Video Crews Sell a Vision of Nightly Street Crime : Media: Risk-taking free-lance cameramen feed TV stations and help shape public’s image of urban violence.

Sooner or later, the regulars who loiter every night on the sidewalks near 11th and Blaine, just west of downtown Los Angeles, notice a pair of white vans idling in a Chevron station lot near the Harbor Freeway. Some assume the vans belong to the station. Others figure they hide undercover police.

One wino knew for sure. Early one morning, reeking of Gallo and cigarettes, he lurched up to the vans. “Bet you got some good stuff tonight,” the wino announced to the four men sitting inside. “If it’s something bad, this old white van got to be there.”

The vans belong to the “Bad News Bears” of Newsreel Video Service, free-lance teams of cameramen who plumb city streets all night, searching for crime and fires. Operating out of the Chevron lot, the vans and their two-man crews race from crime scene to crime scene until dawn, capturing raw footage of the night’s horrors for sale to television news shows the next day.

For better or worse, the cameramen have become a part of the inner city’s nighttime fabric. Their videotapes of drive-bys, hostage dramas and gun battles shape the public’s image of crime in Los Angeles and, ultimately, of life in the city’s poorer neighborhoods--a perception that residents in those communities sometimes resent as unjustified.

It’s not that the “ paparazzi of the underworld” are inaccurate or willfully distort life in the inner city, says Van Gordon Sauter, former president of CBS News who is now a professor of journalism ethics at UC Berkeley.

“The problem is not so much misrepresentation, but rather that there’s this sameness to (the video footage),” Sauter says. “It feeds whatever attitudes viewers already bring when they sit down in front of their sets each morning . . . and you eventually begin to tune out that world entirely.”

But in a competitive business with a bottomless appetite for dramatic visual footage, the video free-lancers give stations what they want.

“Like every other station in town, we’re eager every morning to see what they’ve got,” said KTLA news director Warren Cereghino, adding that the city is “going to hell in a handbasket and unfortunately, the (video) stringers are holding up a mirror.”

The video free-lancers work alone by default, simply because the rest of the city’s media have long given up on sending their own people out after dark. Newspapers have devalued crime news and television stations are constantly looking for new ways to scrimp on their budgets. So each night, the free-lancers get a firsthand look at the shifting relationship among police, citizens and criminals that has emerged in the wake of the Rodney King beating.

The free-lancers are mostly a wild breed, men who clock speeds of 70 m.p.h. over rutted streets to film the tail end of a firefight or a gunshot victim splayed out on a gurney. They think like cops, dress like dockworkers and routinely risk trouble by aiming their blinding klieg lights into hostile crowds.

Rich Taylor, a ponytailed former car mechanic and heavy metal rock guitarist, spoke for them all one night last summer as he raced to a shooting. “We’re maniacs,” said Taylor, who a few weeks ago moved on to other work.

If the free-lance video business ever had a code of conduct, it has been long junked. One outfit was known for driving around in a car painted like a police black-and-white in order to slip past police lines. Another company employed a cameraman who bragged about his arrest record. While Newsreel’s owner, Gary Arnote, calls his men the “Bad News Bears,” he expects them to use good sense out on the street. That doesn’t prevent them from tailing their rivals or, when followed, leading them on aimless chases through darkened city streets.

One night, arriving late at a gun battle between an off-duty Los Angeles policeman and an automated teller machine bandit in an East Los Angeles shopping mall, a cameraman for the Bad News Bears raged when he saw that two competitors from Citycopter, a rival free-lance outfit, had beaten him to the scene. Citycopter has been Newsreel’s bitterest enemy--known for sending cameramen out in a white van that mirrored Newsreel’s trademark vehicles.

For the next half-hour, as he concentrated on taping the wounded officer, the cameraman tried to psych out his rivals. He whispered curses when they turned their camera on--just about loud enough to make their soundtracks unusable.

Free-lancers try not to linger too long at crime scenes. Get in, shoot some tape, get out--it is a philosophy born of expediency and fear. A good night means bringing back footage from several crime scenes, which requires them to keep moving.

Safety worries also keep them hopping. The obtrusive presence of cameras at crime scenes, particularly in the months after the King beating, can set off an edgy crowd. Responding to a shooting one night on Alsace Avenue, one cameraman slung his gear over his shoulder and turned around to find himself faced by five furious gang members.

“They told him to put the camera away or they’d kill him,” said Brent Kaplan, 22, a Newsreel rookie cameraman who was on the scene that night. “He didn’t stick around.”

New hires at Newsreel are always reminded about the July, 1989, night when two cameramen were ambushed after trying to tape a crime scene near the Mar Vista Gardens projects. Rich Farmer and Don Fajardo retreated to their van under a barrage of beer bottles. The bottles kept coming as the van drove off, smashing through windows, raining glass shards into Fajardo’s cheeks and shattering Farmer’s arm. Bleeding and dazed, driving aimlessly through Mar Vista and Venice, the cameramen phoned Arnote, who called police and paramedics.

Afterward, Arnote covered the vans’ windows with shatterproof coats of Mylar. “As long as we’re inside, we’re OK,” he said. “Unfortunately, we can’t film from there.”

The Bad News Bears work long shifts, shooting film as late as 6 a.m. before they call television stations to pitch their “exclusives.” Each strip of footage nets Newsreel no more than $125. Arnote dreams of the day when his rivals are out of business and he can transform his company into a “full-scale video news service.”

A former photographer with the gruff facade of an old sea captain, Arnote gave up filming to concentrate on running the business. He coordinates the film crews and logs the previous night’s footage in a massive electronic library. About 7,000 stories are on file; 200 more come in each month. In August alone, he filed footage from several dozen gang drive-by shootings, the torching of a woman in Watts, the random shooting of a Datsun ZX passenger on Vermont Avenue, a multiple narcotics slaying in South-Central--relentless, numbing swatches of Los Angeles’ nightly terror.

“He’s got stuff going back years,” said Brent Kaplan. “It’s like a history of the city’s bad side.”

Kaplan is a Hollywood hopeful who immersed himself in his camera work, hoping it will one day lead into the film industry. “I don’t want to sit behind a desk,” he said. Instead, he spent his summer behind a steering wheel, balancing a Thomas Bros. map guide on one knee and a cellular phone on his shoulder while piloting his van down obscure surface streets.

One September night, he peeled out from the Chevron station, fiddling with the dials of his scanners. The radios blared an electronic river of noise, a swirl of crime bulletins, cop chatter, choked sirens, static, yelps, whistles, squeals, disembodied drawls and cutoff sentences.

Emerging from the din came a police bulletin about a man firing shots at police from the roof of a Koreatown apartment building near 7th Street and Burlington Avenue. At the same time, a woman with a gun had barricaded herself in an apartment four blocks away. Free-lancers have to constantly make judgment calls--never knowing whether they might miss a hot story by going somewhere else.

“I think we ought to go to 7th Street,” Kaplan said, flipping through a city map. “At least we’ve got shots there.”

Kaplan and another crew member, who was behind the wheel, skidded up to 7th Street before police were able to cordon off the area. The driver parked the van directly in the gunman’s line of fire. When officers blocked the street, the cameramen were left stranded inside police lines.

Officers standing at the corner, just out of shooting range, told Kaplan they were uncertain where the gunman was hiding. Gawkers kept walking into the line of fire, forcing police to sweep them off the streets before any action could be taken. An LAPD helicopter thudded overhead, a voice booming out over its public address system.

“There are people shooting,” the voice warned. “Go westbound on 7th, please. There are people shooting. Please get off the corner. They are about to start shooting.”

A stooped elderly man hobbled into range of the hidden gunman, who at the moment had stopped firing. The old man crossed Burlington in slow, mincing steps, finally reaching safety on the other side. “Amazing,” said a cop who ran up, too late to warn the old man off. “These people got a death wish.”

Kaplan took some random footage of SWAT officers hiding behind cars and ducking into apartment stairwells. But the officers were too far off, almost a block away and submerged in darkness. All the cameramen could do was wait, hoping they might see better action.

After an hour--an eternity for free-lancers--the siege was over. Word came over the cops’ radios that the gunman had been captured without a shot. Free to approach the barricade site, Kaplan went up to the apartment but found nothing to film.

The Bad News Bears dread such moments. Only the most sensational footage is usually bought by the morning news shows. Cameramen have to choose their crimes carefully.

“If it’s a triple shooting or a good double shooting or a dead child, TV’ll use it, no questions asked,” Kaplan said. “If it’s just another dead gangbanger, who cares?”

Remembering the other barricade incident three blocks away, the Bad News Bears jogged back to the van. They raced over to Olympic, but found police cars driving off and the street littered with stamped-out flares.

The woman who was holed up in her apartment was already gone, dragged off after SWAT teams burst into her unit. It was another incident missed. Worse, as he trudged back to his van, Kaplan ran into two Citycopter cameramen who had filmed the entire scene.

“Just getting here?” one of the competitors taunted. “Aren’t you guys just a little slow? Too bad. Grand slam for us.”

The Citycopter crew walked away, braying with laughter. Kaplan stewed silently, packing up his camera. Back in the van, he looked at his watch.

“Well, could be worse,” he said. “It’s only 2 a.m. Hey, we’ve got the whole night ahead of us. Let’s boogie.”

NEXT: The morning that sheriff’s deputies came to Ramona Gardens.