Nothing spices up the 6 o'clock news better than Flailing Rubber Truncheons. Every time I see a grainy videotape of some cops whuppin up on somebody with riot batons--it's almost an iconic image at this point--I wanna scream, "Hey! BACK UP THE TAPE. Hit rewind!" Because something tells me the cops didn't just drive up and say, "Hey, look, a black man, let's beat him up!"

The reason these videotapes usually lie--and the reason the networks are so cynical in the way they edit them--is that we're watching the third-act climax without knowing what happened in acts one and two. By the time we reach the stage of Aluminum Night Stick Jubilee, there had to be about 19 things go wrong. Would it be asking too much of the media to perhaps SPELL OUT WHAT THEY WERE?

Okay, it's a rhetorical question.

The latest bit of ring-around-the-suspect footage comes from Cincinnati, where Nathaniel Jones died after a beating by either two cops or six cops. I watched the tape and saw only two cops using billy clubs, although all the media accounts said it was six cops. I have to assume there were six cops present on the scene, but only two were attempting to subdue him with force. I guess that falls under the category of details too minor to get right.

First of all, any news account concerning the police killing a man named Nathaniel Jones in Cincinnati should contain the phrase "no relation"--meaning no relation to THE Nathaniel Jones in Cincinnati, the former general counsel for the NAACP, the civil rights lawyer in Mississippi in the sixties who became a Cincinnati federal judge, a liberal on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, and a frequently sought-after spokesman for the black community when Cincinnati had the Timothy Thomas riots in 2001. Wouldn't a headline writer reporting "COPS KILL NATHANIEL JONES" at least have enough sense of IRONY to insert a sentence saying "It's not who you think"? I didn't see this qualification made anywhere.

Secondly, wouldn't any of the following facts contribute to the context?

Nathaniel Jones was high on PCP. He passed out before he could finish smoking all the cigarettes he'd dipped in it.

Nathanial Jones was also stoked on another heart-weakening stimulant: cocaine.

Nathaniel Jones had methanol in his body. (Yes, you can smoke that, too.)

Nathaniel Jones weighed 350 pounds.

Nathaniel Jones had a bad heart.

Nathaniel Jones attacked a cop.

The only reason the cops were there in the first place is that he'd been unruly with the paramedics who showed up to save his life. (He was passed out on the lawn in front of a White Kastle hamburger joint.)

And if all that weren't enough, you would think this one fact would be emphasized:

Nathaniel Jones had no internal injuries from the beating. In other words, the cops hit him exactly where they're SUPPOSED to hit a struggling suspect resisting arrest.

It took three to four days to get most of this information into the news mill, and by that time it was buried on page 16C. The initial coverage was all on the order of "Cincinnati Cops Kill Another Black Man, City Uneasy"--implying that there's some connection between the Timothy Thomas case, which set off three days of rioting in 2001, and the Nathaniel Jones case. Since the incidents bear no resemblance, and since the police tape clearly shows Nathaniel Jones lunging at a cop and resisting arrest, the reporting centered on the latter part of the tape itself, implying that, well, why did they have to hit him that hard and that many times?

The answer is that they're trained to hit him hard. Police training is specifically intended to take the guesswork out of a crisis. The last thing they want is a cop thinking, "What should I use here? A full swing? A three-quarters? A half tap? Fast repetition or slow?" The cop is trained to swing with full force at a specified area. The suspect's life is protected by two things--the nature of the club itself, which is designed to be non-lethal, and the cop being trained to hit the suspect on a part of the body that will bring him down but cause no permanent injury. The goal here is excruciating pain, not actual injury. For quick non-lethal containment of the suspect, what you do is . . . HIT HIM HARD.

But the more troubling aspect of the media coverage was the constant repetition of the one sentence: "Eighteen blacks have been killed by Cincinnati cops since 1995."

The sentence would make sense if you could truthfully add the words "under questionable circumstances." But to link all those deaths together, implying some kind of out-of-control Maniac Racist Cop Force, requires you to count cases in which black cops killed black suspects, cops killed in self-defense, cops brought down men who were determined not to be taken alive, and cops killed suspects after being wounded by gunfire themselves.

For example, does the death of Harvey Price really belong in the litany of alleged police abuse? Harvey Price is the guy who killed a 15-year-old with an ax, then engaged in a four-hour standoff with police, then charged officers with a knife before being shot dead. Or how about Darryll C. Price, who was found jumping on the hood of a car yelling he was going to "shoot someone"? High on cocaine, he died of "agitated delirium with restraint" after being tackled and shackled. (It's actually a not uncommon condition in police work, being a sudden death syndrome most often seen among mentally ill drug users.) Do we really think there's any doubt about the case of Daniel Williams, who flagged down a police cruiser driven by Officer Kathleen Conway, then punched her in the face, shot her four times in the legs and abdomen with a .357 Magnum, and took over her car? The wounded officer shot Williams twice in the head.

We could go down the list--a bank robber who attacks a cop with a two-by-four full of rusty nails, an armed robbery suspect who fires on two officers before they fire back, a bank robber who jumps from his car after a high speed chase brandishing a gun, at least three cases of criminals who shot and wounded officers before they were shot themselves--and after we went down the list, we could ask the question, "If any of these guys had been white, would the outcome have been any different?" You would have to be the most paranoid conspiracy theorist in the midwest to think so.

There are currently four investigations of the death of Nathaniel Jones, and increasingly they're centering on the "97- second gap." This is the time that elapsed between the arrival of police at the scene and the time an alert officer turned on the camera. When the patrol car is running, the camera runs continuously. When the lights of the car go off, the camera goes off. The police officer turned the camera back on because he WANTED A RECORD OF WHAT WAS HAPPENING. The irony is that, if there were no tape, the networks would have either ignored the story or reported it for one day and forgotten it. But there's something about those flailing batons that makes the newscast really SING, you know?