Introduction

The 1991 beating of Rodney King highlights police abuse as one of the most pressing civil rights issues in the United States. The Rodney King beating set off a chain of events that enflamed racial, ethnic and social tensions in Los Angeles, including six days of riots and rebellion, calls for structural reforms of the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, and the resignations of the mayor of Los Angeles, the chief of police, and the Los Angeles County district attorney.

The Rodney King beating serves as a mirror that reflects the values of this society and of the people who watch and evaluate what happened. This is illustrated by the history of the case as it has made its way through various state and federal criminal and civil trials, all the way to the United States Supreme Court.

The jury in Simi Valley acquitted the four officers who beat King of criminal charges. The verdicts touched off widespread rioting and rebellion in Los Angeles. More than 40 people were killed, more than 2,000 were injured, and nearly $1 billion in property was destroyed.

The jury in the federal trial in Los Angeles subsequently convicted two officers of criminally violating Rodney King's civil rights. The trial judge in the federal case imposed relatively light sentences of 30 months in prison on the convicted officers, departing downward from the sentences of 70 to 87 months that would have been indicated under the federal sentencing guidelines. The trial court justified the lowered sentences on the grounds that the victim's misconduct contributed significantly to provoking the offense; that the convicted officers were unusually susceptible to abuse in prison; that they would lose their jobs and be precluded from jobs in law enforcement; that they had been subjected to successive state and federal prosecutions; and that they presented a low risk of committing future crimes.

A panel of three judges of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed those sentences on the grounds that the sentences were too lenient, in violation of the federal sentencing guidelines. Under the panel's decision, the officers would have been imprisoned for about six years. Koon and Powell then sought en banc review before all 26 judges of the Court of Appeals, which refused to hear the case. However, nine judges dissenting from the refusal to hear the case en banc -- including a prominent liberal and a prominent libertarian -- wrote that the thirty month sentences imposed by the trial judge should have been affirmed.

The United States Supreme Court then reviewed the case. Applying a mechanical interpretation of the sentencing guidelines to arrive at a mixed result, the Supreme Court affirmed the Court of Appeals in part and reversed in part. According to the Supreme Court, the district court did not abuse its discretion when it considered the victim's misconduct, the convicted officer's susceptibility to abuse in prison, and the burdens of successive prosecutions in imposing lower sentences. However, the district court did abuse its discretion when it considered the likelihood of future crimes and the fact that the officers would lose their jobs and be unable to obtain future jobs in law enforcment when it imposed lower sentences. The Supreme Court sent the case back to the lower courts for resentencing. The trial judge reimposed the original sentences.

In the meantime, in Rodney King's civil suit against the City of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Police Department, Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell and others, the City of Los Angeles conceded liability, and went to trial solely on damages. The jury awarded Rodney King $3.8 million in actual damages to compensate King for loss of work, medical costs, and pain and suffering. The jury denied King any punitive damages. The judge awarded King's lawyers $1.6 million in fees. They had requested $4.4 million.

It is necessary to view the Rodney King videotape in order to begin to reach one's own conclusions about the meaning of "what really happened" on the street that day and what is captured on tape. It is not enough to read or hear descriptions by others. It is certainly not enough, for example, to read an appellate court's interpretation of the tape. Lawyers who have tried cases frequently find it hard to recognize their cases as described in appellate opinions. It can be like seeing a bad snapshot of yourself and asking, "Is that really what I look like?" The Supreme Court's dry-as-dust description of the tape, for example, utterly fails to capture what is reflected in the tape:

The events that occurred next were captured on videotape by a bystander. As the videotape begins, it shows that King rose from the ground and charged toward Officer Powell. Powell took a step and used his baton to strike King on the side of his head. King fell to the ground. From the 18th to the 30th second on the videotape, King attempted to rise, but Powell and Wind each struck him with their batons to prevent him from doing so. From the 35th to the 51st second, Powell administered repeated blows to King's lower extremities; one of the blows fractured King's leg. At the 55th second, Powell struck King on the chest, and King rolled over and lay prone. At that point, the officers stepped back and observed King for about 10 seconds. Powell began to reach for his handcuffs. (At the sentencing phase, the District Court found that Powell no longer perceived King to be a threat at this point.)

At one-minute-five-seconds (1:05) on the videotape, Briseno, in the District Court's words, "stomped" on King's upper back or neck. King's body writhed in response. At 1:07, Powell and Wind again began to strike King with a series of baton blows, and Wind kicked him in the upper thoracic or cervical area six times until 1:26. At about 1:29, King put his hands behind his back and was handcuffed. Where the baton blows fell and the intentions of King and the officers at various points were contested at trial, but, as noted, [Koon and Powell's] guilt has been established.

One of the purposes of this "electronic book" is to situate the Rodney King beating in a broader legal and social context so that the reader can assess the issues for himself or herself. The book combines substantive information about civil rights law, police reform and life in Los Angeles with electronic tools for harnessing the information. The materials include digitized video and audio clips depicting some of the events that emotionally shocked Los Angeles, the nation and the world in the last few years. The video clips depict the Rodney King beating; the shooting of Latasha Harlins by grocery store clerk Soon Ja Du, which exacerbated racial and ethnic tensions in Los Angeles in the days after the Rodney King beating; and the beatings of Reginald Denny, Fidel Lopez and Choi Sai-Choi during the riots and rebellion in 1992.

I have used these materials to teach courses on civil rights and police reform at Stanford Law School and UCLA Law School. While these materials focus primarily on events in Los Angeles, the issues go beyond rebuilding L.A. The materials use the Rodney King incident as a vehicle to address broader issues of accomplishing social change through law. The materials also seek to make the experience of the community relevant to the study and practice of law. The book is also an integral part of our efforts to develop the electronic law school, and to prepare students and attorneys for the electronic practice of law. The goal is not only to prepare for the future. The goal is to enable attorneys and students to practice law the way the best lawyers do now.

The remainder of this Essay will present a chronology of the major events in Los Angeles that are relevant to evaluating the Rodney King beating, from the time of the Watts Riots in 1965, through the beating itself in 1991 and the riots and rebellion in 1992, and continuing with the ensuing efforts to rebuild Los Angeles. The Essay will then describe the organization of the materials and the reasons for publishing these materials in electronic form.

A Chronology of Life in Los Angeles

Violence in the City

The Watts Riots erupted in Los Angeles on August 11, 1965, when an Anglo police officer arrested a black man for drunk driving. After six days of rioting, four people lay dead, over 1,000 were hurt, nearly 4,000 were arrested, and property damage was estimated at about $40,000,000. The National Guard was called in to restore order. According to the report of the Governor's Commission on the Los Angeles Riots (the McCone Commission), entitled Violence in the City: An End or a Beginning?, the fundamental causes of the riots and rebellion were a resentment, even hatred, of the police as the symbol of authority; the absence of jobs for blacks; and the absence of good schooling for black children. Warren Christopher served as vice chair of the McCone Commission. He later chaired the commission that investigated the Los Angeles Police Department following the Rodney King beating, before becoming Secretary of State in the Clinton administration.

City of Los Angeles v. Lyons

In 1983, the United States Supreme Court issued a ruling on police abuse that was to have lasting repercussions for the on-going efforts to achieve police reform in Los Angeles. In City of Los Angeles v. Lyons, 461 U.S. 95 (1983), the Court held that the plaintiff, a black motorist who was placed in a chokehold following a routine traffic stop, did not have standing to seek an injunction prohibiting the Los Angeles Police Department from using chokeholds to effectuate an arrest because he did not demonstrate a serious likelihood of being subjected to a chokehold again in the future. The holding represented a defeat for the plaintiff and for the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the plaintiff in the litigation. However, non-litigation forms of advocacy resulted in a victory for police reform when the City of Los Angeles banned chokeholds in 1982, while the Lyons case was pending in the courts, after the police killed sixteen people, including twelve black men, using the chokehold during routine arrests.

Advocates for civil rights and police reform continued to confront similar issues in and out of the courts from the time of the Watts Riots, through the Lyons litigation, to the Rodney King beating in 1991 and the ensuing riots and rebellion in 1992. In the Rodney King case itself, LAPD officers claimed that the beating and electrocution of Rodney King resulted in part because officers were prohibited from using a chokehold to subdue King. The NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., and other civil rights attorneys filed a civil rights class action in 1990 against the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department in an effort to revive injunctive relief against police abuse in the wake of Lyons. Thoughtful observers agreed that racial intolerance and a siege mentality by many police officers towards the communities they were supposed to protect and to serve exacerbated the use of excessive force by the police. Police abuse, racism, poverty, lack of opportunity, crime, drugs, and the loss of hope in the nation's inner cities were fundamental problems of the society as a whole that lay at the core of civil unrest in 1965 and again in 1992. Reports by Blue Ribbon commissions documented the problems of police abuse and recommended structural reforms. The reports included the McCone Report on the Watts Riots, the Webster Report on the 1992 disorders, the Christopher Commission Report on the Los Angeles Police Department, and the Kolts Report on the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

The Rodney King Beating

On March 3, 1991, four Los Angeles police officers beat and arrested Rodney Glen King while some twenty others stood by and did nothing. George Holiday captured the beating on videotape from his apartment house across the street and delivered the tape to a local television station on March 4. The tape was broadcast around the world, galvanizing international attention on police brutality in Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles County District Attorney dismissed all charges against King four days later. On March 15, four Los Angeles police officers -- Sergeant Stacey Koon and Officers Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind and Theodore Briseno -- were charged in state court with felony assault and related charges arising from the King beating. The four remained free on bail pending trial. Police chief Daryl Gates fired probationary officer Timothy Wind and suspended without pay the other three officers who were criminally charged in the King beating. A grand jury refused to indict seventeen other officers who stood by.

In response to the King beating, Mayor Tom Bradley appointed Warren Christopher to head the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department (the "Christopher Commission") to investigate the Los Angeles Police Department. The Commission issued its Report three months later, documenting the systematic use of excessive force and racial harassment in the LAPD. Police abuse reflected not just a problem with individual deputies, but management problems caused by the lack of supervision, discipline and accountability. The Report also condemned the organizational culture of the LAPD, which emphasized crime control over crime prevention and created a siege mentality that isolated the police from the people. Among the Report's chief recommendations were a call for community policing and the resignation of police chief Daryl Gates.

Superior Court Judge Stanley Weisberg ordered the trial of the four officers charged in the King beating moved to conservative and predominantly Anglo Simi Valley in November 1991. On April 29, 1992, the Simi Valley jury found the four police officers not guilty of committing any crimes against Rodney King, except that the jury hung on one count of excessive force against Officer Laurence Powell. The judge declared a mistrial on that count.

The City Erupts

Riots and rebellion engulfed Los Angeles when the verdict was announced. The police were capured on videotape abandoning the neighborhood around Florence and Normandie in South Central Los Angeles, which became a tinder box for the riots and rebellion. Reginald Denny, an Anglo truck driver, was pulled from his truck and beaten at the intersection. A news helicopter captured the beating on videotape. Fidel Lopez, a contractor and a Guatemalan immigrant, was beaten on videotape near his home near the same intersection. Choi Sai-Choi, an immigrant from Hong Kong, was dragged from his car, beaten and robbed on videotape. As the rioting and rebellion began, Daryl Gates abandoned police headquarters to attend a political fundraising party in the predominantly wealthy and Anglo beachside community of Pacific Palisades, twenty miles from the center of the civil unrest. The National Guard was called in to restore order to the city. By the time the riots and rebellion were over after six days, 42 people had been killed, 700 structures had been destroyed by fire, thousands of people had lost their jobs, 5,000 people had been arrested and Los Angeles had suffered nearly $1 billion in property damage. Of the people arrested, 51% were Latinos, 38% were black, 9% were Anglos, and 2% were Asian Americans or "other." Korean merchants bore the brunt of the property damage. Overall, Koreans ran an estimated three-quarters of the wrecked businesses.

During the riots and rebellion, the Justice Department announced that it would resume investigation of civil rights violations by the police officers in the King beating. Mayor Tom Bradley announced the creation of Rebuild L.A. The project was to be a joint effort by private and public forces spearheaded by former baseball commissioner and 1984 Olympic games czar Peter Ueberroth to rebuild the City of Angels. The effort did not result in any apparent success.

The Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners appointed William Webster, former head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, to head a commission to study the performance of the Los Angeles Police Department during the riots and rebellion. The Webster Report found that the absence of leadership in the police department and in city government was responsible for the failure to prepare for and respond to the riots and rebellion. Neither the city nor the LAPD had a real plan for what to do. City and police leaders were paralyzed in the face of the need to make decisions. The police response should have been quicker, better organized and more effective. To prevent future disorders, the Report recommended community policing and stressed the need for police officers to treat all individuals with equal dignity and respect.

Among the frustrations that resulted in the riots and rebellion was the shooting death of Latasha Harlins, a fifteen-year old African-American girl, by Soon Ja Du, a Korean-American grocery store owner, after Mrs. Du accused the girl of trying to steal a $1.79 bottle of orange juice. A security camera in the store captured the March 16 shooting on videotape just two weeks after the Rodney King beating. Mrs. Du was charged with murder for shooting Ms. Harlins. A jury convicted Soon Ja Du of voluntary manslaughter. Compton Superior Court Judge Joyce Karlin sentenced Soon Ja Du to five years probation, four hundred hours of community service, and a five hundred dollar fine for killing Latasha Harlins. Mrs. Du had faced eleven years in prison. Many people in the community saw the sentence as evidence of the low value that this society places on black life.

The Aftermath

Damian Williams, Henry Watson, Antoine Miller and Gary Williams, who became known as the L.A. Four, were arrested for the beating of Reginald Denny and others on May 12, 1992, and were held without bail. Damian Williams and Henry Watson were subsequently convicted of various charges and acquitted of many of the counts against them. Watson was released and sentenced to five months time served while awaiting trial because he was unable to post bail. Damian Williams was sentenced to a maximum of ten years in prison in connection with the beating of Reginald Denny and others. Antoine Miller pleaded guilty before trial and was sentenced to probation and community service. Gary Williams pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years in prison.

Almost one year after the riots and rebellion, a federal jury convicted Sergeant Stacey Koon and Officer Laurence Powell of violating Rodney King's civil rights. The jury acquitted Timothy Wind and Theodore Briseno. There was no violence in the streets of Los Angeles in response to the verdicts. Federal District Court Judge John Davies sentenced Sergeant Stacey Koon and Officer Laurence Powell to 30 months in prison. As of February 1995, Koon had raised between $1 million and $4.7 million from prison through a direct-mail campaign for money to support his wife and five children and to pay his legal fees. Koon and Powell were released in October of 1995.

The Political Upheavals

The Rodney King beating led to unprecedented political upheavals in Los Angeles. As chief of police, Daryl Gates enjoyed civil service protection from being fired. Immediately following the Rodney King beating, the Los Angeles Police Commission placed Gates on a sixty-day leave. The Los Angeles City Council reinstated Gates the following day. Mayor Tom Bradley and Gates did not speak to each other for over a year in the wake of the beating. Three weeks after the Christopher Commission Report was published, Gates announced that he would retire in 1992 after fourteen years in office. Willie Williams, an African-American police commissioner in Philadelphia, was named to succeed Gates as chief of the LAPD. Gates resigned and Williams was sworn in on May 30, 1992. The voters of Los Angeles passed City Charter amendment F, which removed civil service protection from the chief of police, on June 4, 1992. The amendment was one of the recommendations of the Christopher Commission Report.

Los Angeles County District Attorney Ira Reiner, who was heavily criticized for the handling of the Simi Valley police brutality trial, announced that he would not seek re-election in September 1992. One week later, Mayor Tom Bradley announced that he would not seek re-election the following June after nineteen years in office. Gil Garcetti was elected district attorney of Los Angeles County in the November 1992 elections. Richard Riordan, a wealthy Anglo Republican businessman and sometime lawyer, was elected mayor of Los Angeles in June 1993.

Congress amended the federal civil rights statutes to prohibit patterns and practices of police misconduct.

The international human rights groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch issued reports examining police abuse in Los Angeles and the failure to comply with international human rights standards.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department

The NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., and other civil rights attorneys who traditionally have worked together as "Police Watch" filed a civil rights class action against the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department in September of 1990 alleging that deputies in Lynwood, California, a predominantly Hispanic community near South Central Los Angeles, systematically used excessive force, racial harassment, and illegal searches and seizures. Plaintiffs sought injunctive relief as well as damages in the case, Thomas v. County of Los Angeles. The LDF filed the suit in part to revive injunctive relief against abusive police practices in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in City of Los Angeles v. Lyons. The plaintiffs filed the case five months before the Rodney King beating.

Thomas litigation moved for a preliminary injunction against the Sheriff's Department to curtail the use of excessive force and illegal searches and seizures in July 1991, a few weeks after the Christopher Commission Report appeared. At the initial hearing on the plaintiffs' motion for a preliminary injunction, federal District Court Judge Terry J. Hatter, Jr., stated on the record that the court would favor an examination of the Sheriff's Department like the examination that the Christopher Commission conducted of the Los Angeles Police Department. Plaintiffs' counsel conveyed that message to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors at a public hearing on the Sheriff's Department the following day. In September 1991, Judge Hatter entered a preliminary injunction that required all employees of the Sheriff's Department to follow the Department's own stated polices and guidelines regarding the use of force and the procedures for conducting searches, and required the Department to submit use of force reports to the court on a monthly basis. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed the preliminary injunction pending appellate review.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors appointed retired state court Judge James Kolts to investigate the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department in December 1991. The principal findings of the Kolts Report issued in July 1992 were that there was excessive force and lax discipline within the Sheriff's Department and that the Department had been unable to reform itself. Community-based policing and civilian monitoring of the Department were among the major recommendations of the Kolts Report. Judge Kolts and Sheriff Sherman Block subsequently issued a joint statement in which they agreed to implement many of the recommendations of the Kolts Report.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the plaintiffs' standing to seek injunctive relief against the police abuse by the Sheriff's Department in Thomas v. County of Los Angeles in October 1992. The decision reflected a victory for the plaintiffs in light of the Rizzo-Lyons line of cases, which had restricted the right of plaintiffs to seek injunctive relief. The Court of Appeals nevertheless vacated the preliminary injunction as issued and remanded for further proceedings. The plaintiffs did not seek further preliminary injunctive relief because misconduct by deputies apparently had subsided in the wake of the Thomas litigation, the Kolts Report, and the world-wide attention focused on police abuse in Los Angeles.

In July 1995, a federal jury found the County of Los Angeles, Sheriff Sherman Block and two of his top assistants liable for civil rights violations by their deputies and awarded $611,000 in damages to plaintiffs Darren Thomas, Michael Sterling and Kevin Marshall. The verdict ended the first of 24 cases that remained pending against the Sheriff's Department as part of the Thomas litigation.

In December 1995, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and the plaintiffs settled the Thomas litigation for $7,500,000 in payment for injuries and attorneys' fees. The settlement also required the County to make available an additional $1.5 million for force and cultural diversity training, to have fully operating a computerized force tracking system by March 1997, and to extend the contract for a special counsel to monitor the implementation of the Kolts Report through December 1999.

Meanwhile, undercover investigations into corruption in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department began in Operation Big Spender in late 1988. As of December of 1993, nineteen deputies had been convicted and the investigation was continuing.

L. A. Street Gangs

In the wake of the riots and rebellion, the Crips and Bloods announced a truce to end inter-gang violence. The call for a truce reflected the growing intolerance among all segments of the Los Angeles community towards drive-by shootings, gang crimes and gang violence. Gang crime contributes to police abuse and creates significant obstacles to achieving police reform. Law enforcement efforts to combat so-called gangs can lead to the plundering of constitutional protections. According to the Kolts Report, teams of deputies roam the streets virtually at will to deal with alleged gang members. Deputies get away with improper tactics because of the unsympathetic nature of the suspects. Some deputies engaged in brutal and intolerable gang-like behavior. Some police officers come to see many African American and Latino youths as enemies or potential enemies. According to the 1992 report by former Los Angeles County District Attorney Ira Reiner, Gangs, Crime and Violence in Los Angeles, the police have identified almost half of all black men in Los Angeles County between the ages of 21 and 24 as gang members. That number is so far out of line that the District Attorney recognized that a careful examination was needed to determine whether the police are systematically over-identifying black youths as gang members. In addition, just what is a "gang related" crime is subject to manipulation. The number of "gang homicides" in Los Angeles would drop by almost 60% if a different, equally valid, definition of "gang related crimes" were used.

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