Videotape Haunts Officers Who Were at Beating Scene

One says he cannot fall asleep without the image of “that videotape” appearing before his eyes, while another fights tears as he speaks of how mixed up he is.

Another officer with less than a year’s experience in the field directed traffic yards away while Rodney G. King was beaten. Still another Los Angeles police officer, his voice tight with tension before slamming down the phone, said of his life since the March 3 incident: “It’s been like . . . hell.”

However peripheral their roles that night, no matter their inexperience or subsequent anguish, 17 officers who allegedly stood by while colleagues beat a motorist now find themselves the focus of investigations.

Most of those officers contacted refused to be interviewed, and several clearly resent being involved in the King investigation. “I am fed up with this crap!” said one officer when reached by phone. “I did nothing wrong! . . . I didn’t see anything! And I’m being hung like everybody else!”

But two Los Angeles Police Department patrolmen, who spoke last week on the condition of anonymity, offered a look at their side of the story and its emotional toll.

“I’m definitely losing sleep over this,” one of the officers said. “The first thing you see when you close your eyes at night--and the first thing you see when you keep waking up all during the night--is that videotape.”

“I’ve never been in any trouble myself and this has just been a real stressful incident,” the other officer said.

“It’s all I hear about,” he continued, shifting anxiously from one foot to another and pausing often, as if to hold back tears. “Everywhere I go people talk about this. Everything I turn on . . . they’re talking about it. It’s just hard to escape it.”

Speaking at their homes, the two officers said they and other officers arrived at staggered times as they responded to a call for backup and saw only portions of King’s arrest. At least five of the officers on the scene were still on probation because they had less than a year’s experience in the field and were there with their training officers, they noted.

Both also said they have learned more from newspapers, television and the videotape than from personal observation. One maintained that by the time he got there, he saw nothing he considered improper.

“At the point I arrived, I didn’t see anything incorrect. What I saw was a person already ‘tased,’ and he was being given orders to lay down and put his hands behind his back, and he wasn’t doing that,” the officer said, referring to a Taser gun.

“I only saw three or four hits with a baton, then they stopped,” the officer continued, adding that those blows--the tail end of a beating consisting of an alleged 56 blows--were delivered to King’s legs and thighs. “Nothing out of policy with that,” the officer said.

The officer spoke of how the average citizen does not understand the realities of a police officer’s work and “the dirty, rotten, nasty stuff you have to do to people in a fight.

“Some of it looks pretty bad,” the officer said of the videotape.

“Beating with a baton does not look nice but unfortunately it’s something we have to do sometimes to take someone into custody,” he said.

“We’re not paid to get hurt or to get killed. Tina was killed three weeks ago,” he continued, in reference to slain Los Angeles policewoman Tina Kerbrat, “and everyone has forgotten all about her now, haven’t they?”

All told, 25 officers from three different agencies--the Los Angeles Police Department, the California Highway Patrol, and the Los Angeles Unified School District--were at the scene. Four LAPD officers have already been indicted for the beating; two LAPD officers were in a helicopter overhead, and two more are believed to have remained in their cars--leaving 13 LAPD officers, two CHP officers, and two officers for the school district as bystanders, according to LAPD Cmdr. Rick Dinse, who has been supervising the department’s investigations.

“We’re going to see just who has culpability here and fairly and objectively evaluate each person’s actions,” Dinse said Wednesday.