[quote=zk][quote=svelte]This is not a clear cut case.
Rodney King, with the beating caught on tape, that was clear cut.
[/quote]
I wouldn’t call the Rodney King case clear cut at all. The beating was caught on tape, but not what led up to it. King throwing two officers at a time off his back and charging them. A strong, enraged, violent man on the attack. That wasn’t shown on the tape.[/quote]
Exactly. Believe it or not, the portion of the altercation that would have been in favor of the cops WAS on tape, but the media didn’t show it. I was living in LA at the time and followed this case very closely. 99.99999% of the time, you saw the footage that showed the cops beating on Rodney King. Only once did I see a longer clip that showed the entire incident in a VERY different light. It showed the cops desperately trying to restrain Rodney King, but King kept getting back up and lunging at the cops. This tape showed Rodney King rearing up (arching back, as he was face down on the ground) and literally throwing the cops off his body, then he turned and charged at them.
What was also not emphasized was that during the altercation, a female cop had her gun trained on RK, but Sgt. Koon told her to put away the gun because he didn’t want anyone getting shot.
Under no circumstances was the coverage of that case balanced in any way. While I agree that there are horrific cases of unjustifiable police brutality, this was not one of them, IMHO.
What’s most astounding about the Rodney King incident is that the animals who beat and murdered totally innocent people during the riots (and then danced around and celebrated afterward), and those who torched the businesses of totally innocent people didn’t evoke the same kind of anger within the African-American community. They should have been at least as angry about these obviously racist actions as they were about the actions of the police officers who had some justification for their behavior. Rodney King was a violent, dangerous criminal, and has been nothing but trouble both before and after the incident; the innocent civilians and shopkeepers who were brutalized by these rioters were completely innocent, and they were victimized to a far greater extent than Rodney King.
