Last year, amid nationwide protests over police brutality, the Paramount Network announced it would cancel one of the longest-running TV shows in American history: Cops, the cinéma vérité-style docuseries that since 1989, had tailed police officers as they patrolled neighborhoods and made arrests. (Cops has since been rebooted by Fox Nation.) While presenting themselves as honest and unvarnished, Cops, America’s Most Wanted, and other police shows offer a very specific lens on the criminal justice system—“a ‘reality’ where the police are always competent, crime-solving heroes and where the bad boys always get caught,” as the civil rights group Colors of Change has remarked. In his recent book Who Got the Camera? A History of Rap and Reality, professor and writer Eric Harvey examines the reality entertainment and tabloid culture of the late ’80s into the ’90s, skillfully uncovering how gangsta rap—or “reality rap,” as it was initially called—existed in dialogue with and in opposition to this kind of reportage.

Below, we feature an excerpt from Who Got the Camera?—which sprung out of an earlier Pitchfork piece—that looks back on how amateur footage catalyzed the 1992 Rodney King riots in L.A. and reshaped the national discourse surrounding race, confirming the police violence documented by rappers like N.W.A.

At 12:45 a.m. on Sunday, March 3, 1991, a Los Angeles plumber, George Holliday, was awoken by the sound of helicopters overhead. Seeing a scene transpiring outside, he instinctively grabbed his newly purchased Sony Handycam, stepped out onto his balcony, and started shooting. A group of several officers were violently hitting a man with batons and zapping him with their Tasers. Two other residents of Holliday’s apartment complex got their camcorders out as well—it was the hot technological trend in early 1991—but they lacked Holliday’s second-floor vantage point. The violent scene dispersed, and Holliday went back to bed. A few hours later, he used the same camera to record one of his employees running in the Los Angeles Marathon, but he remained disturbed about the brutality he’d witnessed. Sunday night, Holliday called the Foothill Police Station, but no one there seemed interested in the footage. The same went for CNN’s Los Angeles bureau. On Monday, Holliday took the tape to local TV station KTLA. Producers were shocked at what they saw and screened it at the Los Angeles Police Department headquarters, where officers expressed the same reaction. The motorist’s name, Holliday learned, was Rodney King. He was Black, and the officers who brutalized him on video were all white. The footage aired for the first time that night on KTLA’s newscast and, because of a licensing agreement, was simultaneously transmitted via satellite to CNN’s Atlanta bureau. On Tuesday night, the eighty-one-second clip that showed King’s body receiving fifty-six baton blows and several Taser shocks ran on all three national newscasts. It would air thousands more times in numerous informational and entertainment contexts over the coming year and a half.

Without the videotape, the King beating would have likely led to an Internal Affairs investigation by the LAPD, with King’s injuries weighed against the fact that a Black ex-convict had led the officers on an eight-mile chase and was intoxicated and behaving strangely at the scene of the encounter. Like countless other Black victims of police abuse, Rodney King would have been part of an LAPD database entry, his name forgotten by everyone except his friends and family, who knew the truth. But George Holliday changed all that. Like a far more expensive scientific instrument, his $1,000 Sony Handycam revealed a hidden pathogen, always lurking just out of sight, that the Los Angeles Times or KTLA or CNN had never disclosed so clearly. There was no denying the repulsive truth of the King video, regardless of one’s political position. President George H. W. Bush said the video “sickened” him, the archconservative pundit George Will referred to the actions as a “police riot,” and even Daryl Gates called the actions “a very, very extreme use of force—extreme for any police department in America.” In an April poll of registered Los Angeles County voters, 81 percent of respondents believed the officers were guilty. It appeared for all intents and purposes that, after centuries of Black men being surveilled by the state—slave patrols, lynching, Jim Crow, mass incarceration—the ultimate 1990s surveillance technology, the video camera, had effectively indicted that same authority.