A Free-Will Decision

KNBC has done the public a service by broadcasting more of the videotaped altercation between two black activists and two white policemen in Long Beach. The broadcast should help the investigations being conducted by the Long Beach Police Department, the FBI and the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.

The incident occurred Jan. 14; two white policemen stopped two black men in an older car; at the end of the ensuing altercation one of the policemen appears to have smashed one of the men, Don Jackson, into a plate-glass window. By agreement with Jackson, who said he was tryingto expose police brutality, NBC videotaped the whole incident and broadcast parts of it on national television.

KNBC broadcast those parts and more in its “News Conference” program Sunday morning in the context of a discussion of the incident that included Jackson and a representative of theLong Beach Police Officers Assn., which had asked to see the unbroadcast portions of the tapes.An attorney for the association, Michael Hannon, said he was satisfied that all relevant portions had been seen.

It is important to note, by the way, that NBC broadcast the tapes of its own will and not under duress from any of the parties to the litigation that has arisen from the incident. NBC, like this newspaper and nearly all other newspapers and broadcasters, believes that the constitutions of the United States and of California generally forbid courts to require the release of unpublished notes, photographs or tapes. This prohibition, which at a casual glance may seem unduly restrictive, is necessary to an unfettered press, for otherwise courts, police, defendants and other parties to lawsuits would tend to use the press for their own ends, and its reputation for disinterested objectivity would be imperiled.

The broadcast tapes tend to reinforce our previous impressions of the incident: that after the two policemen stopped the car, one of them overreacted to Jackson’s distinctly unmeek response, and did in fact push his head through the window. The investigation will establish the facts; the larger question to be answered is whether, as Jackson claims, the roust on Pacific Coast Highway was “consistent with a pattern of abuse and excessive force” by Long Beach police.