Mitchell Crooks says his life has been “pure hell,” filled with death threats and cries of “race-traitor” from fellow Whites, ever since he videotaped a White Los Angeles-area police officer slamming a handcuffed Black teen-ager into his squad car.

“There has been a little praise here and there, mostly from the Black leadership in Los Angeles, but there’s been more doses of hate,” says Crooks, whose internationally broadcast videotape refocused attention on police brutality against African Americans, a decade after the Rodney King tape did the same thing.Advertisement


“The only door this has opened has been to a jail cell.”

He means that literally.

Immediately after releasing the video to CNN, Crooks was snatched up by police officers in a black Explorer with darkened windows – he believes they were federal agents – and spirited away. CNN taped his capture and broadcast that along with the police beating footage.

Crooks ended up in a Placer County court (a 92-percent White community near Sacramento), where he was sentenced to six months in prison on an outstanding warrant for DUI.

“The whole thing was completely racial, the fact that me, a White guy, had shot the video,” he says. “It’s a real red-neck town.

“There were no Black inmates in jail. ‘Race traitor’ was thrown in my face every day, mostly due to the fact that officers would pay off folks to try and intimidate me.”

He did his time without being assaulted, he says, but two years later, he’s still looking around corners.

“Today I’m in hiding. I’m scared to go out,” Crooks told BET.com in a recent telephone interview. “I used to do pretty well as a DJ. Now I’m not working. I survive by doing odd jobs. I’m getting by, by the skin of my teeth.”

The Ordeal

Crooks had just returned from vacation and was resting in his second-floor Inglewood hotel room when he was awakened by a “blood-curdling scream.”

“There was this lady screaming at the top of her lungs,” Crooks recalls. “At first I ignored it. Then I heard her yell, ‘Don’t resist; don’t resist!’ Those were the key words that let me know it was police. That’s when I grabbed my camera, ran to the window and started filming.

“I was beat up by police when I was 16, which is part of the reason I carry my camera with me,” says Crooks, 29.

What Crooks saw was Inglewood Police Officer, Jeremy Morse, holding 16-year-old, Donavan Jackson, with his hands cuffed behind his back. Jackson was bent over the hood of Morse’s police cruiser. Morse lifted Jackson and slammed him into the car, making a loud thud, Crooks says.

“I could tell that they had already beaten him before I started filming, just by the way that woman was screaming and the way that Donovan looked,” Crooks says.

The next thing that Crooks saw were two officers looking up at him from the street below.

“On the video, you can see them looking up at me. That was my key to pack up,” Crooks says. “I ran into the hall and gave my camera to these foreign back-packers I had met from England and Germany. I said, ‘Quick, take this, before the police get up here.’” Seconds later, Crooks says, officers pushed their way into his room. “When the cops came into the hotel, they searched my room up and down,” he says. “The back-packers told me that I was sitting on the biggest story since 9/11. I told them that it really wasn’t that big a deal, that I see this all the time in LA, and that police always do this to protestors.”

Big story or not, Crooks says he knew he had to get the tape into the hands of news media. He went live on BET.

The following day he headed to CNN. That was a mistake he says. “CNN told me they needed the original video, so I called my friend and told him to deliver it,” Crooks recalls. “But my phone was bugged. Once I had the tape, that’s when the FBI pulled up and grabbed me. They used the Patriot Act on me. They wanted to get me and the tape at the same time. It just so happens that CNN was videotaping me outside of their studio; the whole thing stinks.”

Crooks says he now wonders whether all the effort was worth it. Officer Morse, who beat Jackson, and his partner, Bijan Darvish, who perjured himself on the stand defending Morse’s story, have not been convicted of any crime. Morse’s trial ended in a hung jury last week. Darvish was acquitted in October. Both men faced three years in prison.

The case is scheduled to go before a new jury later this week.

“The DA still hasn’t called me to testify against the officers,” says Crooks, who now refers to himself as a soldier and activist. “He’s intentionally ignoring me. They say it’s hard to prosecute an officer, but here is a case where they have a video and they have witnesses. If they wanted to convict, what more do you need?”