[July 01, 2011] The Miami Herald Fred Grimm column Tweet Jun 12, 2011 (The Miami Herald - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- Twenty years ago, George Holliday heard police sirens and a loud ruckus from the street below his Los Angeles apartment. Holliday grabbed his Sony Handycam. His nine minutes of grainy video, shot from his balcony, amounted to an epochal moment, signaling the beginning of a new, fast-evolving, ever more contentious relationship between police and citizen photographers. The LA cops who Holliday recorded beating Rodney King were found not guilty of brutality charges by a state court jury, but the verdict seemed incompatible with the video. At least that was the roiling sentiment on the streets of Los Angeles, where riots would leave 50 people dead. In 1991, the incriminating (or, from the police perspective, misleading) video was a bit of bad luck for the over-exuberant cops. Back then, Handycams weren't usually so handy. It was still unlikely that some citizen stumbling across a police confrontation would be armed with a video camera, batteries charged, loaded with a cassette tape, ready to shoot. Twenty years later, as Urban Beach Weekend entered its Memorial Day culmination in Miami Beach, it had become utterly inevitable that someone amid that rowdy mass of partiers would record the police gun barrage that killed Raymond Herisse. In 2011, in the digital age, most of the population above age 8 has a smart phone or cell phone with recording capabilities. And a genetic predisposition to generate content for YouTube. Sure enough, as the sun rose over Miami Beach that morning, a video of those frightful war-like moments, shot from seven stories up, was already reverberating through cyberspace. A second video, recorded at street level by Narces Benoit, depicted what appears to be a frantic attempt by police just after the shooting to confiscate the cell phones and cameras, was the other inevitable image of the digital age. If the video doesn't quite prove Benoit's contention that police roughed him up at gunpoint and stomped his cell phone after the shooting, neither does it lend all that much support to the police version, the notion that the frantic cops grabbing cell phones and at least one TV camera from a WPLG-ABC 10 photographer were only interested in collecting evidence that might help in the shooting investigation. The Greater Miami Chapter of the ACLU looked at the video and charged that the Miami Beach police have "set themselves up for legal actions in connection with the suppression of peoples' ability to document what police were doing." The Miami Herald's David Smiley and Diana Moskovitz reported that the Miami Beach PD has demonstrated an unseemly inclination in the past to keep potentially embarrassing, or incriminating, videos out of the public eye. Not that the MBPD has been alone. A Broward deputy was placed on administrative leave two weeks ago after a motorist charged that he employed racial slurs, then, noticing that a passenger was taping the confrontation on her BlackBerry, snatched the phone away. The BlackBerry was found a few blocks away, broken in two, but the memory card (and the unsettling video) was intact. In 2009, Hollywood cops, trying to blame a young woman for a collision with a police car, excised an incriminating stretch of video captured by the patrol car dashboard cam from the court record. The video clip, a YouTube sensation, included a cop explaining how he would invent his own scenario for the accident: "We'll do a little Walt Disney to protect the cop." No wonder police are so wary of cameras. Especially in Florida, which has posted a number of YouTube sensations with what appeared to be violent police misconduct. There's a Manatee deputy shown throwing a drunk, handcuffed woman face down on a hospital floor and then ignoring her as she bled from the head. A video showing West Palm Beach cops pummeling a handcuffed robbery suspect in the head until he drops, then kicking his head like a soccer ball. A Hillsborough County jailer dumping a paralyzed man out of his wheelchair at a Tampa jail, as if she thought he was faking his disability. So many smart phones, along with an estimated two million security cameras hanging from buildings and utility poles across the nation -- any bad actor in uniform must know that potentially incriminating video has become more than the mere possibility LA cops encountered back in 1991. In 2011, video cameras have become so ubiquitous that the very act of confiscating the cameras is liable to be recorded and launched off into the Internet. Ask the Miami Beach PD. Big Brother has finally arrived. He looks a lot like us. To see more of The Miami Herald or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.herald.com. Copyright (c) 2011, The Miami Herald Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For more information about the content services offered by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services (MCT), visit www.mctinfoservices.com. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]