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KTLA News: “Demonstration in support of people incarcerated in Los Angeles County Jail” (1980)
The UCLA Film & Television Archive, in collaboration with the UCLA Library Digital Library Program, is pleased to announce the expansion of its KTLA News preservation and access project, now offering free online viewing of 65 news stories (including unseen outtakes) documenting issues related to incarceration, policing and crime in Los Angeles during the 1970s. The curated selection of footage is now available through UCLA Library Digital Collections and the Archive’s YouTube channel.
Thanks to a generous grant from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, these 65 KTLA newsfilm segments, shot on 16mm film, have been preserved, digitized and cataloged for discovery. Special effort was directed to the ethical description of content to ensure that biases in original reporting (common during this period) were not replicated. The segments are intended to serve as an adjacent resource to UCLA’s “Archiving the Age of Mass Incarceration” project, a collaborative effort to collect, digitize and preserve a sustainable archive of primary and secondary sources for the next generation of research on racial and social justice.
KTLA News: “Reverend Milton Merriweather speaks out against police choke holds and police surveillance” (1978)
Contributing valuable insight to the collection, Trudy Goodwin and Monika Rhue share their perspectives and contextualize the historical materials as guest writers on the UCLA Film & Television Archive blog. “The KTLA collection represents a historical timeline of systemic abuse against Black and Brown people by L.A. police officers,” writes Monika Rhue, Ph.D., who served as the project manager for “Archiving the Age of Mass Incarceration. “Curating the newsfilm collection is an example of archiving and providing access towards reparative justice.”
Trudy Goodwin, a Los Angeles community organizer who served as a consultant for “Archiving the Age of Mass Incarceration,” writes that the KTLA footage “validate the fears that many Black and Brown individuals harbor regarding interactions with law enforcement [...] The testimonies of community members reflect a persistent call for accountability and justice that has echoed through the decades [...] Despite some progress, the struggle for justice continues today.”
KTLA News: “Press conference about the killing of David Aguayo” (1972)
“As part of the societal reckoning that continues in the wake of the murder of George Floyd (1973–2020), researchers and scholars across disciplines are reexamining media and governmental histories of past events for accuracy and biases,” said Mark Quigley, the John H. Mitchell Television curator at UCLA. “Such work allows for the ethical correction of narratives that were previously told, often incompletely, incorrectly or indirectly, intentionally or not, through the lens of classism or white supremacy.”
From the Watts Rebellion of 1965 to city-wide protests stemming from the acquittal of LAPD officers in the beating of Rodney King in 1992, Los Angeles has frequently been at the epicenter of issues related to law enforcement and the criminal justice system. For the decade of the 1970s, KTLA television news extensively covered these topics, ranging from the juvenile justice system to police brutality, which remain of broad public and scholarly interest today.
KTLA News: “Recreation, education and work opportunities for incarcerated people” (1976)
Thanks to the support of the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, the UCLA Film & Television Archive now has over 300 KTLA news segments online for free public access. These segments, which cover social sciences, governance and public policy, and issues of concern to marginalized communities in Los Angeles, have been viewed by researchers and the public over 530,000 times. Given ongoing national and local dialogues and debates regarding issues of crime, policing and incarceration, the Archive has preserved and contextualized this curated selection of KTLA newsfilm as a unique research resource for the people of Los Angeles and beyond.
KTLA News: “Criticism of methods used by police officers assigned to Chinatown” (1972)
