Lights, Camera, Arrest

“Kill the camera,� the voice says urgently. “Kill the camera.�

The voice is not Cecil B. DeMille’s. It is a sheriff’s deputy’s. The camera is mounted in the Twin Towers jail. It is taping six or seven deputies trying to control a suddenly “combative� prisoner in a wheelchair--a prisoner who wound up dead of a heart attack.

Just what does the videotape show? A cover-up of excessive force? Or a by-the-book maneuver that went tragically bad? A homicide, or an accident?

Ah, technology: the answer to our prayers, or another reason to start praying?

Los Angeles City Atty. James Hahn, who this week is watching 71 more convictions stroll out the jailhouse door because of dubious Rampart police testimony, has suggested that the LAPD’s newest recruit be electronic: audio recorders in undercover operations whenever feasible.

Eight years ago, after the city’s riots, the Christopher Commission advised that police cars be fitted out with tamper-proof microphones and video cameras. Last month, City Councilman Mike Feuer asked the LAPD to consider adding small “copcams� to its standard uniform kit.

In a week when Los Angeles’ mayor tells us two bits of every new dollar in the city’s budget for next year will have to go to pay for all the Rampart abuse lawsuits now lining up as if courtrooms were ATMs, a dispassionate electronic witness looks like a fine idea, maybe even a panacea. A few dollars invested in equipment, a few million saved in lawsuits.

Memo to the LAPD: Get wired.

Cops and civil libertarians, who often cannot even agree on the correct time, like this idea, probably because each is convinced it will prove they’ve been right all along.

See, the civil rights lawyers will say. Selective enforcement. An unjustified driving-while-black traffic stop. Excess force. Bingo.

Look there, the cops will say. We didn’t lay a hand on the guy. We did read him his rights. He wasn’t running away when we shot him. Told you so.

All the unresolved, agonizing police shooting would be unresolved no more: Did Margaret Mitchell come at police with a screwdriver before she was shot to death? Let’s go to the videotape. Did a sergeant order his troops to plant a gun on a gang member? Run that tape back and let’s look.

But go to these videotapes: the NFL’s instant replay experience; the watchful, careful pronouncements of Elian Gonzalez from his bed; the Simi Valley jurors who believed that what they saw happening to Rodney King was only a piece of the whole story; or the juries that watched Marion Barry use dope and John DeLorean gloat over drugs and were not altogether persuaded.

The camera is precise, but not eloquent. The camera cannot lie, but it cannot always tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but.

*

With all those gung-ho, bust-through-the-door “World’s Wildest Police Videos� shows on TV, do we have to ask what cops think of more relentless monitoring?

We do. As they say in Congress, “it’s in committee.�

Within six months the LAPD should begin testing prototypes of tamperproof in-car videos. The estimated quarter-million arrests, the 76,000 tapes of six to eight hours each that a year of policing Los Angeles would produce make for a monstrous storage and retrieval challenge that digital equipment could solve.

And, says Capt. Mike Moore in the LAPD’s management services, the Sheriff’s Department is sharing results of its experiment with the bodycam, which officers wear on their chests with the discretion to switch it on and off.

In Orange County, where cameras have been used for years, Newport Beach cops who groused about them at first embraced them after the video eye often sided with them in citizen complaints.

And something as simple as audio taping could mean “an increase in pleas as well as an increase in jury trial convictions,� predicted Sue L. Frauens, a supervising Los Angeles city attorney, in her memo to Hahn. In other words, we got the goods on you, pal.

There is bound to be LAPD resistance “as a safety issue� to taping some of the very kind of undercover operations that are most open to abuse. But that is precisely where they are needed. If video is simply the new-media version of the old-media world, where officers’ field notebooks could go conveniently missing, why bother?

How many times can the Rosemary Woods’ “I must have erased it by accident� excuse be believed? How many “kill the camera, kill the camera� moments can any department survive?

As Richard Pryor said--if it was Richard Pryor I saw on that videotape--�Who are you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?�

Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is [email protected].