RODNEY KING

Rodney King

Rodney King

Important Facts

In March and April of 1992, four white officers of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) stood trial on charges that they used excessive force in apprehending Rodney King, an African-American motorist who had led the police on a high-speed chase during the early morning hours of March 3,1991. Sergeant Stacey Koon and Officers Lawrence Powell, Timothy Wind and Theodore Briseno all faced charges of assault with a deadly weapon and of excessive force under color of police authority; in addition, Koon and Powell were charged with filing false reports in order to cover up the incident, and Koon was charged with assisting Powell in evading justice. Well before the trial of these officers in Simi Valley, California began, a solid majority of the American public had developed strong opinions regarding their guilt. A Los Angeles resident had surreptitiously made an eighty-one-second videotape of the officers' arrest of Mr. King, and a large portion of the millions of Americans who had repeatedly viewed segments of that tape on television news programs in the year preceding the trial viewed the jury's task as the mere transformation of the brutal "reality" displayed on their television screens into a formal guilty verdict.

Issues

The 1991 beating of Rodney G. King by Los Angeles, California, police led to state and federal criminal prosecution of the law enforcement officers involved in the assault, a civil jury award of $3.8 million to King for his injuries, and major reforms in the Los Angeles police department. In addition, the April 1992 acquittal of the white police officers for the beating of King, an African American, touched off riots in Los Angeles that rank as the worst in U.S. history. The controversy surrounding each of these actions raised the issues of race, racism, and police brutality in communities throughout the United States.

The prosecution and defense attorneys in the Rodney King trial essentially agreed on a number of central factual issues. Through their opening statements, closing arguments, and witness examinations, both sides told the jury that Mr. King led California Highway Patrol (CHP) Officers Tim and Melanie Singer on a high-speed chase over various freeways and surface streets; that King ignored repeated signals to pull over; that police units from the LAPD and the Los Angeles Unified School District joined in the pursuit; that the police eventually stopped King's car but that he exited the vehicle slowly and refused to follow the Singers' orders to lie flat on the ground; that Sergeant Koon ordered Melanie Singer to back off; that Koon then took control of the police operation; that King resisted an initial at- tempt by Officer Powell and others to apprehend him physically; that Koon was unable to force King into submission with two darts from a taser gun; and that King then endured forty-five baton blows from Powell, dozens of baton blows and kicks from Wind, and one kick to the upper body by Briseno before the police finally handcuffed and arrested ...