Are videos best hope for justice?

By RICK CASEY

HOUSTON CHRONICLE

May 2, 2010, 6:02PM

It is 2010. We have a black president. We have a black chief of police, our third. We have a police force in which one out of every five officers is black, not much below the percentage of the city's black population.

And we have an old-fashioned black activist, Quanell X, delivering the news to us that we have a Rodney King-style video showing a group of cops beating a black kid after he tried to flee an apparent burglary scene, was caught, handcuffed and on the ground.

And one of the officers shown kicking him in the face, we are told, is black.

That is a bitter dose of progress.

This story is as old as our nation and as new as YouTube.

The family of the boy, Chad Holley, says they didn't come forward to file a complaint, even in the rage of having to take their son to the hospital to deal with a broken nose and other injuries, because they didn't think anything would happen.

Who can say they were wrong?

Mayor Annise Parker viewed the videotape and describes herself as “extremely upset.” She said she is grateful to the business owner who turned over a copy of the security video to authorities, which must be regarded as an act of courage.

“Without that tape,” Parker said, “I don't know we would have known what happened.”

We have clues.

Not all the officers on the video took part in the beating, but did any of those who didn't join in report the assault they witnessed?

Did the family have any reason to believe that police officers who engaged in or witnessed the beating would tell the truth about it?

It is 2010, but having police officers call out their brothers for beating up prisoners is not a regular part of the American experience.

More typical is the recent case of the Ibarra brothers, who were roughed up and arrested by sheriff's deputies for daring to videotape what the deputies were doing in the open in the yard next door.

Instead of investigating the complaint that the Ibarras did file, the sheriff's department and the district attorney's office pursued criminal complaints against them.

Even when a jury acquitted one of the brothers, the officials investigated the incident only to defend the lawsuit the brothers filed.

The taxpayers paid out millions for that case, but the deputies were never punished.

But in the next election voters threw out the white sheriff who presided over that debacle, a throwback to a different era, replacing him with a former Houston cop who won more votes than any other candidate on the ballot — the first Mexican-American to win countywide office here.

It is 2010 and race is still an issue in America, but so much more complex.

Police brutality also is still an issue in America.

About 10 years ago, I had a breakfast meeting with a police sergeant. That morning's newspaper included a story about a young man who, approached in his car by an officer, tried to drive away. The officer hung onto the car and was taken for a frightening ride.

Fortunately, the officer wasn't hurt, and other police helped catch the young man.

“I wouldn't be surprised if that guy fell down or hit his head getting into the squad car,” the sergeant told me wryly.

Sure enough, later reports showed the man had been injured while “resisting arrest.”

It's human nature

The message from the sergeant was that if you run from the police you should expect that they won't wait for a judge and jury to decide the punishment for defying their authority and making them chase you.

This is understandable.

Give a badge and a gun to people, and put them into dangerous, high-adrenalin situations dealing with people the rest of us don't even want to see much less wrestle, and some are going to cross the line between subduing a wrongdoer and brutalizing him.

It is human nature.

No matter how hard we work to make society better, we will always need crime fighters.

And we will always need to police the crime fighters.

One new tool is an appeal to conscience that includes H.L. Mencken's definition of conscience as “the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.”

Being a police officer is more dangerous than ever. There are so many more guns.

But there are also so many more cameras.

rick.casey@chron.com