from the video, at least I can't see, what they are actually doing, what harm they are actually inflicting, but it looks like it is out of control.

The other thing that I saw, at the end of the video — and I don't know how much of this incident the video encompasses — remember that was the problem in the Rodney King case, you had 80 seconds of an incident that had gone on for many minutes — it looks to me at the end that some people at the end are trying to pull cops off this guy. I don't know if that's because they are supervisors who realized that this thing had gotten out of hand or that they had seen the television cameras. It does not look good, but it raises some questions that cannot be answered by the video itself. You need to know the context of this video. You need to know how long the incident was going on. The video doesn't excuse you, you have the same responsibilities you would have if you didn't have the video. How long has this chase been going on? What has this guy done? How many of the officers themselves are caught up in the chase? How many of them are just wandering by? Are they brutally punishing someone because he shot a cop or are they themselves been shot at? Is this part of the pursuit? You do need the investigation.

It raises troublesome questions but it doesn't by itself provide the answers.

Lopez: Is it good, or is it necessary, that the Justice Department is involved?

Cannon: The Justice Department almost always becomes involved. They were involved in the Rodney King case from the beginning. That is pro forma often. If I were writing the story, it wouldn't be my lead — because they do that, they open an investigation that can mean everything or nothing.

Normally, any Justice Department under any attorney general will open the investigation and they'll leave it to local authorities to investigate. That's what they should do. It's a local matter, there shouldn't be a federal action unless the locals just don't do anything at all, which was the case in the old days in some of the Southern states.

Lopez: Are there any lessons the Philadelphia police department should bear in mind while investigating this incident?

Cannon: I guess what we've learned from other videotapes is that first of all we need to make sure that we have the entire videotape. In the celebrated King videotape, one of the reasons that the officers were exonerated in the first trial was that the television had been showing an incomplete video all along and when the jurors saw the complete tape, they became convinced that the news media had not dealt fairly with the issue. So, you need to see the whole tape and then you have to run back from that tape anything that happened so that you form a picture of the entire incident. The other lesson that we've learned is that you have to have some individual, an outsider who is respected in the community take a look at the whole thing, so the police aren't just investigating themselves.

You need to see the video in context, you need to know what happened before and you need to know what happened afterward. Police brutality should be punished severely, but you don't want to make a rush to judgment based on a scene that is part of a long and unfolding incident.

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