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The Story:
March 3, 1991, Los Angeles, California. Rodney Glen King III was watching a ball game with a few friends, knocking back a few cold ones. After the game, King was heading west on the Foothill Freeway with two of his buddies, Bryant Allen and Freddie Helms. Around 12:30 a.m., King noticed a police car. The police also noticed him. King’s car was speeding, and being on parole from a robbery he committed in 1989, he knew that if the police pulled him over, it would lead to all sorts of legal problems. King didn’t pull over. He gunned it.
The police pursued the car, off the freeway and into residential areas, reaching speeds of 80 miles per hour (almost 130 km/h). After 8 miles (nearly 13 km) the police cornered King. Allen and Helms had the crap beaten out of them. Helms’ baseball cap was handed over the police, still bloody, and he was treated for a laceration on the top of his head. King himself, after being subdued, was hit several times. He later claimed to have received “11 skull fractures, permanent brain damage, broken [bones and teeth], kidney damage [and] emotional and physical trauma”. The footage shows moments King is laying on the ground, obviously not a threat to anybody. And yet the police continue to beat the everloving shit out of him.
All this might have just been another night on the beat for the LAPD, if not for one concerned onlooker, who decided to put the majority of the incident on video. The people (or at least some people) of the United States were shocked. Returning public perception to what it once was would be about as easy as returning a stone to the hand from which it was thrown.
The prevalence of video cameras nowadays, in combination with the World Wide Web, give this power to all of us – the power to record a single event which can change the course of a life – to change the course of history. It gives us the power to resist the oppression of bureaucrats who decide to overstep the boundaries of their office. It gives the world a voice.
How can we use this power to benefit humanity? What kind of responsibility does it take to wield a camera, or to type words into a blog? Are we yet to see the full effects of these technological developments on established media companies? Are we yet to see the change in consciousness where people can handle these new frontiers of information? We explore these questions and more, in the next exciting episode of … The Paradise Paradox!
The Links:
Rodney King Footage
Orion Martin – Sidekik app – interviewed on Anarchast
Is the Mexican Nation “Locoed” by a Peculiar Weed? (1915)
Juice Rap News – Episode 19: Whistleblower
Phantom vibration syndrome on Wikipedia
Why is Marijuana Illegal on Drugwarrant.com
Cover image modified and used under Creative Commons licence. Original image.