A Police Beating With the World as a Witness

Rodney King drank too much. He drove too fast. He ran from the police and when he was finally cornered, he danced and he swayed and at one point, the Los Angeles police officers would say later, he lunged at an officer.

The police struck with their batons. Over and over, they pounded his body. The sergeant shot him with an electric stun gun. They kicked him. He was handcuffed and hogtied and dragged face-down across the gravel.

The world would never have known his name had it not been for George Holliday, who was standing on a balcony and whirling away with his Sony camcorder.

Rodney G. King and the beating he took would never have made the nightly news and the world’s newspapers had Holliday not turned his tape over to a local broadcasting station.

Rodney King, a black man beaten and arrested by white officers, would have simply gone quietly off to jail. Because he was an ex-convict, he probably would have been returned to prison, convicted of speeding, drinking and driving, and resisting arrest.

For years, leaders of Los Angeles’ ethnic minority groups had complained about police abuse, of a department out of control, of officers harassing people of color. Their complaints generally could not be proved and went largely ignored or were disbelieved.

Then, just 100 days after the King beating, the Christopher Commission determined that many officers indeed routinely engaged in “excessive force under color of law.” The panel found sections of the department to be particularly violent. It also compiled an ignoble list of 44 officers whom it designated the worst offenders.

The commission also released countless computer messages sent by patrol officers, messages full of hate and racial slurs, ridiculing minorities who dared challenge the nightstick.

But a more effective argument, in terms of public opinion, was made by the Holliday’s videotape, beamed over the evening news on a regular basis. Now, people throughout the region and indeed the nation had seen the beating with their own eyes. Now they believed.

A year passed--and then came April 1992.

Twelve jurors in Simi Valley, none of them black, reached a verdict in the criminal trial of the four white officers charged with beating King.

Not guilty.

Sgt. Stacey C. Koon and Officers Laurence M. Powell, Timothy E. Wind and Theodore J. Briseno leaped to their feet and embraced.

Outside the courtroom, much of the public reacted with stunned disbelief, wondering how a jury could have seen the tape and come to such a conclusion.

And Los Angeles’ minority communities, who had felt certain that this time their complaints would be vindicated, erupted in anger.

As the four smiling officers left the courthouse, an angry group in the parking lot yelled racial epithets and hurled rocks.

The spark of violent anger from that courthouse parking lot flashed at the South-Central intersection of Florence and Normandie.

Reginald Denny, a white truck driver, was yanked from his rig and beaten nearly to death by black men. One of his assailants danced around his unconscious body.

*

The mayhem spread for five days. Whites were pulled from cars and beaten. A black minister standing in the midst of smoke and fire prayed for peace. Looters lumbered from busted-out stores, their arms laden with new TV sets.

Parker Center was bashed with rocks, and Police Chief Daryl Gates slipped out the back way to attend a political meeting across town.

The grounds of City Hall were stormed; Mayor Tom Bradley called for calm, but added: “The jury’s verdict will never blind the world to what we saw on the videotape.”

Then Rodney King stepped forward. He had not spoken in a year, and even this time, he said only a few words.

“Can’t we all get along?” he asked.

Koon and Powell would be retried on federal civil rights charges, and they would go to prison. Koon would receive a lot of money through a fund to help his family. Powell would fade away. Rodney King would go on to more arrests in drunk driving and domestic abuse cases.

A smoldering city remained. The violence took 54 lives. More than 2,200 were injured. Property damage topped out at $900 million.

The call of the day was for community-oriented policing, and Chief Gates stepped down. The city demanded more public oversight of the police. And complaints about police abuse have been gaining in credence anew this year, with a wrenching police misconduct case. Tales emerge from the Rampart Division of officers allegedly planting drugs on suspects, falsifying reports, committing perjury, and shooting an unarmed man.