Refracting History

The Cameraman]

Jolted out of bed by police sirens and helicopters on March 3, 1991, George Holliday grabbed his new Sony Handycam and, from the balcony of his Lake View Terrace apartment, recorded nine minutes of footage that included the King beating. The grainy video, first broadcast on KTLA-TV Channel 5, was soon transmitted to networks worldwide. According to published reports at the time, Holliday earned up to $100,000 for selling the use of the video to director Spike Lee for the movie “Malcolm X.” Holliday contends, however, that his total income from the video was less than $10,000 from all sources. Now 41, the soft-spoken plumber lives in Granada Hills and is a divorced dad to a 4-year-old son.

*

It was just coincidence. Or luck. Luck can be good, luck can be bad. For Rodney King, it was good luck; for the cops, it was bad luck. For me, it was coincidence.

I didn’t see the whole incident. When I first looked out of my window, [the beating] was not happening. I went back inside to get the camera and, by the time I got onto my balcony, the beating was going on. I don’t know if [King] lunged at police. I’ll never know . . . .

This guy Rodney King, personally I don’t know him, but since the incident he was in the news for doing things that are wrong, and still he ends up being able to make all this money off the system [by winning a civil-rights-violation lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles]. I don’t think that’s right. I’m not talking about me personally, but there are lots of people who don’t break laws and they are not compensated when something wrong happens to them.

The only time we really exchanged words was one night when I left work around 10 p.m., and I stopped at a gas station in North Hollywood. I’m walking back to my truck and this guy says, “Hey, George.” I didn’t recognize him. The only time I saw [King] was in the papers, with his face swollen from getting beat up. This guy was fine. He says, “You know who I am?” I said, “No.” He says, “You saved my life.” Then I knew. The thing is, I don’t really know if I saved [King’s] life. I don’t think [the police] would have killed him. When I was younger, in Argentina, during the summertime on the beach with friends, I saved a life. But this, I don’t think I saved his life.

I’m not going to make it a point to tell my son. One day he will come and ask me. I know that my name appears in the history books. To me, that’s the coolest part of this whole thing. I’m sure he’s going to read about it in school. Then I’ll tell him. My name is also on a game card for Trivial Pursuit. They didn’t spell it right. Every once in a while--now it’s not that often--somebody will recognize me. “Aren’t you the guy with the video?” But I don’t go around telling people. It’s like being a celebrity. But I don’t go around with it on a T-shirt.

--As told to Kristina Sauerwein

*

The Suspect

Barreling down the Foothill Freeway about midnight, Rodney G. King’s speeding white 1988 Hyundai caught the attention of the California Highway Patrol. King, an unemployed construction worker on parole for a 1989 robbery, was forced to pull over in Lake View Terrace, where several Los Angeles police officers joined in on the stop. Ordered to the ground, King refused to be handcuffed by the officers, who kicked and beat him with their batons 56 times during the 81 seconds of the encounter that were videotaped by observer George Holliday. The multiple injuries King suffered in the early morning of March 3 included a battered cheek and eye socket, which his plastic surgeon said had been fractured like an eggshell. King, now 35, lives in Fontana. He says he does a bit of construction work but hasn’t worked recently because of arthritis. His life since the beating, the subject of a 1999 profile in the magazine for which this photograph was taken, has been complicated by several brushes with the law, ranging from spousal abuse to driving with illegally tinted windows. His reflections on his legacy are dominated by bitterness over money: He feels his lawyers received more than the stipulated 25% of the $3.8-million judgment against the city of Los Angeles that he won in a civil-rights-violation lawsuit. He is suing one of his lawyers.

*

It’s a non-ending thing. I’m just disappointed in the court system. It’s a fight, a struggle, especially for a black man. I’m in a fight, just like I was that day during the police beating. I’m fighting for what is already rightfully mine.

I wake up every day wishing it had never happened. I hate that it was me. I hate that it would be anybody at the center of attention like that. I wouldn’t wish that on nobody. I have to turn it around, put it behind me, which is really hard.

I’ll always have to live with what happened and everything. I have headaches and pain going through my body all the time. I have arthritis real bad. I have a real hateful reminder constantly, and then to go through all the agony and deceit, trying to recoup my money. It’s like another beating all over again. I didn’t expect to be like this at 35. I was fine at 24.

My mom and dad brought me up to know that life was going to be a struggle. But I had no idea that life was as racist as it is. It is a nice country and state to live in, but it’s also a fight, a lifetime battle uphill.

I’m trying to live life like everybody else, but I don’t think I’ll ever get away from it, that night. I was lucky. God has His way of working things out. I’m lucky to be alive, to be out here still fighting for what is rightfully mine. I have respect for God, Jehovah. I really have been blessed through all the prayers and a lot of people, and of course family support too. But it’s a dirty world, a cold world. You have to wonder sometimes what the future holds for our kids.

The public knows what’s right and what’s wrong. That’s why the civil outburst was like it was. It should have happened. I just didn’t want to see younger and older people suffer. That’s why I said: “Can we all get along?” That’s why I said what I said to save innocent lives. It was time to say something. I was just glad people understood and knew that things were wrong . . . the whole judgment that went down in Simi Valley.

I just happened to be the one at the center of a political war. Sometimes you get thrown into a situation you have no control over. I just feel, hope that I get the little settlement that the courts and the people in the jury awarded me, so I can move on with my life.

--As told to John L. Mitchell

*

The Sergeant]

Besides Rodney King, no one was as central to the storm as Sgt. Stacey Koon, whose image will be linked forever to the controversy. Koon became a de facto spokesman for the four LAPD officers charged in the case, later writing a book about his role in the beating. After serving 30 months in federal prison following his conviction on federal civil-rights charges, Koon, 50, has refused nearly all requests for interviews and declined to be photographed for this piece. But he offered these comments when reached at the Castaic-area home he shares with his wife, Mary, and five children.

*

My friends say this couldn’t have happened to a better person. Not that I should have gotten screwed like this, but I was more educated in the subject than almost anyone else. They knew I could articulate a defense.

At first it was more or less a pain in the ass, to be quite honest. I wasn’t seeking any fame or notoriety, and all of a sudden this happened. And because I was the supervisor, I became the spokesman. I have a master’s degree in criminal justice, with a thesis in police history. The first thing I did was call up the county library, within a day or two of the incident, and went back through all the L.A. Times archives on chokeholds and use of force.

I knew why the batoning developed, how that particular use of force came about: It was initially seen as a godsend to replace the chokehold. But when it happened, everybody denied it, so I said, wait a minute here, folks, you made this policy. You have your own selves to blame. It was official negligence.

We didn’t make the policy. We just abided by it. It’s ugly and it’s brutal, but you know what, folks? You knew about it. The city knew that moving away from the chokehold and replacing it with a metal baton was going to get real ugly, and that officer and suspect injuries would increase dramatically. What you see on that tape is exactly the training, the policy, the procedure of the LAPD. Every officer on the job understands that. We were made scapegoats.

The officers know that the city won’t back them, the department brass won’t back them and that the citizens may not back them. Consequently, what happened after this incident is that arrests had gone down significantly and stayed down. Officers aren’t going to do squat because they aren’t backed. Until they stop this politics of placating people, and they get back to letting the police do their job, police aren’t going to go out and do their job. But the department has no leadership in that regard. Management has tried to perpetuate this lie that the King case was an aberration when every officer knows it could happen to them tonight. The people who have the power to change are not about to admit their culpability. They all want to say these officers were out of control. That’s why they never use the baton anymore--it’s just an appendage that they carry with them that is useless. So you know what they’re using instead? They’re using their guns!

I’m your typical ‘90s guy. [I’m in] one of these new marriages where the women go out and get jobs. I didn’t have a problem with it. I get by. There wasn’t a lot of employability for me. And I needed to reconnect with my family, and this gave me the best way. I haven’t changed much. The hair’s a little grayer. That’s about it.

--As told to Josh Meyer

*

The Police Commission President]

In the wake of the beating, then-Police Commission President Melanie Lomax, a civil-rights attorney, was among the first to call for Police Chief Daryl F. Gates’ resignation. She orchestrated a vote of her fellow commissioners to place Gates on extended involuntary leave, but failed to muster the political support she needed. A backlash ensued, and she was asked by Mayor Tom Bradley to submit her resignation. It would take another year for Gates to step down.

*

I remember coming from a Police Commission affair and turning on the television and being stunned into a state of total disbelief as to what I was seeing on this videotape. It was so pointless, so excessive, so reminiscent of a police force in the Deep South of the ‘60s. No matter how many times you saw the video, no matter how many times Gates said it was an aberration, it just stabs you in your heart every time you see it. Because he couldn’t see what was so violent and wrong and inhumane about beating this man, that meant to me that Daryl Gates was the problem.

There was a time in this city when Gates was more powerful than the civic leaders, including the mayor and the City Council. There was a time in the city when he was an emperor. There were no limits on him. No one had ever disciplined him. He was never dishonest. He never took money, he didn’t tolerate corruption, but he was totally blind to the damage that was done by [beating] Rodney King. These wounds were too gaping for anybody to mend in his presence.

I became this anti-Daryl Gates figure in the community. People either hated me or loved me, thought I was courageous or narrow-minded. I believed that in some ways I earned some points toward heaven.

Now, 10 years later, the concept that the chief and the department are always subject to civilian review, that the department has civilian oversight, that reforming the LAPD is an ongoing process, is not only commonly accepted but it has been embraced and it is definitely in vogue. Then there was a code of silence--either you defended the Police Department or you were an enemy of it. What I was really attempting to do was weed out that section of the department that was racist and used excessive force.

Initially, people outside the black community did not understand or appreciate the level of the movement that was the basis for Tom [Bradley’s] pushing for Gates’ removal and for reform. It wasn’t just that he didn’t like Gates, it was that he was totally aware that the chief was out of control. Some reform had to take effect in the department. It forever changed this notion that Southern-style vicious criminals can exist in the LAPD.

The video forever opened this chapter, and it remains open today. You still have [officers] shooting homeless women with screwdrivers. The standing of the department has been forever altered in a way that is good for both the department and the city. There is no all-powerful chief who doesn’t have to answer to other city leaders who are elected. That principle is now firmly planted in everyone’s mind.

--As told to Beth Shuster

*

The Reformer]

The King beating was neither the first nor the last cataclysm to cross the path of Warren Christopher. He already had served three U.S. presidents, a Supreme Court justice and a governor. And yet Christopher, like so much of Los Angeles, was deeply rattled by the images of police officers beating King. Soon after seeing the tape, he visited Mayor Tom Bradley, who later tapped Christopher to head an independent review of the LAPD. That panel, now universally referred to as the Christopher Commission, proposed sweeping, structural reforms of the Police Department and made dozens of other recommendations, many of which were fulfilled but some of which have languished. What follows are Christopher’s reflections on the beating and its aftermath, compiled from a recent interview and his recently released memoir, “Chances of a Lifetime.”

*

I saw it for the first time at home, on TV. Then I saw it again at my office. I thought it was one of the worst examples of excessive force I’d ever seen. I was personally stunned by it.

While I knew there would be competent investigations of the beating event itself, I suspected that no one had yet mobilized to deal with the broader question of how Los Angeles would analyze and act on its implications. That concern brought me to Tom Bradley’s office.

When we started our investigation, I didn’t have a set of opinions about Daryl Gates. A lot of what came out in the testimony against him, particularly by his deputies, [Assistant Chief Jesse] Brewer and [Assistant Chief David] Dotson, showed that he had begun to treat his position as one that could be done primarily through interviews and press releases. I didn’t think that he was a racist or deliberately tolerated abuse, but he had lost touch with his own command staff.

As a result of the beating and the report, vital structural changes were made to the Police Department. There was a fixed term for the chief and a term limit on his service. The Police Commission was strengthened and given enhanced powers. The office of the Inspector General was created.

That said, I can only view with disappointment the slow pace of implementation of some of the other reforms. There’s no data bank of officer [performance indicators]. There’s no full inclusion of officers’ histories in their [files]. There’s still no regular psychological testing of police officers, and to deny ourselves the tool of psychological tests that might catch someone like officer [Rafael] Perez [of the Rampart Division] is wrong.

The day the report was released, [Gates] told a cheering crowd that he would step down only if and when the citizens of Los Angeles voted a change in the city charter that imposed a term limit on the office of the chief. [Voters did the following year, and Gates retired a month later.]

I’ve not spoken to Gates about the report since he retired. You may remember that I left the area shortly after the report [to become President Clinton’s first secretary of state]. We had the same [L.A.-area] barber, and I thought we might run into each other there, but we never did.

--As told to Jim Newton

*

The Watchdog]

Michael Zinzun, founding member of the Los Angeles-based Coalition Against Police Abuse, began his organization in 1975, helping record complaints against police and filing lawsuits against law-enforcement agencies. In the wake of the King beating, he became an informal advisor to the Christopher Commission as it investigated police procedures and the LAPD’s management culture. Today he feels tension between police and minority communities remains high.

I still feel frustration. I mean, if you were going to rate the tension on a scale of 1 to 10, I would say that it was at about an 8 to a 10 before the uprising [that followed the King beating]. Now it’s something like a 7 to a 9. That’s not a lot of progress.

What we’ve been saying all along about abuse, things that were proven by the King beating--well, it was validated again by [the LAPD] Rampart [Division scandal]. You had cops doing whatever they wanted, trampling on people’s rights.

But the thing people need to understand is, police framing people, and harassing them and brutalizing them, doesn’t just happen in Rampart, but in areas all over the city where there are people of color and the poor. In Southeast Division, in Hollenbeck, in 77th [Street].

We still see, with the new revelations, that there is more to the police than meets the eye. Corrupt policemen are labeling people as gang members, or actually sending people to prison who should not be [sent].

And there’s still an us-against-them mentality with police. I get something like four to seven calls a day from people who say they have been abused by police in some way.

Even after [the] King [incident], the city has not been willing to take on police, where you see officers are in fact prosecuted and jailed for what they do. So there remain real suspicions about the whole system and its fairness. As long as the suspicions are there, you are going to have that spin in the community that the police are corrupt and that they are continuing to cover up their illegal activities.

You have people who are more organized and more active and more demanding. And the thing is, as long as these demands are not met in a timely manner, there is potential for more uprisings. What’s that potential today? It’s kind of like an earthquake and aftershocks. The aftershocks are real, you know. You don’t know when they are coming, you don’t know what will set them off, but the threat of them is still there.

--As told to Kurt Streeter

*

The Chief]

Police Chief Daryl F. Gates was in Washington, D.C., for a meeting with George Bush administration officials when his officers chased down Rodney King. When he returned to L.A., Gates watched the videotape 25 times. “It made me sick,” he said. About a year later he was forced to resign. He now runs the Chief a Daryl F. Gates Co., which includes consulting and investigative services.

*

This was a great opportunity to get me. If you go back to that time you’ll find that blacks in particular were not faring well in the political arena. There were no superstars on the horizon. Their strength was fading, and they knew it and they felt it. And here was the cause and here was an opportunity to get great media coverage. The first thing some of them did was call for my resignation, and they did this because they figured this was their way of getting power. Tom Bradley--same thing.

You give 43 years of your life to a city and a police department, and have great pride in that police department, because you know it’s the kind of organization that you can be proud of. You have police officers who depend upon you and a city that looks to you for leadership, and you have a job-approval rating of 80%--higher than any conservative in the state of California, including the governor of California. And after the Rodney King affair (I wasn’t there! I didn’t beat him!), my rating dropped to 30%. What do you think that did to me? What do you think that did to me after I’d put in all those years?

I walked away, and there’s not an employee in that Police Department in the city after 25 years who doesn’t go before the City Council and have nice things said about them. And they get a proclamation thanking them for their devoted work. I never got a proclamation. After 43 years--almost 15 as chief--I never got a proclamation. I haven’t gotten anything.

Now we have the Rampart corruption scandal, which is much worse than the Rodney King affair. Think about it: the Rodney King affair involved four police officers and was a one-incident situation. You had four officers in that situation, and what made it the kind of monster that it became is the media. Now you have what you have today: the biggest mess that this city has seen in a long, long time.

I have had so many people come to me and say, “Chief, we need you--Jesus, come back, we need you.” And I just say, “You people did it to yourselves.”

I went into radio for 18 months, and I enjoyed that for a while. And when there was something to talk about--the national election, the mayoral elections--I did that. But once those things were over it just wasn’t something I wanted to do again. Now I’m in private enterprise, and I’m trying to consistently break into the 80s in golf.

--As told to Solomon Moore