Incident or Pattern?

If the altercation last Saturday night between two black activists and two white Long Beach police officers had run true to form, it would have attracted little attention and would have produced what the experts call a “swearing match.” The cops, under oath, would have sworn that they pulled over the activists’ car because it was weaving down Pacific Coast Highway and that one of the men threatened them and, while they were restraining him, smashed the plate-glass window of a hardware store with his elbow. The activists would have sworn that they had broken no traffic law and that, once pulled over, they were subjected to a torrent of profanity and excessive physical force that ended with the arresting officer’s pushing one of them through the plate-glass window. More likely than not, a trial court would have accepted the police version.

What changed this scenario, of course, was the videotape that NBC made of the whole incident with a hidden camera and a microphone. The edited tape, played and replayed in the last few days, strongly suggests that the version of events related by activists Don Jackson and Jeff Hill, both off-duty law-enforcement officers themselves, is closer to the truth than what the Long Beach policemen told their superiors in their formal report. The car was not weaving down the highway; the expletives came not from Jackson, who was booked for--among other things--suspicion of using offensive language, but from Officer Mark Dickey; it was Dickey who shoved Jackson’s head and arm through the window, then lied about it.

Jackson, a sergeant on administrative leave from the Hawthorne Police Department, has been criticized in some quarters for setting up this sting and for purposefully provoking an overreaction from the arresting officers by getting out of the car. Perhaps he was sassier than most citizens would consider prudent. But, whether or not the current investigations find that he was provocative, Jackson should be credited with turning the spotlight on a longstanding unresolved dispute that embroils many cities: Do predominantly white police departments routinely detain blacks without cause, harass them and use excessive force?

Jackson and Hill, leaders of the Police Misconduct Lawyer Referral Service, an organization dedicated to exposing racial discrimination in law-enforcement agencies, insist that the videotape proves their point. The roust on Pacific Coast Highway was “consistent with a pattern of abuse and excessive force” by the Long Beach force, says Jackson, citing dozens of citizen complaints from Long Beach blacks.

Maybe he is right; certainly many blacks share his perception, sometimes reinforced by personal experience, of racism among the police. But the videotape doesn’t tell the whole tale. It doesn’t explain why the Long Beach officers stopped that car last Saturday night, it doesn’t prove whether Officer Dickey genuinely felt menaced by Jackson, it doesn’t determine whether there was “lawful necessity” for the force that Dickey used, and it emphatically does not establish a pattern of racism in Long Beach or anywhere else.

Those are all issues, particularly the question of whether it was an isolated incident or part of a pattern, that should be investigated by the Los Angeles district attorney’s office and the FBI. We would urge that all parties cooperate with these inquiries--including NBC, which so far has balked at releasing a full, unedited videotape. That is the only way, as Long Beach Mayor Ernie Kell said so forcefully Tuesday, “to find out what happened here and make sure it never happens again.”