The Nightmare Ends

Los Angeles is breathing a sigh of relief now that the city has reached the end of what we very sincerely hope is the last of the trials stemming from the Rodney King beating.

The jury that awarded King $3.8 million in trying to compensate him for the beating he suffered at the hands of Los Angeles Police Department officers said this week that individual officers did not have to pay King punitive damages. That surprised some people, but the jury said something else that generally is being overlooked--that former LAPD Officers Laurence M. Powell and Stacey C. Koon, who were convicted of violating King’s civil rights, did indeed act with malice in the 1991 beating. So although the jury said that individual officers did not have to pay King, it by no means absolved them.

That’s important to remember as various lawyers cite the jury’s judgment as vindication of their own points of view. Making a decision was easier in the first phase of this civil trial than in the second: The City of Los Angeles, as the employer of the police officers, was responsible for compensating King for medical bills and pain and suffering. Wisely, the city didn’t fight the obvious, and the jury awarded King $3.8 million.

With the end of the second phase, which dealt with determining penalties for individual officers, there’s been some grumbling that although the taxpayers got stuck for the King beating, those who actually did the beating paid nothing. That’s absurd. Powell and Koon remain in prison; Timothy Wind, a rookie at the time, was fired; Ted Briseno was suspended and is still trying to get his job back. Daryl F. Gates, though he would disagree, is no longer police chief in part because of the tremendous public backlash over how poorly some officers, under his leadership, performed during the King beating and its aftermath, the 1992 riots.

So everyone paid. Particularly the people of Los Angeles. Let us hope that the city never again will endure such a traumatic, and expensive, nightmare.