In 2016 actor Will Smith was on Stephen Colbert and said, “Racism is not getting worse, it’s getting filmed.” Everyone has a video camera in their pocket now, and sometimes it helps and many other times the justice system makes the most bullshit excuses, especially when cauliflower-colored cops beat or even kill a Black person. Despite the video evidence of the 1991 police beating of Rodney King, justice was nowhere to be found, and a city burned.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: March 3, 1991--
“Oh but he was driving drunk and led them on a high-speed chase!” Shut. The fuck. Up. You want police to have the authority to mete out whatever punishment they deem appropriate like some kind of Judge Dredd dystopian bullshit? That means living in a police state. Police shouldn’t be beating and killing people no matter how fucking guilty they are. That is NOT their job.
Early in the morning on March 3, 1991, Rodney King was with friends and speeding along a Los Angeles highway. He’d been drinking and tried to outrun police, later saying he fled because driving drunk violated his parole for a previous robbery charge, and he didn’t want to go back to jail. We get it. He wasn’t a saint. But what followed was a brutal beating that was caught on video and incensed the public. He had broken bones in his face and ankle, plus several bruises and cuts. Nurses at the hospital the police took King to reported that the officers laughed and joked about how many times they had hit him.
Four cops were charged with assault and excessive use of force; three were acquitted and one given a mistrial by a jury made up of 10 whites, one Latino, and one Asian. The trial received significant public attention, and people were pissed. The city’s Black mayor Tom Bradley said those police did “not deserve to wear the uniform of the LAPD.” President Bush said he was “stunned” by the verdict, unable to reconcile it with what he saw on the video.
The L.A. riots broke out almost immediately amongst a population sick of the regular police brutality experienced by their communities. The riots lasted six days, resulting in thousands of fires, over $1 billion in damages, over 2,000 injuries, and 63 deaths. Smaller riots occurred in other cities including San Francisco, Las Vegas, New York, Atlanta, and Seattle.
King appeared on television pleading for it to stop, asking, “can we all get along?” But with rampant injustice and inequality that shows no signs of diminishing in the three decades since then, it seems the answer remains “No.”
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I lived in LA at the time of the riots. The response to the chaos by the vast majority of other white people was some version of "Not my problem. Let 'em all kill each other if that's how they're going to be," paradoxically combined with hysterical fear that the riots would spread into their own neighborhoods. Very few seemed to have any awareness of, or concern about, the systemic pattern of police brutality against Black folks that was the actual catalyst. Meanwhile, all my Black friends were terrified to go outside, even far away from the riots. They weren't afraid of rioters; they were afraid of the way they would be treated by any police they encountered. Because of all of that I was not at all surprised that us white people -- collectively -- didn't learn anything by seeing what happened to Rodney King.
It was so very sad to see all the destruction that occurred.