Volatile afterimages: the videotaped beating of Rodney King
FBI report | George Holliday with his SONY Handycam CCD-F77 | Original photograph John T. Barr/Gamma-Liasion
George Holliday, the man who recorded the beating of Rodney King by police officers in 1991, passed away at a Los Angeles hospital on Sunday 20 September, 2021, aged 61. His death was reportedly due to complications relating to Covid-19.
In an era of increasingly centralised image archives and footage libraries, Holliday was unique, up until his death, licensing arguably one the most recogniseable pieces of footage of the late 20th Century involved negotiating with its creator.
In 2019 we were engaged by ACMI's Chief Curator Sarah Tutton and Assistant Curators Julia Murphy and Chelsey O'Brien to produce a series of museum screens on citizen journalism and the inherent power of images for ACMI's Story of the Moving Image exhibition. Locating and licensing Holliday's footage of Rodney King's arrest put us in contact with the man behind one of the most volatile pieces of footage ever committed to magnetic tape.
The Videotaped Beating of Rodney King in situ, ACMI Story of the Moving Image, Federation Square Melbourne.
Shortly after 12:30 a.m. on Sunday 3 March, 1991, George Holliday, a Los Angeles plumber, would record several minutes of grainy video footage on his newly-purchased Sony Handycam that would shock America to its core and alter the course of his life.
When Rodney Glenn King’s white Hyundai Excel was pulled over for speeding by police in the early hours Sunday morning, what should have been a simple traffic violation escalated into a brutal beating at the hands of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD).
Moments earlier, California Highway Patrol (CHP) allege that they observed King driving at over 100 mph on Foothill Expressway. When King failed to stop, the CHP radioed the local Foothill Division of the LAPD for assistance.
As King exited the Expressway at Paxton Street in the San Fernando Valley, five police cars and a police helicopter were in pursuit. King would run at least one red light before eventually coming to a stop outside 11777 Foothill Terrace Boulevard.
At the nearby Mountain Back Apartments residents were woken up by the noise of police sirens and a helicopter hovering overhead shortly after 12:30. At the time Sylvia Sales told LA Times reporters she heard a police officer instruct King to “pull over or you’ll get hurt” over a loudspeaker.
Although up to a dozen people witnessed King’s arrest, none reported seeing King charge at police or reach for a weapon. Their accounts would later contradict the official police reports. “He never moved his hands” Josie Morales, told the LA Times, “the driver moved away from the car and laid down”. Dawn Davis, said she saw up to six police officers wrestle King to the ground and hit him.
As King lay on the ground, Holliday started filming from his second-storey balcony, “I didn’t see the very beginning of it, I thought maybe he tried to hit a policeman or something, but I don’t know I don’t know, I didn’t get that part on tape either” Holliday later told reporters.
A still taking from the FBI analysis of the Rodney King beating. Courtesy Prelinger Archives.
In the attack, King was tasered twice, struck with police batons more than 56 times, kicked in the head and body, had his eye socket cracked, his cheek bone fractured and his right angle broken; he also suffered third degree burns and was left with numerous facial lacerations.
““What happened out there was wrong””
When what Holliday assumed was a high-profile arrest failed to make the local news, Holliday decided to act, “what happened out there was wrong”.
KTLA Los Angeles first broadcast Holliday’s footage as part of the 10pm news on Monday 5 March, 1991. The public outcry was immediate, KTLA’s switchboard was inundated with calls. The following day, Holliday’s video was syndicated to CNN, within days it would appear on screens around the world.
In the fallout the LAPD claimed King’s violent arrest was an isolated incident, but for civil rights groups it was consistent with the rough justice regularly levelled at minorities and African-Americans by police in Los Angeles’ poorer neighbourhoods.
“[This] is not an isolated incident – the difference this time is that we have proof … on tape” Ramona Ripstein executive director of the Southern Californian chapter of ACLU said at the time.
On Thursday 15 March four LAPD officers we indicted on charges stemming from King’s arrest: Sargeant Stacey Koon, Theodore Briseno, Timothy Wind and Laurence Powell. Within days the Justice Department and the FBI launched investigations into the incident.
The FBI enlisted state of the art computer technology to analyse the beating of King by LAPD officers.
At the trial Holliday’s video was the single-most important piece of evidence. In the courtroom individual frames were scrutinised as prosecutors and defendants extracted every fragment of information the footage contained. The FBI engaged state of the art technology to recreate CGI figures of the beating. In other tests officers struck rubber blobs with nightsticks to measure the force of impact levelled at King’s body.
Theodore Briseno, one of four LAPD officers on trial for the beating of Rodney King, stands before George Holliday’s video in a courtroom.
When the four officers were acquitted of all charges by a mostly white jury in Simi Valley over a year later. Their decision seemed to fly in the face of the brutality captured on Holliday’s videotape.
“The jury’s verdict will never blind what the world saw,” Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley told reporters after the verdict was handed down.
In downtown L.A. as shopkeepers prepared for the worst, an anonymous woman told a camera crew “it was on film, we saw them beating that man”. The outrage at the court’s ruling would see fires and violence erupt at flashpoints across the city.
The L.A. Riots lasted more than five days and resulted in 63 deaths, 2,383 injuries, more than 12,000 arrests, and over USD$1 billion in property damage.
George Holliday with Sony Handicam on the balcony of his Foothill Terrace Boulevard apartment in 1991 (still from KTLA-5 News)
“It was almost like I was watching something on a tiny television – images more than reality”
Just as Darnella Frazier’s footage of George Floyd’s death at the hands of police in 2020 sparked protests in Minneapolis and saw thousand march in Black Lives Matter protests across much of the United States. The afterimage that persists from these citizen journalists serves as a reminder that systemic racism, police brutality and abuse of power remains an ongoing issue in America.