Friday A/V Club: Before Rodney King

We live in an time of two-way
surveillance. On one hand, governments and other powerful
institutions can track us more closely than ever before. On the
other hand, ordinary civilians can
pull out a cell phone and start recording if they see a cop or
some other official doing something abusive, irresponsible, or just
embarrassing.

We all know that. But there was a time when hardly anyone saw
such a future coming. Four
decades ago, it was widely assumed that new surveillance
technologies would serve only the state and the corporate world.
The idea that ordinary people might point a lens back at the
powerful didn’t really take hold until a witness with a
camcorder recorded
the beating of Rodney King in 1991.

Yet that wasn’t the first time a man with a camera was at the
right place to tape some cops who’d gotten out of control. If you
were attentive enough, you could see the outlines of the new era
taking shape even before King came along. Two years
earlier, for example, in Cerritos, California,

a bridal shower at the home of the Dole family, natives
of Samoa, apparently attained a level of festivity that provoked
the interest of the sheriff’s department. In all, according to
accounts in the Los Angeles Times, about 100 officers from
three law enforcement agencies showed up for the event, bringing
with them a helicopter whose noise and blinding searchlights
reportedly added to the confusion.

The police said that they were pelted with rocks and beer bottles.
Neighbors and party guests said the cops initiated the violence in
which 34 persons were arrested and an undetermined number
injured.

A cam-equipped neighbor decided to unobtrusively tape what he could
of the scene. He got shots of an officer beating people on the
ground who, it appeared, were already restrained. Dismissing the
images on the tape, the sheriff said, “It would be unusual to use a
baton if they were handcuffed.”

Unusual or not, local newscasts gave their viewers a picture of the
law in action somewhat different from the one the police would
prefer to project.

The story ultimately ended with what the Los Angeles
Times called
“the largest civil rights damage award against police in California
history.” Here’s a news report that includes some of the neighbor’s
footage, starting about 48 seconds in:

The Dole family didn’t come first either. A year before police
attacked their home, two men carrying cameras—Clayton Patterson and
Paul Garrin—happened to be on the scene during the
Tompkins Square Park Riot of 1988, when squatters and cops
clashed over control of a park in Manhattan. When officers started
clubbing bystanders and otherwise trampling people’s rights, there
was videotape to back up the victims’ complaints. In one meta
moment, Patterson got footage of the police smashing Garrin into
the wall.

There may well be even earlier examples. But it’s the events in
Cerritos and in Tompkins Square Park that were cited in a prescient
piece Peter Karman wrote for the leftist paper In
These Times. (That’s where that passage I quoted about the
Dole party came from.) The article was titled “Little Brother Is
Watching Too”—in those days, that headline wasn’t
a cliché yet—and it appeared in 1989, long before the world had
heard the name Rodney King.

Citing a variety of examples—not just camcorders but radar
detectors and the tools used by hackers—Karman argued that the
surveillance state was being turned upside down. He also noted the
central role that market forces were playing in this
transformation, though he phrased this in a way calibrated to
appeal to In These Times‘ socialist audience: “owing to
the treasonous nature of modern capitalism,” he wrote, “the same
corporations selling the tools of social control to Big Brother
were happily adding to their profits by selling their antidotes to
little brother.”

Later in the article, he extended the point:

The videocams with which Patterson and the Cerritos
resident caught the police at their worst first began to bloom
years ago in parking lots, lobbies, workplaces and,
surreptitiously, in the ceilings of those blank motel rooms to
which undercover cops bring the subjects of stings. Banks of
monitors showing bare corridors and newscasts of time-signed scenes
of politicians stuffing money into briefcases became commonplaces
of our visual landscape. We also knew, of course, that we were
being watched on the job—but knew, too, that we would probably bore
our surveyors to death before giving their tape machines anything
to pop their heads about.

Commercially speaking, there were only so many hallways, washrooms
and cops that could be mounted with videos. Real profit lay in
putting a videocam to the eyeball of every tourist, nostalgist or
artist—in short, just about everyone. Once that happened, the
technological tables again turned on Big Brother.

Today millions of Americans carry pocket-sized devices that can
not just record the police but can transmit their footage to the
world. In the future, those tools will be even smaller and more
ubiquitous. (If Google Glass–style
technologies catch on with the wider public, Karman’s line about
“putting a videocam to the eyeball” may prove even more prophetic
than it looks now.) And just about everyone understands this. What
was a counterintuitive thesis in 1989 is now the conventional
wisdom. It’s reached the point where some anti-authoritarians have
had to start issuing
reminders that these technologies can still be used by powerful
people too.

But there was a time when most people didn’t realize that anyone
but the powerful could deploy this tech. Kudos to Karman
for seeing so early that the future would be more complicated than
that.

(For some of Patterson’s footage from the Tompkins Square
Riot, go here.
For some of Garrin’s footage, go here. For past
editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)