Earlier this month, Jason Young — wedding videographer by trade, deceptive gadfly blogger by choice — posted this video on his SaveAnaheim.com blog:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boybb9nGnGQ]

Young is very excited because the 4-member panel on a PBS show supports the idea of a civilian police review to duplicate the existing layers of police oversight.

On the other hand, Young must not have liked what panelist Mike Capaldi had to say about last summer’s Manuel Diaz shooting, since he editing that part of the video out. Here’s the complete exchange:

Question: Can a civilian board with no legal authority make an impact on the department?

[The bolded area is the part that Save Anaheim blog cut out of the video.]

I think the answer is yeah. We need to lay out the facts here  a little bit because there have been examples of police overreaction, death caused in the Orange County area by officers just in the last couple of years and this is really different than for example the Kelly Thomas killing a couple of years ago. In this situation, um, this Manuel Diaz who was running away um put his hands in his waste, uhh the police officer had to make a split second decision, whether that was a simple gesture or whether that was something that could lead to the death of himself, ya know, to his partner and he made a call. He shot this fellow, he turned out to be unarmed uh but of course the police officer in this situation does not know that, we had a split second to make that decision. So you understand and looking back if you were in that situation how um everything in that situation may not be particularly obvious to you. And he made a judgment, I’m sure it’s a judgment that he regrets at this point but should he be prosecuted for it? My sense is that the DA made the right decision here.

But on the question of civilian oversight, I happen to believe that civilian oversight is very very important when you are talking about people in the society as powerful as powerful as police officers. They walk…they have the force of law behind them, they wear weapons and uh and ya know anyone who believes in checks and balances out to favor some sort of civilian authority some sort of investigative authority. It’s not a uh major problem to put responsible citizens in an oversight role and I think more police departments, more cities and counties out to be looking at this.

Here’s the complete PBS “Real Orange” video, untouched by the careful hands of Jason Young.

Jason’s editing out of inconvenient opinion is ironic given his caterwauling about not being allowed to pitch a fit on other people’s Facebook page.