KTLA Newsfilm Collection: Incarceration, Policing and Crime

Thanks to a generous grant from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, the UCLA Film & Television Archive has augmented its online collection of historic KTLA newsfilm with a curated selection of footage documenting issues related to crime, policing and incarceration in Los Angeles during the 1970s. These 65 KTLA newsfilm segments have been cataloged for discovery with special effort 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(opens in a new tab)” 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.

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. In the 1970s, KTLA television news extensively covered topics ranging from the juvenile justice system to police brutality, which remain of broad public and scholarly interest today.

Additional footage from the KTLA Television Newsfilm Preservation and Access Project can be viewed through the UCLA Film & Television Archive website(opens in a new tab).