Did L.A. Police Break the Law to Get Ted Rall Fired?

Ted Rall cartoon, used with permission

Veteran American political cartoonist Ted Rall has been fired by the LA Times based on a poor quality, sometimes unintelligable audio tape made by a police officer ticketing the cartoonist for jaywalking in Los Angeles 14 years ago.

At issue are competing narratives of that 2001 jaywalking incident.

In a May 11 blog for the LA Times website, Rall recalled that he was arbitrarily handcuffed and pushed up against a wall by the ticketing officer at the time.  The blog posting accompanied a Rall cartoon for the paper targeting current LAPD pedestrian crosswalk policy.

Following Rall’s blog post, a copy of an audiotape made by the officer involved in the 2001 jaywalking bust was made available to Times editorial-page editor Nicholas Goldberg.

In announcing Rall’s termination on July 28, editor Goldberg wrote: “An audiotape of the encounter recorded by the police officer does not back up Rall’s assertions; it gives no indication that there was physical violence of any sort by the policeman . . .”

Prime among the questions raised was whether the cartoonist had been handcuffed, something Rall didn’t mention in a complaint about the incident filed in 2001.  Rall explained this by saying that at the time he was “far more concerned and angry about being falsely charged with a misdemeanor that could have created a criminal record.”

Rall has posted both the police recording provided to the LA Times and an enhanced version of that tape by three sound technicians Rall consulted.  In the cleaned-up version of the tape, the cartoonist reports, someone can be heard saying “He was just jaywalking . . .  you need to take off . . . you need to take off his handcuffs.”

Rall had done hard-hitting cartoons for the LA Times since 2009.

As Rall said in an interview with Sputnick News: “Look, I pissed off cops.  I’ve done many anti-LAPD cartoons and essays over the years.  The LAPPL [Los Angeles Police Protective League] made clear in their blog that they have long been angered by me, and they are crowing about my dismissal.  So, just at a bare minimum, think about how disturbing this is.  The LAPD, or the LAPPL, passed illegally — basically stole something out of the evidence room — slipped it to the top editors at the LA Times, one of the biggest and most widely-respected metro-dailies in the United States, in order to get me fired.  In order to send a message to other reporters, ‘don’t screw with cops’.”