Official
Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD,
Book by Lou Cannon; Westview Press, 1999
the 1991 Rodney
King incident and the 1992 riots.
Prologue
TWO STARK AND
BRUTAL VIDEOTAPES SYMBOLIZE THE RODNEY King beating and the deadly riots that
broke out in South Central Los Angeles in the spring of 1992. The first
videotape, taken on March 3, 1991, by an amateur cameraman who had been
awakened after midnight by sirens and the noise from a police helicopter, is of
the King incident. It shows uniformed officers swarming around a large man who
writhes on the ground and attempts to rise, but is clubbed and kicked into
submission while other policemen watch with folded arms. The second video, shot
from a news helicopter hovering over the intersection of Florence and Normandie
Avenues during the riots a year later, shows the driver of a cement truck,
Reginald Denny, being dragged from his cab by neighborhood toughs, then kicked
and smashed in the head with a brick until he lies near death while one of his
assailants does a jig.
Because King is
black and the police officers are white and Denny is white and his attackers
are black, these two videotapes convey a powerful message of racism and
brutality. The symbolism was reinforced by several trials in which the
videotapes were used as evidence. In April 1992, in suburban Simi Valley, a
jury with no black members exonerated three of the police officers of using excessive
force against King and acquitted another officer of all but one charge. The
Simi Valley verdicts triggered the riots, in which fifty-four people died,1
more than two thousand were injured, and more than eight hundred buildings
burned. Then, in 1993, in a second trial, a federal jury with two black members
convicted two of the police officers and acquitted two others of violating
King's civil rights. Later that year a state jury on which there were four
blacks, four Latinos, two Asians, and two whites acquitted Reginald Denny's
black assailants of attempted murder and other charges and found the principal
defendant guilty of a lesser felony.
I covered the
trials of the officers and the riots for The Washington Post. Along with
most journalists and the public, I at first assumed that the videotape of the
King beating would assure conviction of the police defendants. I didn't know
that the tape shown repeatedly on television was a partial,
edited record.
While the videotape is brutal in any version, the larger record is vital to an
understanding of why the Simi Valley jurors acted as they did.In time I learned
that the mythology of the King case concealed a...
1 DREAM CITY
"Imagine
Los Angeles in the first decade of the 21st century.... More different races,
religions, cultures, languages and people mingle here than in any city in the
world."
--"LA
2000: A City for the Future," a report of the LA 2000 Committee.
THE LAST THING
THE LEADERS OF LOS ANGELES EXPECTED IN THE early 1990s was that their city would
become the scene of the nation's deadliest urban race riot since the Civil War.
To the contrary, Mayor Tom Bradley was confident that the city he had led since
1973 was "at the brink of a great destiny," poised to become the
multicultural crossroads of the world. His optimism was shared by the downtown
financiers who had bankrolled his political campaigns and were his enduring
allies. Together they had transformed a sprawling municipality once disparaged
as forty suburbs in search of a city into a metropolis of chrome-and-steel
skyscrapers, a magnet for investment from Canada, Japan, and other nations of
the Pacific Rim.
Bradley and his
backers as well as political leaders in Sacramento, the state capital, believed
that California was essentially recession-proof. They foresaw neither an end to
the cornucopia of defense spending which had funneled federal dollars into the
state since World War II nor the collapse of what seemed a perpetual real
estate boom. After five decades of steadily increasing values, even nondescript
tract houses were selling for fifteen to twenty-five times their original
price, and homes were considered better investments than certificates of
deposit or mutual funds. Despite air pollution and crowded freeways, Southern
Californians were convinced they lived in one of the best places on earth. In a
1943 article, Life magazine had described Southern California as
"irresistibly attractive to hordes of people." The state's entire
population was then just under 7 million, 2 million less than the 1990
population of Los Angeles County alone. But people continued to pour
2 TRIAL BY VIDEOTAPE
"This
is great! They got it on tape! Now we'll have a live, in-the field film to show
police recruits. It can be a real-life example of how to use escalating force
properly." --SergeantStacey Koon.1
RODNEY King
REMEMBERED THE PAIN OF THE BEATING AND OF feeling like "a crushed
can" when it was over. Officer Laurence Powell remembered that he was
"scared to death" when King charged at him and that he became
exhausted from hitting King with his metal police baton. Officer Timothy Wind
recalled that " King's arms were as big as my thighs" and that he
behaved the way suspects were supposed to act when under the influence of the
drug phencyclidine, or PCP. "Shit, I got to get out of here," Wind
thought. Officer Theodore Briseno remembered that nothing went right. He
recalled King's iron strength and the ease with which King threw him from his
back when he tried to bring his arms together to handcuff him. He remembered
the charge and a wild swing by Officer Powell with his baton which clipped King
in the head and knocked him down. He remembered that Powell continued to flail
away, "out of control."
Sergeant Stacey
Koon, the supervising officer, remembered that he had directed officers to
swarm King before a blow was struck and that King tossed them off his back like
so many rag dolls. He remembered firing two volleys into King from his electric
stun gun without stopping him and telling Powell and Wind to hit King in his
joints with their batons to keep him on the ground. Koon was convinced that he
had abided by Los Angles Police Department policy and very possibly saved King
from being shot, but he knew that what had happened had not been pretty to
watch. "I have seen uses of force of considerable violence, but I have not
seen anything that is as violent as this in my fourteen and a half years [as a
Los Angeles police officer]," Koon subsequently testified.
3 THE DRAGNET LEGACY
"The
future of America may well rest in the hands of the police.
-- LAPD
ChiefWilliam Parker, 19571
TIMOTHY EDWARD
WIND DROVE HIS BLUE-AND-SILVER FORD pickup truck from Kansas to California in
May 1990, eager to join what he was certain was the finest police department in
the world. He had dreamed of faraway adventures since his boyhood in Lake of
the Forest, a secluded community in the rolling hills of east Kansas near
Bonner Springs. Wind had joined a nearby fire department while still in high
school, and he enlisted in the Army after he graduated, becoming a paratrooper
and a Green Beret. The Army had given him a taste of the world, but he intended
to spend his life as a police officer, not a soldier. When he applied to the
LAPD, he had worked seven years in the police department of Shawnee, Kansas,
where the crime rate was low and promotions came slowly. "I wanted to be
with the best," Wind said.
Wind was a
handsome thirty-year-old who looked younger than his age when he entered the
Los Angeles Police Academy. His wife, Lorna, and their infant son soon joined
him in Los Angeles, and they found a home in Santa Clarita, north of the city,
where many police officers live. At the Academy, Wind was evaluated as being
"highly motivated, eager to learn, and extremely safety conscious."2
On the night of March 3, 1991, he had served exactly four months as a
probationary officer in Foothill Division, where his supervisors considered him
a promising officer who used "good judgment and patience even in dealing
with violent suspects."3Joseph Napolitano, one of the bystander
officers at Rodney King's arrest, saw Wind eating breakfast in a restaurant a
few hours later and told him there would be times when he would have to use
force as a police officer but that he should never enjoy it. "I didn't enjoy
it," Wind replied.
Neither Wind
nor Napolitano knew of the existence of the Holliday videotape when they had
this conversation. Wind was told about it by otherofficers in the locker room
of Foothill Station when he arrived for roll call on the night of March 4. The
tape didn't seem of consequence to him because he could not imagine that he had
done anything wrong. Then...
4 OFFICIAL NEGLIGENCE
"Police
officers are not raised on police farms where they are born and bred to be
police officers. They come out of all walks of society with all the prejudices
and problems of everyone else."
--
SergeantScott Landsman, Los Angeles Police Department.1
WITH HIS
BLACKENED RIGHT EYE SWOLLEN HALF-SHUT AND HIS right leg in a cast, Rodney King
was wheeled out of the Los Angeles County Jail on March 6, 1991, three days
after he was beaten. Answering questions from reporters, King denied having led
police on a high-speed freeway pursuit. "There was no chase," he
said. According to King, he had been pulled over because he "may have been
speeding just a little bit," maybe driving 40 to 45 miles an hour. Then he
was handcuffed and beaten. He said he did not think he had been beaten because
he was black nor did he remember the officers making racial comments.
"They beat me so bad I didn't pay any attention to what they were
saying," King said.
King's
attorney, Steven Lerman, agreed that race was not an issue. Lerman had not been
the first choice of King's family, who had sought the services of Johnnie L.
Cochran Jr., the city's premier black defense lawyer. But Cochran's
receptionist said he was involved in a trial.2 Desperate, King's
mother, Odessa, made inquiries of friends and came up with Lerman, a white
lawyer with a Beverly Hills office who had represented a black defendant in a
police brutality case. Deputy District Attorney Terry White, an African
American, suspected that race might have been a motive for the King beating.
But he was dissuaded by Lerman. "Very early on, Lerman told me he didn't
think race was an issue," White said.3
Daryl Gates had
his own suspicions, and he was relieved when LAPD investigators suggested only
that the incident was an extreme example of a police tendency to use excessive
force after a high-speed chase. That wascomprehensible, if not defensible.
Gates had been around a long time and knew the old LAPD maxim, "If you
run, you get beat."4But Gates was not relieved for long.Six days after
King's news conference at the jail, Internal Affairs investigators...
5 LATASHA'S SHIELD
"The
most important thing to me is that my family is always protected by a shield so
that they won't be harmed by dangerous, ruthless, uncaring people. "
--Latasha Harlins
ON A PEACEFUL
SATURDAY MORNING IN MARCH 1991, THIRTEEN days after the beating of Rodney King,
a fifteen-year-old high school freshman named Latasha Harlins who had spent the
night with a friend was walking home on Figueroa Street when she made an
innocent decision with deadly consequences. Harlins decided that she wanted
some orange juice. Her route took her by the Empire Liquor Market Deli, a white
stucco convenience store owned by a Korean family in a mostly black
neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles. It was not a popular store. People
in the neighborhood complained that its prices were too high and said the Korean
owners were rude to customers. But it was the nearest store with groceries in a
neighborhood of few choices, and Harlins had not eaten breakfast. At 9:40 A.M.
on March 16, she entered Empire Liquor, strolled to the refrigerator, and
extracted a $1.79 plastic container of orange juice. Shoving the container
halfway into her backpack, she headed toward the counter with two dollars in
her left hand.
Soon Ja Du, a
forty-nine-year-old Korean woman, was behind the counter, waiting on two black
children, a twelve-year-old girl and her nineyear-old brother, who were buying
hair gel for their mother. She watched fearfully as Harlins put the orange
juice into her backpack and came toward the counter. Harlins was five feet six
inches tall and weighed 150 pounds. She was an imposing figure to the
diminutive Du, who distrusted black people, disliked South Central, and hated
working behind the counter at Empire Liquor. Du lived in the faraway San
Fernando Valley, where blacks were few and she felt safer and among friends, as
she had once felt safe in Korea. South Central was another country. Blacks had
robbed Empire Liquor the
previous
Saturday when her husband, Hung Ki, known to Americans as Billy, was in charge.
Black gang members had robbed the store the previous December when her oldest
son, Joseph, who was thirty, was behind the counter. They had threatened...
6 CHRISTOPHER'S COURSE
"The
Rodney King beating stands as a landmark in the recent history of law
enforcement, comparable to the Scottsboro case in 1931 and the Serpico case in
1967. Rightly called 'sickening' by President Bush, and condemned by all
segments of society, the King incident provides an opportunity for evaluation
and reform of police procedures."
-- "Report
of the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department, July 9,
1991."1
DARYL GATES
STRUGGLED TO SAVE HIS JOB AFTER THE RODNEY King incident while Tom Bradley
pursued a political strategy that almost cost him the services of the quiet man
he chose to investigate the inner workings of the LAPD. "The Los Angeles
Police Department is facing a crisis of confidence in light of the intense
scrutiny following the brutal beating of Rodney King," the mayor said on
April 1, 1991, as he announced formation of the Independent Commission on the
Los Angeles Police Department and named Warren Christopher as its chairman.
Bradley said his "top priority" was "to restore the public's
confidence in the LAPD and to restore the prestige and morale of our
officers." He promised that the commission would "produce a report...
beyond reproach."
But Bradley's
behavior during this period did not match the high standard he set for the
commission. The mayor had decided that the King incident had handed him an
opportunity to oust a police chief he lacked the authority to fire, and the
mayor's aides fed a flow of disparaging information about Gates to the media,
some of it demonstrably false.2 Gates dug in his heels. "I'm
not going to slink away, defeated, because of some people in the community that
are not thinking and who found an opportunity to run me out," he had said
on March 13.3 Two days later, Glenn Bunting of the Los Angeles
Times reported that Deputy Mayor Mark Fabiani was orchestrating the effort
to "turn up the heat" on the chief and pressure him to resign.
Bradley had unconvincingly denied responsibility and said in an interview with
the Daily News on March 24 that any decision on retirement was up to...
7 KARLIN'S WAY
"We
must feel that our lives have value. We must feel that justice is equitable, that
Latasha's death has meaning. " --Reverend Cecil (Chip) Murray.1
JUDGE JOYCE ANN
KARLIN OF THE SUPERIOR COURT WAS AN unlikely choice to preside over the murder
trial of The People of the State of California v. Soon Ja Du, if only
because she had never before presided over a jury trial of any kind. Karlin had
been a busy federal prosecutor at the time of the Latasha Harlins shooting. By
the time of the trial six months later, she was, at forty, the newest and
youngest judge in the Compton office of the Court.
It is
exceedingly rare for a novice judge to launch her judicial career with a murder
trial. But coincidence and a reluctance of senior jurists to become involved in
controversy combined to hand Karlin the case almost by default. Before she
received the assignment in September 1991, during her second week on the bench,
one experienced judge had been transferred to a civil case because of an
unrelated controversy, another had been removed by a prosecution challenge, and
still another removed by a challenge from the defense. Two other judges had
dodged the assignment on the trivial ground that the trial would conflict with
their vacations. Karlin also could have refused to take the case, but she was
self-confident and unafraid of controversy. She believed the trial would be a
challenge and accepted it with alacrity.2
Karlin, a
talented and fiery lawyer, was a self-described movie brat who was born in 1951
in Caracas, Venezuela, where her father Myron was a film distributor. He later
became the president of Warner Brothers International. The family moved every
few years--to West Germany, Argentina, and Italy and then back to the United
States. Karlin attended schools in Frankfurt, Rome, Denver, and Chicago and
became fluent in German, Italian, and Spanish. As a child she read mystery
stories voraciously, sometimes rewritingthe endings to suit herself. She was
nine when she announced her ambition to become a lawyer. "I decided that I
would be a lawyer because I was a girl and as such I didn't need to support a
family...
8 JUDICIAL NEGLIGENCE
"Here
is Rodney King, racing on the freeway.... a black man racing toward Ventura
County. Just that juxtaposition alone can influence jurors." --Deputy
District AttorneyRoger Gunson1
IRA REINER
REMEMBERS THE DAY THE TRIAL OF THE PEOPLE OF the State of California v.
Laurence Powell et al. was transferred to Ventura County as the day when
the unflappable Roger Gunson used a four-letter word. Gunson is a devout Mormon
who rarely swears or uses crude language. He was then chief deputy of the
Special Investigations Division in the Los Angeles County District Attorney's
Office, where he had worked for twenty-three years since graduating from law
school at UCLA. During this time Gunson had served under five district attorneys,
earning their respect for his calm professionalism. But he wasn't calm on
November 26, 1991, when Judge Stanley M. Weisberg decided to try the officers
accused of using excessive force against Rodney King in the East Ventura County
Courthouse in Simi Valley. Gunson desperately wanted Reiner to challenge the
decision. Otherwise, he was sure the case would go down the drain and Reiner
with it.
The Special
Investigations Division prosecutes the bad cops whom Warren Christopher had
called "problem officers," and Gunson knew from experience that it
was never easy to convict even the worst of them. A few months earlier, despite
the testimony of sixteen LAPD officers for the prosecution, a racially diverse
downtown Los Angeles jury had acquitted three LAPD officers of misdemeanor
charges in the Thirty-ninth Street and Dalton raid, where four apartments
inhabited by poor blacks and Latinos had been leveled during a futile search
for drugs. These verdicts, a surprise even to Chief Daryl Gates, had deeply
disappointed Gunson. During Gunson's years at Special Investigations, civil
juries had become sufficiently skeptical of the LAPD to award damages to
civilians who suffered at its hands. Butthe Thirty-ninth and Dalton trial
showed that juries still hesitated to send police officers to prison.This
reluctance of juries to convict police officers on criminal charges might have
made People v. Powell a difficult case anywhere, despite the widespread
assumption...
9 BEYOND THE VIDEOTAPE
"Sometimes
police work is brutal. It's just a fact of life." --SergeantStacey Koon1
"Witnesses
tend to see things in a certain way. The videotape does not lie."
--Johnnie L. Cochran Jr.2 <
PEOPLE V.
POWELL EXISTED BECAUSE OF THE COMPELLING evidence of a videotape that the
world assumed had caught LAPD officers committing acts of irrefutable
brutality. Without the Holliday video, the beating of Rodney King would at most
have prompted an Internal Affairs inquiry in which investigators would have
faced a tangle of contradictions and uncertainties. King had been too
intoxicated at the time of the beating to remember with any clarity what had
happened. The police officers had plausible explanations for their conduct.
Civilian witnesses had seen only fragments of the incident, and their accounts
conflicted.3
Without a
videotape, investigators would have known that a physically imposing
African-American man had led police on a pursuit of nearly eight miles and
behaved in a bizarre fashion after he finally stopped. They would have known
that the man was shot by an electric stun gun and charged at an officer who hit
him with a baton. They might have concluded from medical reports that he had
been struck numerous times, but they would not have known that he had been on
the ground during many of the blows. Without a videotape, they would have been
unable to determine whether the officers had behaved unreasonably. Without a
videotape, the victim would have been just another black ex-convict who was
injured by the police while supposedly resisting arrest, and no one except
friends and family would today know the name of Rodney King.
By catching
officers in the act, the tape had solved the central problem of most excessive
force cases by making it impossible for the police to denythat they had beaten
a suspect. But the video simultaneously undermined the criminal case it
created. It became a powerful defense tool for removing from the jury the
people who were most appalled by what they had seen.Only rarely do...
10 JUDGMENT AT SIMI
"Duty
required Officer Powell to act. Circumstances required him to engage his duty
at his own peril. He didn't have the opportunity for calm reflection... He
didn't have an opportunity to run the scenario backwards and forwards on a
video screen in slow motion.
--
Michael Stone1
"They
think they are above the law. And I'm here to tell them and they should know
that no man is above the law--not Rodney King, not Stacey Koon, not Ted
Briseno, not Timothy Wind and not Laurence Powell."
--
Terry White2
If Stacey Koon
was the compass of the defense, then Sergeant Charles Duke was its anchor. Koon
had steered the defense argument beyond the deep waters of reasonable doubt
into the safe port of an affirmative defense in which the conduct of the
defendants was acclaimed as well as justified. Testifying as an expert witness
in Koon's behalf, Duke secured this argument in the hard doctrines of LAPD
policy. The officers had been doing what they had been taught in the Police
Academy. After repeatedly watching the video, Duke said he was certain that the
officers who had so badly beaten and kicked Rodney King had acted on the basis
of "reasonable perceptions" in dealing with an unsearched felony
suspect whom they had reason to consider a threat.
Duke was a
living legend within the LAPD. A hero of the SWAT team, he had received ninety
commendations, earned a medal for bravery, and taught self-defense tactics or
hostage negotiations to police agencies, the Marine Corps, and the FBI. Even a
jury less enamored of police officers than the one assembled in Simi Valley
might well have been dazzled byDuke's background, which was elicited by Mounger
in a long preamble toDuke's analysis of the videotape.For jurors in need of an
expert's argument in order to indulge their propolice sympathies, Duke was the
perfect witness. As interpreted by Duke, even...
11 ANATOMY OF A BREAKDOWN
"It
was the Pearl Harbor of the LAPD. " --Zev Yaroslavsky1
"It
was the LAPD's Vietnam." --LAPD SergeantCharles Duke2
DARYL GATES
BELIEVED THAT THE WATTS RIOT HAD TAUGHT enduring lessons to the LAPD and to
African Americans in South Central Los Angeles. Reflecting on the riot twenty
years later, he said that blacks realized "it would be total insanity to
do that again." But if another disorder on the scale of Watts ever did
occur, he vowed, the LAPD would be ready: "... The Los Angeles Police
Department would not allow it to go the way it did before. We would stop it the
first night."3
Gates was a
thirty-eight-year-old field commander at Watts and in the thick of the action.
On August 11, 1965, the first night of the riot, he had established a command
post at a strategic location and tried to close off the area. "Once the
area was sealed off, it was our opinion that the activity would subside,"
Gates said in a memo afterward. "A sweep of the area on foot was thought
to be inadvisable at this time, primarily because of a lack of sufficient
personnel and a belief that the disorder would subside by itself."4
But instead of subsiding, the disorder spread. Defiant youths stoned patrol
cars. Under orders not to fire unless their lives were in danger, police
officers fell back. Although his post-riot memo did not mention it, Gates said
in a book written a quarter of a century later that Deputy Chief Roger Murdock had
ordered him to leave the area.
Whether ordered
out or not, Gates had no choice except to withdraw. "We did not know how
to handle guerrilla warfare," he acknowledged.5 Nordid he have
enough police officers at his disposal. By the time order was restored six days
later by the National Guard and a task force of various police forces under
LAPD command, thirty-four people had been killed and 1,032...
12 NIGHTMARE CITY
"There
are going to be situations where people are going to be without assistance. That's
just the facts of life."
--
ChiefDaryl Gates1
"There's
no doubt in my mind that we could have saved the city."
--
Metro OfficerGreg Baltad2
NO ONE NOTICED
DARYL GATES AS HE WAS DRIVEN NORTH TO Brentwood on the San Diego Freeway,
following the route that O. J. Simpson would take two years later in the famous
slow-speed chase that ended in his arrest. On April 29, 1992, the eyes of the
world were focused on the bloody intersection of Florence and Normandie, where
in the wake of the LAPD's withdrawal a gang-led mob took control and attacked
anyone who was not African American. Because the police had failed to seal off
this well-traveled route through South Central, targets were plentiful. Whites,
Asians, and Latinos were hauled from vehicles and beaten or attacked on the
streets. Most of the victims were poor, small, or frail. None had any
connection with the LAPD or Rodney King.
These racially
charged assaults were recorded by television cameras on news helicopters
hovering over the intersection as horrified pilots added commentary. "And
there's no police presence down here!" an observer in one helicopter said
at the height of the violence. "They will not enter the area. This is
attempted murder! Tell LAPD to shut Florence Boulevard down, and Normandie."3
While the
savagery at Florence and Normandie was witnessed by the nation live on
television, it was not seen by the mayor, the police chief, or many
high-ranking LAPD officers. Chief Gates learned of "a major incident"
at Florence and Normandie by radio as he was heading for the fund-raiser, but
he could not see what was happening. Neither could Mayor Bradley, who after
denouncing the verdicts had left City Hall for the First AfricanMethodist
Episcopal Church and the rally that was intended to launch "Operation Cool
Response." Deputy Chief Matthew Hunt, in charge of South Bureau, was also
at the rally. Twelve LAPD captains, two-thirds of the department's division
leaders, were still on...
13 AFTER THE FALL
"
Los Angeles, you broke my heart. And I'm not sure I'll love you again. "
--
George Ramos1
"We
in Los Angeles cannot begin the healing and the stabilization process until and
when we make peace with ourselves and each other. As Martin Luther King once said,
'True peace is not merely the absence of tension. It is the presence of
justice.'"
-- LAPD
ChiefWillie L. Williams2
MAYOR TOM
BRADLEY LIFTED THE DUSK-TO-DAWN CURFEW AT 5:15 P.M. on Monday, May 4,
officially ending the riots. Fifty-four people had lost their lives during five
days of violence, the highest toll in an American civil disturbance since the
Draft Riot of 1863 in New York City.3 Twenty-six of the dead were
African American, fourteen were Latino, nine were non-Hispanic whites, and two
were Asian. Three persons who died in fires had been too badly burned to
determine their race or ethnicity. Another 2,328 people had been treated for
injuries in emergency rooms by doctors who practiced what one hospital official
called "battlefield medicine."4 Property losses exceeded
$900 million, the most ever in any U.S. riot. Eight hundred and sixty-two
structures had been destroyed by fire, more than four times as many as in the
1965 Watts riot. Thousands of businesses were damaged or looted, and many
"mom-and-pop" stores were gone forever.
In South
Central, Pico-Union, Westlake, and Koreatown, the lifting of the curfew and the
withdrawal of troops marked the end of one ordeal and the beginning of another.
The riots had wrecked the infrastructure of the city's poorest neighborhoods.
In a sprawling city where public transportation is at best inadequate, hard
lives became especially hard for those without an automobile. Many
neighborhoods no longer had any grocery stores, and most of the mini-malls
where the poor had done their shopping had disappeared.Gone with the groceries
were drugstores, clothing stores, and discount variety stores. Gone, too, were
jobs, at least 30,000 of them, in neighborhoods where they had been scarce to
begin with.5The 1992 riots were particularly painful for Watts. One of...
14 PRESUMED GUILTY
"Prosecutors
are the good guys."
--
Steven Clymer1
"This
is a political case, not a legal case."
--
Harland Braun2
THE RESTORATION
OF RIOT-TORN LOS ANGELES WAS A VAST AND difficult undertaking that proved
beyond the capacity of federal and local governments. But it was easy and
convenient for the powerful law-enforcement arms of these governments to
retaliate against the relatively resourceless men whose videotaped conduct
symbolized the injustices that produced the riots--or the injustices of the
riots themselves. As the disorders spread, President George Bush and Attorney
General William Barr swiftly set in motion the process that led to the federal
indictment of the four white LAPD officers who had been acquitted of using
excessive force against Rodney King. Soon afterward, Los Angeles Police Chief
Daryl Gates personally took charge of a high-visibility foray that arrested the
alleged ringleader of the four young black men accused of the assault on
Reginald Denny and others at Florence and Normandie. After the arrests,
District Attorney Ira Reiner produced a long list of charges that had the
potential to put the defendants behind bars for the rest of their lives.
Bush's reaction
was essentially a political response to a social upheaval that baffled and
bothered him. The president had assumed with most other Americans that the
videotape of the King beating ( Bush said it had "sickened" him)
would result in convictions. After the riots that followed the verdicts, Bush
was at a loss. He wanted to calm passions.
On the morning
of April 30, Bush met in the Oval Office with White House spokesman Marlin
Fitzwater, who had drafted a proposed statement. "Yesterday's verdict in
the Los Angeles police case has left us all with a deep sense of personal
frustration and anguish," it began. When Fitzwater readthe statement at a
senior staff meeting after his meeting with the president, William Kristol,
chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, objected that the
"frustration and anguish" phrase was too conciliatory to the
rioters.3 While Bush allowed the...
15 PLAYING THE RACE CARD
"I'm
not absolutely sure which word it was, if it was killer or nigger. I'm not
sure."
--
Rodney King1
THE UNNOTICED
VERDICTS IN THE FIRST TRIAL OF CERMAN Cunningham, the unsolved murder of Raul
Delcomber, and the rout of the rally turned "mini-riot" at Florence
and Normandie occurred in December 1992, as one of the most tumultuous years in
the history of Los Angeles drew to a close. The stage was now set for two
trials that many feared could spark new disorders. Although procedural issues
had delayed the trial of The People of the State of California v. Damian
Monroe Williams and Henry Keith Watson, a top-notch trial team was prepared
to try United States of America v. Stacey C. Koon et al., in which Koon,
Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, and Theodore Briseno were accused of violating
the civil rights of Rodney King. The federal prosecutors enjoyed a favorable
venue and superior resources and were confident of the merits of their case.
But they were nervous, and security was tight at the federal courthouse in
downtown Los Angeles. Both the security and the nervousness were prompted by
fears that the government had a "mole" in its midst.
The prosecutors
had reason for concern. While going through his mail at his downtown law office
on a warm August morning four months earlier, Officer Powell's lawyer, Michael
Stone, had come across what appeared to be a memorandum to the U.S. Attorney
from the federal trial team. Instead of sharing his discovery with his fellow
defense attorneys, Stone telephoned Steven Clymer at the U.S. Attorney's Office
a few blocks away and asked if he had sent him anything. Not recently, Clymer
replied. Stone told him about the memorandum, and Clymer asked if he had read
it. Stone said he had begun to read it but stopped after a couple of pages when
he realized the memo was not meant for him. Clymer told Stone not to read any
more of the document or copy it and sent FBI agents to his office to confiscate
it.
16 THE OTHER VIDEOTAPE
"Look,
folks, policing is done this way. You may like to live in Santa Monica and have
your little wine party in the backyard and drive your Jaguar and do your little
barbecue.... Know that the reason you are allowed to do that in the safety of
your community is because police officers go out and they clean up the streets
and deal with all the scum that you don't want to know about..."
--
Stacey Koon1
"We've
survived the prosecution case just fine. The question is whether we can survive
the defense."
--
Harland Braun2
HAVING
ESTABLISHED KING'S HUMANITY, PROSECUTORS RETURNED to the theme that the
defendants had treated him inhumanely. Their next witness was Dr. Harry Smith,
who was called to show that King's facial injuries were caused by baton blows.
Smith was substituting for biomechanics expert Dr. James Benedict, who on the
second day of the trial dismayed the prosecutors by calling from his office in
San Antonio and telling them that a medical condition prevented him from
flying. He offered his associate Smith, and Steven Clymer and Alan Tieger flew to
San Antonio to interview him. They came back all smiles. In addition to
expertise in biomechanics, Smith had a background as an emergency-room
physician and radiologist and the confident manner of an expert who had
testified at many trials.
Smith spent
three hours on the witness stand on March 11, smoothly translating medical
terms into layman's language and using a pair of gleaming plastic skulls to
trace the patterns of King's facial and head injuries. He took dead aim at the
defense theory that these injuries were caused by falls to the pavement. King
had suffered fifteen facial fractures, including a broken cheekbone and eye
socket and a dislocated jaw, but his nose had not been broken, as Smith said
would have happened if the injuries had been the result of face-first falls.
"The patterns I have discussed here today are not caused or causable by a
fall," Smith said under Michael Stone's cross-examination. "These are
baton injuries."Overall, the prosecution case on the issue of head blows
was compelling....
17 THE THIRTEENTH JUROR
"There
is fear for my family. I'm in there, and I don't even know if there is a riot
going on outside. I don't know what my family is doing. I'm locked in this
closet." --Jury Foreman Bob Almond1
THE PROSECUTION
WAS IN CONTROL AFTER THE SHOWING OF THE Briseno videotape. What little remained
for the government to do was accomplished by Steven Clymer in a closing
argument that was a masterpiece of the lawyer's art. While he knew the
government had presented a strong case, Clymer is pessimistic by nature. A
single determined juror could cause a mistrial, and trying the officers a third
time would be difficult if not impossible. Clymer felt a need to connect with
the jurors and make every possible point. He clung rigidly to the lectern and
looked at his notes as he began. Then he paced, stopping to look directly into
the eyes of the jurors as he spoke.
After a brief
outline of his argument, Clymer began by discussing King's behavior. "On
March 3, 1991, Rodney King was drunk," Clymer said. "He was
disrespectful. In the words of Melanie Singer, he was a wiseacre. He was slow
to listen and to comply with the commands the police gave him. When they tried
to handcuff him, he tried to resist.... He got up and tried to run away [and]
escape. In response to that, these defendants taught Rodney King a lesson. They
went far beyond what was reasonable and what was necessary to arrest Rodney
King."
Clymer
described the beating of King and the inaccurate descriptions of it given in
the various reports filed by the defendants. He recalled Briseno's testimony
that King had not been combative. "Why did [ Briseno] tell you he tried to
stop Powell, and he tried to stop Koon, and they didn't respond to his request
to stop?" Clymer asked. "The answer to all of that is simple, ladies
and gentlemen. Something went very, very wrong at the intersection of Foothill
and Osborne that night." Now passionately launched into his argument,
Clymer accused the defense of a persistent effort to deny and then to cover up
what went wrong. "They have sought to convince you by exaggeration that
Rodney King is the most dangerous person...
18 SECOND JUDGMENTS
"The
sentences ordered by Judge Davies were severe indeed. Neither law nor justice
requires that they be set aside or that any longer prison terms be
imposed."
--
Ninth Circuit JudgeStephen Reinhardt1
"Justice
is in the eye of the beholder."
--Community
activist Don Jackson2
NEAR THE END OF
THE TRIAL THAT RESULTED IN HIS CONVICTION for violating Rodney King's civil
rights, Stacey Koon wrote a onesentence note to Judge John Davies. He put the
note in an envelope and gave it to the court clerk with a request that it not
be opened until the jury had completed its work. After the verdicts, Davies
opened the envelope. The note read, "Your honor, out of deference to your
penchant for precise and succinct language; thank you for a fair trial."
Koon's
assessment is as open to question as were his tactics during the King arrest.
Davies was certainly impartial, but it is hard to call the trial at which he
presided "fair," when the impact on jurors of the fearful venue of
Los Angeles is factored into the equation. It is also hard to call it fair
using a common-sense definition of double jeopardy, rather than the legal
fiction under which the Supreme Court has permitted acquitted defendants to be
tried twice for the same conduct. And even if the issue of fairness is limited
to what occurred in the federal courtroom, doubts remain.
The federal
jury had been almost evenly divided when it began the emotional deliberations
that could well have ended in a deadlock. In part the jurors' eventual
unanimity was driven by a presumed imperative that consensus was necessary--a
view encouraged by Davies, who abhorred the notion of a mistrial. Davies had
proposed an exceptional instruction at the beginning of deliberations (the
Allen, or "dynamite," charge) and might have given it to the jury had
not the prosecution argued that it could leadto reversal of convictions on
appeal. He also had made known his feelings about a mistrial early on, when he
prevented defense attorney Harland Braun from questioning prospective jurors
about their willingness to hold out against majority opinion.The judge's
message...
19 BACK TO THE FUTURE
"He's
tough enough to turn L.A. around."
--
Richard Riordan1993 campaign slogan
"I
am not a liar."
--
Police ChiefWillie Williams1
AS THE CRIMINAL
AND CIVIL CASES SPAWNED BY THE RODNEY King incident dragged on through the
courts, change came slowly to Los Angeles. The 1992 riots had discredited
high-profile officials, speeding the retirement of Chief Daryl Gates and Mayor
Tom Bradley and prompting District Attorney Ira Reiner to drop his reelection
campaign. By the summer of 1993, when Willie Williams had been police chief for
a year, Los Angeles had a new mayor and Los Angeles County a new district
attorney. Despite the turnover, however, municipal politics remained democratic
in form but exclusionary in substance, with the city's largest ethnic group and
third largest racial group isolated from its political life.
During
Bradley's twenty years as mayor, Los Angeles had advanced from the era when it
was ruled by an oligarchy and celebrated by its boosters as the "white
spot" of America. African Americans had obtained access to power and
developed a sophisticated political leadership. Homeowner associations and
other voluntary groups had learned to lobby and otherwise influence the city
council. Now boosters celebrated the diversity reflected in the 1990 census,
which found that 40 percent of the city's population was Latino, 37 percent
Anglo (non-Hispanic white), 13 percent African American and 9 percent Asian.
Since the census, the proportions of Latinos and Asians have steadily
increased, while the proportions of Anglos and African Americans have declined.
But the
political demography of Los Angeles in the early 1990s sharply conflicted with
the census. Anglos held most elected offices and African Americans a higher
proportion of offices than their percentage of thepopulation. Latinos were
vastly under-represented in the government and Asians barely represented at
all. Indeed, Los Angeles was two cities. One city, overwhelmingly Latino and
increasingly Asian, provided the huge, dependable workforce required by small
businesses, service industries, and an...
20 JUDGMENTS AND LEGACIES
" Rodney
King was a defining incident. I used to wish we could take back those five
minutes, but more good than harm has come from them for the LAPD. " --LAPD
LieutenantJohn Dunkin1
"Most
people of a certain age remember what they were doing when John F. Kennedy was
shot. Many remember what they were doing when the Challenger exploded. If you
live in Los Angeles, anyone can tell you where they were when the riots
occurred and how they felt. Most of them felt fear and an overwhelming sense of
loss. " --Los Angeles Deputy MayorRobin Kramer2
RODNEY GLEN
King'S LIFE WAS DOGGED WITH DIFFICULTIES IN the five years after the March 3,
1991, incident that made him an international symbol of police abuse. The
videotape that aroused "horror and outrage... from Paris to Tokyo"
also made King an enduring celebrity who attracted the media spotlight,
especially when he ran afoul of the law while behind the wheel. These incidents
were part of a recurring pattern. King suffered from alcoholism, which had
killed his father, and he had not learned to take responsibility for his
actions. Although usually gentle when sober, King became wild and temperamental
when drinking. But despite everything that had happened, King continued to
drink and drive.
King's next
brush with the law after March 3 was trivial. He was driving in the suburb of
Santa Fe Springs on May 11, 1991, when Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies
pulled him over because the windows of his car were excessively tinted, which
is against the law in California. The windows were so dark that the deputies
did not recognize King until he had stopped. Whenthey saw who it was, they
wanted no part of him. Although he was driving without a license and the
registration on the car had expired, King was not even cited.Seventeen days
later, King was arrested in a bizarre incident...
The Struggles of the Survivors-an Epilogue
EIGHT YEARS TO
THE DAY AFTER THE VIDEOTAPED BEATING that, as federal prosecutor Barry Kowalski
put it, caused "horror and outrage" from "Paris to Tokyo,"
Rodney Glen King faced yet another criminal prosecution, the third since the
incident. This time he was charged in San Bernardino County, California, of
misdemeanor counts of injuring a child, causing corporal injury to her parent,
and vandalizing property. The aggrieved parent was Carmen Simpson and the child
her sixteen-year-old daughter, Candace, whom King had fathered out of wedlock
when he was seventeen. The arrest warrant was issued on March 3, 1999, the
anniversary of the televised beating that led to many of the events described
in this book.
King pleaded
innocent to the charges, which have not been adjudicated at this writing,
calling them a "family misunderstanding." Whatever their legal merit,
they were symptomatic of long-standing problems. Despite his $3.8 million civil
damage award for the injuries inflicted in the beating, King is still
struggling to find himself. The effort has led him ever farther from the
central city--most recently to Fontana, in the San Gabriel Mountains, an outer
ring among the endless suburbs of Los Angeles.
King has been
unable to flee the problems that beset him long before March 3, 1991, as his
detractors are quick to point out. After King's latest arrest, former LAPD
Chief Daryl Gates said King would be "in trouble the rest of his
life" because he was "in denial about his substance-abuse problems."
A well-informed friend of King, speaking anonymously, offered a more
sympathetic but also disheartening assessment: "Rodney has developmental
problems that have not been addressed," the friend said. "He's
basically a nice man with limited intellect who becomes easily frustrated [and]
doesn't know how to deal with his problems when this happens and lashes out at
others, sometimes violently.... He has had psychological assistance that helped
him deal with the impact of the beating, but no one has really addressed his inability
to deal with frustration."Still, Rodney King has tried, often under
conditions that would frustrate anyone. Two dozen lawyers laid claim...
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