On the night of March 3rd, 1991, Rodney king was driving home with friends of his, Bryant Allen and Freddie Helms, from another friend’s house on Interstate 210 while severely intoxicated (his BAC was estimated to be twice the legal limit for driving in California). [1] When two California Highway Patrol members tried to pull him over, he refused to do so, and initiated a high-speed (115 mph) chase that lasted for eight miles and continued into residential areas. [2][3] In these residential areas, the chase still occurred at speeds ranging from 55 to 80 miles per hour. [4][5] He’d been avoiding arrest for a DUI, normally not too serious a charge, by driving recklessly high speeds, normally a very serious and dangerous action, because he knew that if he were arrested he’d be violating his parole for a case of assault and armed robbery. [6] The chase came to a close as Allen pleaded King to pull over, and as seven police cars and a helicopter came up on King at the corner of Foothill Boulevard and Osborne Street. Five officers, Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, Theodore Brisneo, and Ronaldo Solano, ordered King’s friends out of the car and then King himself. When King exited the car, he acted bizarrely, dancing “pitter-patter”, waving at police helicopters, reaching for his buttocks and mooning the officers at the scene (an act mistaken as him drawing for a weapon), reacting to police commands slowly and inconsistently, and occasionally blowing them kisses, actions which were all later attributed to his severe level of intoxication. [7] King flatly refused to perform some commands, such as being told to lay down or put his hands over his head. As King was resisting arrest, four officers “swarmed” him to try to affect an arrest, and he heaved them off of his back, and when they tried to taser him, he fought through it, and when they did this a second time, he charged one of the officers, forcing them to subdue him with their batons. His behavior was so erratic and irrational that the responding officers assumed he was under the influence of PCP, a relatively-commonly used drug at the time that induced erratic, violent behavior and a high pain tolerance. [8] What followed was what formed the catalyst that allowed LA public opinion to jump from discontent to out-and-out violence.
The Beating
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OauOPTwbqk
As Rodney King was finally subdued, belly-down on the ground, the five aforementioned officers at the scene began beating him with their batons, an event which was captured by a video tape widely-circulated throughout news stations in the following days and weeks.
King was struck repeatedly over the course of about a minute until he was finally handcuffed and left bleeding on the street while waiting for an ambulance to arrive.
The Effect on the Populace
The first few seconds of the video I provided above shows King rushing the officers at the scene. This footage, due to its blurriness, was nowhere near as commonly shown as the rest of the tape. Generally, news sources would show only the immediate aftermath, i.e., the beating:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SW1ZDIXiuS4
This, combined with the common misperception that King had been pulled over in a routine traffic stop, stripped the public perception of any of the moral ambiguities and grey areas in the case. People by-and-large perceived the beating as completely unprovoked police manhandling, which was a common problem within the LAPD throughout the 1980s. In effect, the Rodney King beating came to be seen as a “stand-in” for about a decade of indiscriminately violent tactics employed by the LAPD. He was the first of these caught on tape and brought onto the national stage by the news media. In light of this exposure, the officers involved in his beating were to be tried and likely convicted for assault and/or use of excessive force, and this would hopefully send a message to the LAPD that such behavior would no longer be tolerated. Because there was little knowledge on King’s behavior immediately prior to the beating, he came to be perceived not as a case of a dangerous criminal who was grossly improperly handled by police once subdued, but basically an innocent black man being savagely beaten by white LAPD officers, the public took his case as a symbol and prime example of the LAPD using excessive force out of sadism or in order to instill fear, as it had done for about ten years prior, rather than applying it because they were met with a perpetrator whose resistance was complicated by drunkenly erratic and belligerent behavior. Even those who had understood the gravity of King’s drunken 115-mile per hour chase, and his resistance to arrest, oftentimes felt that did not at all justify the responding officers’ response. Lastly, public opinion was destined to be slanted against the LAPD from the beginning because people took the news-media narrative of the beating at face value (white cops beat black man following routine traffic stop) because the police department’s conduct for the last decade, which involved incidents happening basically like that, made such a story not only completely plausible, but expected and regarded as “business-as-usual”.
This all meant that when the officers who beat Rodney King were convicted, the public saw it not as a questionable verdict on excessive force being used in a dicey situation, but a black-and-white case of LAPD cops getting away with beating minorities one too many times. This would fuel moral outrage and in turn violent outrage on a scale the LAPD would be unable to contain.
Citations:
[1] http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/1993/05/23/the-untold-story-of-the-la-riot (page 1) [2] http://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/18/us/seven-minutes-los-angeles-special-report-videotaped-beating-officers-puts-full.html (page 1) [3] Ibid., page 2 [4] Ibid. [5] Ibid., http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/1993/05/23/the-untold-story-of-the-la-riot [6] Ibid., http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/lapd/lapdaccount.html [7] http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/1993/05/23/the-untold-story-of-the-la-riot (page 1) [8] http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/lapd/lapdaccount.html