.
For over a year, Americans were shown again and again a frightening videotape of white police officers beating a black man. Indeed, the sight was so shocking that the president of the United States remarked on national television that he was surprised by the not-guilty verdict.
No one who saw the few seconds of the video that were repeatedly shown could imagine an acquittal of any of the officers involved.
But those who saw what the news media refused to show, or watched the entire trial, or understood that overly harsh charges were brought against the policemen, had a far fuller understanding of what happened, and why the jury reached its verdict. They saw a 230-pound, six-foot-three-inch man, with a .19 blood alcohol level (.08 is legal intoxication), acting wildly and lunging at policemen, four of whom he actually threw off.
Those who saw this, or learned of it from the prosecution’s eyewitnesses, understood that the policemen had suspected that King was under the influence of the hallucinogenic drug PCP. Like other PCP suspects, he could not be subdued by “tazing,” the shooting of powerful electric shocks. Even after being shot twice with the Taser gun, King still resisted being handcuffed…
Only after their verbal orders had been ignored and “tazing” and other techniques had failed to subdue him, did the police use their batons to beat King. And all this was after an eight-mile car chase at speeds of up to one hundred miles an hour on a freeway, and eighty miles an hour through city streets.
It is almost impossible to overstate how responsible the media were for the rage over the Rodney King verdict. Los Angeles and national news programs deliberately and repeatedly showed only the most brutal seconds of the tape, thus never providing viewers with a context…
…Roger Parloff, a Democratic attorney and senior journalist for American Lawyer, concluded after viewing the entire tape that he “might have done the same thing the jury did.” He ended his article with these words:
I can’t remember a time when I have ever felt so hesitant to say what I believe… And I am terrified at the prospect of quotation out of context. After all, imagine if the media were to summarize [my] article the way it summarized the trial. [24]
Yet the New York Times and other leading newspapers, whenever discussing the incident, always referred to King as “the black motorist Rodney King,” as if white police were looking for an innocent black motorist to beat up.
Rodney King was anything but an innocent “black motorist.” In 1989, he was arrested for armed robbery and served nine months in state prison. He was a felon on parole when the chase occurred. He knew that, had he been caught, he would have been reincarcerated, which is why he drove at life-threatening speeds.
Had King been described even half the time as “the paroled armed robber who had just eluded police in a hundred-mile-per-hour car chase,” passions might not have been nearly as stirred up. Certainly, had news programs shown more of the tape, the incident would never have engendered as much rage as it did.
[24] American Lawyer, June 1992.
Dennis Prager
Chapter 22, “Blacks, Liberals, and the Los Angeles Riots”
Think a Second Time
