Mugged (21 page)

But the public didn’t see the full tape. Everyone with a TV saw only the KTLA-edited version that ran continuously for the next year on all the networks—“like wallpaper,” in the words of CNN executive vice president Ed Turner.
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Even the jurors on the second, federal civil rights trial were leaning toward acquittal when their deliberations began—and that was after the explosive riots sparked by the first jury’s acquittal of the officers. That was after the mayor of Los Angeles had declared the officers guilty of a crime, saying of the first verdict, “The jury told the world that what we all saw with our own eyes was not a crime.” That was after even the president of the United States had proclaimed the officers guilty.

A few days into the Los Angeles riots, President George Bush addressed the nation from the Oval Office and said: “It was hard to understand how the verdict could possibly square with the video. Those civil rights leaders with whom I met were stunned. And so was I and so was Barbara and so were my kids.” Then he announced that he would be pursuing a federal prosecution of the acquitted policemen.
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The federal jury knew its job was to convict the officers, whatever the evidence—and it did. A measure of the second jury’s trepidation is revealed
by the fact that the forewoman of the first jury—the mean, racist jury that acquitted the officers—appeared on
Nightline
with her full name. The foreman on the second jury would only go by “Bob” on the very same show.

Neither jury thought race was a factor. The police department investigation concluded that adrenaline and fear, not racism, fueled the confrontation. Even Rodney King didn’t think his race was a factor in the beatdown (at least until the second trial, when he suddenly recalled hearing the officers call him the N-word). To summarize, both juries, the police and Rodney King said it wasn’t racism.

The media’s conclusion? Racism.

The riots that erupted hours after the officers’ acquittals were entirely the fault of KTLA. That station was looking for more of an Emmett Till– type story, so it deliberately fed the public misinformation. KTLA knew exactly what it was doing. Yes, the rioters were more responsible, but to paraphrase Jesus, ye have criminals with you always. If KTLA had simply run the full eighty-one-second tape, the public would have been prepared for the possibility of acquittal. Everyone would have said, “Well, he
was
lunging at the cop, I wonder what else he did.…”

Not only did the media show only part of the videotape, ad nauseum, but they did everything in their power to turn up the dial on ghetto rage. King was instantly dubbed a “black motorist”—as if he had been out for a Sunday drive after lunch with the parson in the tin lizzy, wearing a jaunty cap and goggles, as opposed to a drunk, violent ex-con leading police on a dangerous high-speed chase.

Foreshadowing the OJ trial, the media considered it highly probative that earlier in the night, Officer Powell had referred in a private communication to a domestic violence call as something “out of
Gorillas in the Mist
.” But forepersons on both juries said that race did not figure into their deliberations at all. In fact, “Bob” reported that it was the younger jurors, rather than the two black jurors, who seemed to see things from King’s point of view.
¹⁶

It was not as widely reported—meaning it was reported in a single newspaper—that Officer Koon had once given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a black transvestite prostitute with sores on his mouth after the man collapsed in a police station lockup. When the prostitute died, the medical examiner confirmed that he had had AIDS. Koon explained to one stunned officer that he did it because the transvestite prostitute “was created in the image and likeness of God, and if he could keep him alive, he was going to do that.”
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Ted Koppel asked the forewoman of the first jury if the ensuing riots had given her “any second thoughts at all about what you had done?”
¹⁸
The jurors? They did their job, and properly according to everyone familiar with the evidence.

How about KTLA? That TV station was rewarded by the industry for deceptively editing a video in order to create the false impression of racist cops savagely wailing on a random “black motorist.” Anyone with a passing familiarity with the facts of the case—say, someone working at a television news bureau—had to know an acquittal was highly likely on the basis of the actual facts of the case. Just for fun, KTLA’s producers and news directors piled up kindling, firewood and lighter fluid and waited to see what happened.

THE LA RIOTS

The LA riots were a calculated explosion—and a guaranteed media ratings booster!

In a poll, 87 percent of black respondents said they did not approve of the riots. 37 percent thought the riots were totally unjustified, period, while 50 percent disapproved of the riots but understood why the rioters responded to the acquittals the way they did. Only 9 percent thought the riots were justified.
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(Among white liberals, 99 percent agreed with the statement, “the riots were great TV.”)

A
Los Angeles Times
poll asked what would prevent a future riot. The runaway favorite, among several options, was “more moral leadership,” garnering 50 percent support from both blacks and whites, as well as from about a third of Latinos.
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We would not be getting that moral leadership from Congresswoman Maxine Waters. She responded to the officers’ acquittal in the King case by taking to the streets, chanting “No justice, No Peace!”
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U.S. News & World Report
said the five days of mind-bogglingly destructive riots were “bred out of decades of racism and police brutality and nourished by the enraging conditions of ghetto life: unemployment, poverty, family breakdown, gangs, drugs, welfare and Reagan-era cutbacks in aid.”
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KTLA shouldn’t have taunted the wolfpack, but that doesn’t mean we want to understand the wolves’ feelings.

In the most infamous incident from the riots, a white truck driver, Reginald Denny, drove his eighteen-wheeler into the middle of the mayhem, unaware of what was going on because he was listening to country music on the radio. At the corner of Florence and Normandie, rioters smashed his passenger window with a rock, dragged Denny from the car and began beating him to a pulp.

As Henry Keith Watson stood on Denny’s neck, other black thugs repeatedly kicked and stomped him, smashed his head with a claw hammer, and threw a five-pound oxygenator—stolen from another bloodied white truck driver—at his head. In a final gruesome act, Damian “Football” Williams picked up a slab of concrete and heaved it directly on Denny’s head, knocking him unconscious for five minutes and fracturing his skull in ninety-one places. Williams then did a victory dance around Denny’s body, pointed at Denny and flashed gang signs to the hovering news chopper that was filming the entire attack.

Other black rioters took photos of Denny’s brutalized body, spat on him and stole his wallet. One black man stopped on his motorcycle and fired a shotgun at the gas tank on Denny’s truck, mercifully missing.

Bobby Green, a black truck driver who lived in the neighborhood—one of the more affluent and stable in South Central LA—saw the beating of Denny on TV and rushed out to the street to rescue him. With the help of three other blacks running interference in their cars, Green drove Denny’s truck, with Denny in it, to a hospital. They got there just in the nick of time. Denny went into seizure as soon as they arrived.

The riots did finally produce a hate crime involving paint, but, unlike the hoax attack in the Bronx earlier that year, this one actually happened. It was captured on videotape. After savagely beating and kicking Fidel Lopez until he was unconscious, rioter Damian Williams painted the unconscious man’s face black, then pulled down Lopez’s pants and painted his penis and testicles black, as another attacker joyfully announced on his videotape of the attack, “He’s black now! He’s black now!”

Lopez would have been one of the dead, but an ex-con, ex-pimp black minister, Bennie Newton, threw himself over Lopez’s body and told the crowd, “Kill him and you have to kill me, too.”
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Where’s the Hollywood movie about Bennie Newton?

Representative Waters did not champion the heroic blacks like Green or Newton, who risked their necks to save the lives of brutalized victims. She championed Damian Williams and the other violent animals who did the brutalizing. Williams’s mother told the
Los Angeles Times
that no sooner had
Williams been arrested than Waters “just showed up at the door” and said “‘I’m Maxine Waters’” and offered help to Williams and the other young men in the neighborhood, saying, “her doors were open.”
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Waters insisted on calling the bloody, pointless riots a “rebellion,” as if a larger cause were at stake, something other than thievery, murder and mayhem. As she explained: “If you call it a riot, it sounds like it was just a bunch of crazy people who went out and did bad things for no reason. I maintain it was somewhat understandable, if not acceptable. So I call it a rebellion.” Yes, their
cause juste
was that they wanted new TVs and free liquor.

The people who bore the brunt of this “rebellion” were the Korean Americans who moved into South Central to do business, primarily running small markets after the big grocery chains pulled out, an act that had been a mystery…until the LA riots.

In one of the accounts of the riots, Sergeant Lisa Phillips said she and her partner were trying to rescue a Korean girl who was stuck in her car, being besieged by hundreds of rioters:

That’s what Maxine said was “understandable, if not acceptable.” Calling their celebrated anger “righteous” and a “reaction to a lot of injustice,” Waters said: “There were mothers who took this as an opportunity to take some milk, to take some bread, to take some shoes. They are not crooks.”
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U.S. taxpayers already supply the unlucky and the lazy with food stamps, free school breakfast and lunch programs, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), free and subsidized housing for the poor, free medical care for the poor, direct cash payments to the poor—all at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars each year. Half a dozen federal agencies administer a score of programs to ensure that the poor in America are housed, fed, clothed and cared for. The only thing missing is a government worker to lift the spoon to the
poor person’s lips. The disadvantaged are fed so well, the leading health problem among them is obesity. But when a black mob erupts in a murderous rage, looting liquor stores and killing white and Korean victims, a U.S. congresswoman tells us it’s because they needed milk and bread.
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As was getting to be a habit, the media blamed the cops for the behavior of blacks.
U.S. News & World Report
said, “the prolonged, televised absence of police at the riot’s epicenter virtually invited thousands of would-be looters to believe they could steal and rampage with impunity.”
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Virtually invited! They pulverized Asians, Hispanics and whites and did a billion dollars worth of property damage. The rioters even attacked a carload of nuns. What else could the little darlings be expected to do? It was the cops’ fault for not stopping them.

The elites treated blacks like children—unusually violent children—who could not be held accountable, even when they were captured on news cameras beating random passersby nearly to death.

Fifty-four people were killed in the riots. Thousands more were injured—and consider that Reginald Denny counts as injured, not killed.

Every single member of the crack KTLA news team that deliberately fed the public the misinformation that led to this carnage ought to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder, worried about a relative of Reginald Denny or a financially ruined Korean sneaking up on him.

But far from hiding, the people responsible for the misleading tape brag about their Peabody Award.
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At least we have their names.

KTLA’s Ryan Cowan was the first to see the tape.

Reporter Stan Chambers took the tape to the police for comment and was the on-air reporter who presented the deceptive tape to unsuspecting viewers. Before the tape aired, Lieutenant Fred Nixon of the LAPD’s Press Information Office made the obvious point to Chambers that “As you and I both know, it’s impossible to look at a videotape and tell precisely what the justification was.”
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And he was talking about the full eighty-one-second tape.