Slow Down the Rush to Judgment

Because of TV, it looks bad for the cops.

Police brutality may, indeed, be the issue regarding Monday’s TV chopper footage of Riverside County Sheriff’s deputies briefly roughing up suspected illegal immigrants after an 80-mile chase of a battered pickup truck that ended in South El Monte, with most of the 21 occupants fleeing, only to be apprehended later.

Push the caution button, though.

It’s too early to leap to conclusions about those widely released KCAL-TV Channel 9 pictures now repeatedly being beamed across the United States, stamping our brains with their fleeting violent images of cops described as being out of control. “It seems to be excessive force,” Bryant Gumbel said with care on NBC’s “Today” program Tuesday, his tone properly circumspect.

Unfortunately, TV winds are being whipped in that direction largely without such restraint, with this incident being lumped automatically with home video pictures of the notorious savage clobbering of Rodney G. King by Los Angeles cops in 1991.

“Blistering beatings!” KCBS-TV Channel 2 shouted about this latest incident on its noon news Tuesday.

“Two people were clubbed over and over,” a KTTV-TV Channel 11 reporter declared Tuesday morning. The implication of “over and over” was that prolonged violence was involved. The pictures, however, seemed to show only a lone man being hit several times by a baton-wielding sheriff’s deputy. The man appears to offer no resistance. In the footage, at least, the beating did not appear to be prolonged. That’s not to say it wasn’t, only that the TV pictures don’t show it happening.

As for the second victim, the videotape shows a seemingly passive person identified as a woman appearing to be hit with a baton perhaps twice, but hardly being clubbed “over and over.” Again, it may have happened, but the evidence isn’t on the screen.

And what about that woman? Numerous TV accounts have described footage of a deputy “smashing her head” onto the hood of the pickup truck. Perhaps that is what happened. Yet look closely, for the footage shows only a woman being aggressively slammed against the hood with her head down prior to being cuffed with her hands behind her back. Does her head hit the hood? Possibly, but it’s hard to tell from the overhead camera angle. Was there intentional “smashing” of her head onto the hood? Possibly. But that also can’t be determined from the angle.

In other words, the charges may be true, but the pictures don’t fit the description.

Meanwhile, “brutal beating” was the inflammatory label initially applied to this incident by ABC’s “Good Morning America” Tuesday. Interestingly, the program properly identified the two people who were struck as “suspected” illegal immigrants, while attaching no “suspected” or “alleged” to “brutal.”

We should have learned by now to withhold judgment about TV pictures until all the facts are in.

The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department was “very embarrassed” by the pictures, Sgt. Mark Lohman, a spokesman for the department, said Monday. And the two deputies involved were put on paid leave while the incident is being investigated. On Tuesday, however, Lohman appeared to be tempering his comments just a bit, telling one TV interviewer who was pressing for details only that “everything we know now is on face value,” based on the TV footage.

Even if this doesn’t turn out to be Rodney King II, the TV pictures of possible baton action in South El Monte are a striking example of the positive role that chopper coverage potentially can play--just as Bob Tur, in a hovering KCOP-TV Channel 13 chopper, likely saved the life of trucker Reginald Denny by reporting his plight during the Los Angeles riots that followed the first King trial. And news choppers galore monitored the now-famous pursuit of then-murder suspect O.J. Simpson’s white Ford Bronco.

But here’s the downside.

Be assured that national publicity over this incident will encourage Los Angeles stations to again gratuitously hit the skies en masse like the Royal Air Force defending the realm against German Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain during World War II.

As if they needed all that much encouragement. Even before Monday, L.A. news choppers were getting ever-increasing air time, as local news edged toward resumption of the Great Chopper Wars of a few years ago, when nothing that moved on the ground eluded the live lens in the sky.

Yet, now viewers can anticipate even more preemptions of regular programming for live chopper coverage, even when stations are fuzzy on the details of the high-speed chase on the screen. It moves, it grooves.

Inevitably, such footage gets bannered and prominently featured in regular newscasts because freeway pursuits depict action, and action excites viewers, diverting them from vastly more significant non-crime stories that aren’t being covered.

On Monday, this obsession may have paid off. Almost always, though, the payoff is empty, entailing all of the risks of live TV without matching the hyperbolic advance billing. Nonetheless, get ready, Southern California, for that next hot story featuring live pictures of a spine-tingling, nerve-jangling, adrenalin-pumping, heart-stopping, eye-popping chase involving two kids on skateboards. And why not? Local news priorities are set in stone.

If it speeds, it leads.