Professional Viewing

The Rodney King video that we screened was footage that would’ve outraged just about anyone that watched it. The court footage from the trial showed the defense and the prosecution each making their case to the jury. While watching the footage, I didn’t feel prosecutor Terry White did such a bad job at drawing attention to the officers at fault. However after sitting through the testimony and the cross-examining of each of the 3 officers (Koon, Powell, Briseno) at the trial (Wind did not get cross examined) I had to almost laugh at how it was possible that the jury bought into what the officers said.

In the article “Professional Vision” by Charles Goodwin he shows how the defense was able to use its own “coding scheme” when examining a piece of evidence as incriminating as the infamous video tape of the Rodney King beating. It is absolutely fascinating how the defense for the 4 Los Angeles Police Department officers was able to breakdown the tape in such a way that the jury viewed it according to their “coding scheme,” and to the point where they no longer saw events in the tape the way an average person did. Goodwin defines coding schemes as “one systematic practice used to transform the world into the categories and events that are relevant to the work of the profession” (608). Therefore what in reality was a massive beating by the officers, was now transformed into ten separate events each with its own sequence of stages, and the aggression displayed by the officers was “coded” as professional practice.

The defense also made use of “expert testimony” which according to Goodwin “had the effect of filtering the events visible on the tape through a police coding scheme, as articulated by an expert who instructed the jury how to see the body movements of the victim in terms of that system” (616).

By way the defense broke down the events in the tape, the expert called incidents of police brutality - periods of “escalating and de-escalating” force used to apprehend a suspect, the batons that the officers were beating King with were now referred to as “tools” used by the officers, and minor movements in King’s body were interpreted as aggression on his part. A part of me considers this brilliant use of rhetoric but I can’t help wonder that behind all this coding, behind all the “professional police talk” how could the jury just not look at everything like an average citizen would putting aside all the police babble.? Even the fact that one of the officers accused, Briseno, defended himself by actually admitting that the other officers were going too far. There was even a break in the defense! Not all 4 officers could agree on a single defense, and how could the jury NOT pick up on this?