Rodney King case

Significance: The arrest and beating by police of Rodney King, a black man, sparked a major investigation of police brutality in Los Angeles and violent race riots after a California court acquitted the officers involved.

Following a high-speed chase along a Los Angeles highway that ended just after midnight on March 3, 1991, California Highway Patrol officers Timothy and Melanie Singer stopped driver Rodney Glen King and his two passengers, Bryant Allen and Freddie Helms, for questioning. More than twenty Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers soon arrived on the scene in Los Angeles’ Lake View Terrace neighborhood. Police sergeant Stacey Koon, assisted by officers Theodore Briseno, Laurence Powell, and Timothy Wind, took over the investigation. The police quickly subdued and handcuffed Allen and Helms without incident. Their encounter with King, however, caused a controversy with far-reaching legal and social consequences.

King’s Arrest

According to the four white police officers who arrested King, a black man, King refused at first to leave the car and then resisted arrest with such vigor that the officers considered it necessary to apply two jolts from a Taser electric stun gun, fifty-six blows from aluminum batons, and six kicks (primarily from Briseno) to subdue King before they successfully handcuffed and cordcuffed King to restrain his arms and legs. The event probably would have gone unnoticed had not George Holliday, an amateur cameraman who witnessed the incident, videotaped the arrest and sold the tape to a local television station news program. The videotape became the crucial piece of evidence that the state of California used to charge the four LAPD arresting officers with criminal assault and that a federal grand jury subsequently used to charge the officers with civil rights violations.

Broadcast of Holliday’s tape on national news programs elicited several responses from the LAPD. On March 6, 1991, the LAPD released King from custody and admitted that officers failed to prove that King had resisted arrest. On March 7, Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates announced that he would investigate King’s arrest and, if the investigation warranted it, would pursue criminal assault charges against the arresting officers. On March 14, a Los Angeles County grand jury indicted Sergeant Koon and officers Briseno, Powell, and Wind for criminal assault, and they subsequently pleaded not guilty.

Investigation of Police Brutality

Overwhelming public sympathy for King following the national broadcast of Holliday’s videotape prompted Los Angeles Mayor Thomas Bradley to investigate charges that instances of police brutality motivated by racism were commonplace during LAPD arrest operations. On April 1, 1991, Mayor Bradley appointed a nonpartisan commission, headed by Warren Christopher (who had formerly served as President Jimmy Carter’s deputy secretary of state), to study the LAPD’s past record of complaints regarding police misconduct. On April 2, Mayor Bradley called on Police Chief Gates, who had served on the LAPD since 1949 and had been police chief since 1978, to resign. In May, the LAPD suspended Sergeant Koon and officers Briseno and Powell without pay and dismissed officer Wind, a rookie without tenure, pending the outcome of their criminal trial. King then filed a civil rights lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles.

Several significant developments occurred as the officers awaited trial. On July 9, 1991, the Christopher Commission released the results of its investigation and its recommendations to the five-member Los Angeles Police Commission. The Police Commission employed the police chief and was responsible for the management of the LAPD. The Christopher Commission found that the LAPD, composed of 67.8 percent white officers in 1991, suffered from a “siege mentality” in a city where 63 percent of the population were people of color. The commission also found that a small but significant proportion of officers repeatedly used excessive force when making arrests and that the LAPD did not punish those officers when citizens filed complaints. Finally, the commission recommended measures to exert more control over the LAPD’s operations, including limiting the police chief’s tenure to a five-year term, renewable by the Police Commission for one additional term only. After the release of the Christopher Commission report, Police Chief Gates announced his retirement, effective April 1992 (which he later amended to July 1992). On July 23, 1991, a California court of appeal granted the police defendants’ request for a change of venue for the upcoming criminal trial.

The State of California Court Trial

The trial of the four officers began on March 4, 1992, in the new venue—the primarily white community of Simi Valley in Ventura County. The jury who heard the state of California’s case against the four officers consisted of ten whites, one Latino, and one Asian. The officers’ defense lawyers presented Holliday’s videotape broken down into a series of individual still pictures. They asked the jury to judge whether excessive force—that is, force that was not warranted by King’s “aggressive” actions— was employed at any single moment during the arrest. Referring often to the “thin blue line” that protected society from the “likes of Rodney King,” the defense built a case that justified the police officers’ actions. King’s lawyer, Steven Lerman, a personal injury specialist, advised King not to testify at the trial out of concern that King’s “confused and frightened” state of mind since the beating might impair his memory of events and discredit his testimony. The Simi Valley jury acquitted the four officers of all charges of criminal assault, with the exception of one count against officer Powell on which the jury was deadlocked.

The acquittal of the four police officers on April 29, 1992, ignited widespread and destructive riots led by poor and angry black Angelenos. The riots affected areas throughout Los Angeles but particularly devastated parts of impoverished South Central Los Angeles. Fifty-three people died during the riots, which raged until May 2, and more than one billion dollars’ worth of property was damaged. There had long been friction between Los Angeles’ neighboring Korean and black communities, and the Korean American community bore the brunt of the rioters’ destructive attacks.

The Federal Court Civil Rights Trial

On August 5, 1992, a federal grand jury indicted the four officers for violating King’s civil rights. The grand jury charged Sergeant Koon with violating the Fourteenth Amendment, which obligated Koon, as the officer in charge of the arrest, to protect King while he was in police custody. Officers Briseno, Powell, and Wind were charged with violating the Fourth Amendment in using more force than necessary, and using that excessive force willfully, when they arrested King. King testified during the federal trial. On April 17, 1993, a jury of nine whites, two blacks, and one Latino found Koon and Powell guilty and Briseno and Wind not guilty. On August 4, 1993, Koon and Powell were sentenced to two-and-one-half-year prison terms. In May 1994, a Los Angeles jury awarded King $3.8 million in compensatory damages in his civil rights lawsuit against the city, but on June 1, 1994, the jury denied King’s request for additional punitive damages.

Legacy

King's case and its impact were brought to the forefront of the media following his death by reported accidental drowning in 2012. Just months before his death, he had spoken to reporters about how the beating and his subsequent involvement with civil rights had affected him.

The concerns raised by the King case regarding police brutality were heightened once more in the 2010s, particularly following several incidences of shootings of African Americans by white police officers beginning in 2014. Commentators and journalists noted that these instances represented an escalation of brutality rather than a decrease since King's case, as most of the high-profile 2014 cases involved the use of guns and all resulted in the deaths of the African American suspects involved; additionally, none of the cases led to criminal punishments against the officers. When white police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed unnarmed teenage African American suspect Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August of that year, protests and riots erupted in the town that were reminiscent of those that had broken out following the beating of King. Civil unrest continued following the grand jury's decision not to indict Wilson on civil rights violation charges.

Bibliography

Gooding-Williams, Robert, editor. Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising. Routledge, 1993.

Khalifah, H. Khalif, editor. Rodney King and the L.A. Rebellion: Analysis and Commentary by Thirteen Best-Selling Black Writers. UB & US Communications Systems, 1992.

Koon, Stacey, and Robert Deitz. Presumed Guilty: The Tragedy of the Rodney King Affair. Regnery Gateway, 1992.

Owens, Tom, and Rod Browning. Lying Eyes: The Truth Behind the Corruption and Brutality of the LAPD and the Beating of Rodney King. Thunder’s Mouth, 1994.

Taylor, Marisa. "Rodney King Case Changed Perceptions of Police Brutality." ABC News, 17 June 2012, abcnews.go.com/US/rodney-king-case-changed-perceptions-police-brutality/story?id=16589385. Accessed 16 Apr. 2015.

"23 Years after Rodney King, Victims of Police Violence Get Even Less Justice." Vanity Fair, Feb. 2015, www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/02/rodney-king-23-years-even-less-justice. Accessed 24 Apr. 2017.