凍結 天然氣 火車

Rodney Kings claim to fame was being at right place at the right time when the LAPD beat the shit out of him which allowed his police beating to be videotaped by a bystander.

The only good thing about the incident was that it made the American public more aware that cops are corrupt to the core and routinely violate the rights of almost everybody they come into contact with.

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Rodney King dead at 47, key figure in LA riots

Jun. 17, 2012 01:49 PM

Associated Press

LOS ANGELES -- Rodney King, the black motorist whose 1991 videotaped beating by Los Angeles police officers was the touchstone for one of the most destructive race riots in U.S. history, was found at the bottom of his swimming pool early Sunday and later pronounced dead. He was 47.

King's fiance called police at 5:25 a.m. to report that she found him in the pool at their home in Rialto, California, police Lt. Dean Hardin said.

Officers arrived to find King in the deep end of the pool and pulled him out.

King was unresponsive, and officers began resuscitation efforts until paramedics arrived. King was taken to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 6:11 a.m., police said.

Police Capt. Randy De Anda said King had been by the pool throughout the early morning and had been talking to his fiancee, who was inside the home at the time. A statement from police said the preliminary investigation indicates a drowning, with no signs of foul play.

Investigators will await autopsy results to determine whether drugs or alcohol were involved, but De Anda said there were no alcoholic beverages or paraphernalia found near the pool.

Authorities didn't identify the fiance. King earlier said he was engaged to Cynthia Kelley, one of the jurors in the civil rights case that gave King $3.8 million in damages.

The 1992 riots, which were set off by the acquittals of the officers who beat King, lasted three days and left 55 people dead, more than 2,000 injured and swaths of Los Angeles on fire. At the height of the violence, King pleaded on television: "Can we all get along?"

King, a 25-year-old on parole from a robbery conviction, was stopped for speeding on a darkened street on March 3, 1991. He was on parole and had been drinking -- he later said that led him to try to evade police.

Four Los Angeles police officers hit him more than 50 times with their batons, kicked him and shot him with stun guns.

A man who had quietly stepped outside his home to observe the commotion videotaped most of it and turned a copy over to a TV station. It was played over and over for the following year, inflaming racial tensions across the country.

It seemed that the videotape would be the key evidence to a guilty verdict against the officers, whose trial was moved to the predominantly white suburb of Simi Valley, California. Instead, on April 29, 1992, a jury with no black members acquitted three of the officers on state charges in the beating; a mistrial was declared for a fourth.

Violence erupted immediately, starting in South Los Angeles.

Police, seemingly caught off-guard, were quickly outnumbered by rioters and retreated. As the uprising spread to the city's Koreatown area, shop owners armed themselves and engaged in running gun battles with looters.

During the riots, a white truck driver named Reginald Denny was pulled by several black men from his cab and beaten almost to death. He required surgery to repair his shattered skull, reset his jaw and put one eye back into its socket.

King himself, in his recently published memoir, "The Riot Within: My Journey from Rebellion to Redemption," said FBI agents warned him a riot was expected if the officers were acquitted, and urged him to keep a low profile so as not to inflame passions.

The four officers who beat King -- Stacey Koon, Theodore Briseno, Timothy Wind and Laurence Powell -- were indicted in the summer of 1992 on federal civil rights charges. Koon and Powell were convicted and sentenced to two years in prison, and King was awarded $3.8 million in damages.

The police chief, Daryl Gates, who had been hailed as an innovator in the national law enforcement community, came under intense criticism from city officials who said officers were slow to respond to the riots. Gates resigned under pressure soon after. He died of cancer in 2010.

In the two decades after he became the central figure in the riots, King was arrested several times, mostly for alcohol-related crimes, the last in Riverside California., last July. He later became a record company executive and a reality TV star, appearing on shows such as "Celebrity Rehab."

In an interview earlier this year with The Associated Press, King said he was a happy man.

"America's been good to me after I paid the price and stayed alive through it all," he says. "This part of my life is the easy part now."

Civil rights leader Al Sharpton said in a statement that King was a symbol of the civil and anti-police brutality movement.

"Through all that he had gone through with his beating and his personal demons he was never one to not call for reconciliation and for people to overcome and forgive," Sharpton wrote. "History will record that it was Rodney King's beating and his actions that made America deal with the excessive misconduct of law enforcement."

Attorney Harland Braun, who represented one of the police officers, Ted Briseno, in the federal trial, said King's name would always be a part of Los Angeles history.

"I always saw him as a sad figure swept up into something bigger than he was," Braun said. "He wasn't a hero or a villain. He was probably just a nice person."

King's case never would have become such a symbol without the video, he said.

"If there hadn't been a video there would have never been a case. In those days, you might have claimed excessive force but there would have been no way to prove it."

The San Bernardino County coroner will perform an autopsy on King within 48 hours.

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Rodney King dies at 47; victim of brutal beating became reluctant symbol of race relations

By Joe Mozingo and Phil Willon, Los Angeles Times

June 17, 2012, 10:05 p.m.

Rodney King never set out to be a James Meredith or Rosa Parks.

He was a drunk, unemployed construction worker on parole when he careened into the city's consciousness in a white Hyundai early one Sunday morning in 1991.

While he was enduring the videotaped blows that would reverberate around the world, he wanted to escape to a nearby park where his father used to take him. He simply wanted to survive.

He did survive, but the brutal beating transformed the troubled man into an icon of the civil rights movement. His very name became a symbol of police abuse and racial tensions, of one of the worst urban riots in American history.

More tangibly, the tape of his beating and the upheaval that followed in 1992 brought about the resignation of the long-reigning Los Angeles police chief, Daryl Gates, and opened the door to widespread police reform in the city and beyond.

But King struggled with the expectations freighted upon him, with addictions, legal problems and financial woes, with the name that transcended the man himself and the ragged reality he lived.

Early Sunday morning, at age 47, King was found dead at the bottom of his swimming pool in Rialto. Authorities say there was no evidence of foul play and are investigating his death as an accidental drowning.

King's fiancee, Cynthia Kelley, discovered him around 5 in the morning, authorities said. She told investigators that she had been talking to him intermittently through a sliding glass door. At some point she heard a splash, and ran out to find King submerged at the deep end.

Kelley said she could not swim well, so she called 911. When police pulled King out of the water, King showed no signs of life.

From the beginning, King had faltered in his role as a symbol and was tormented by his failings. His stuttering plea for everyone to "get along" during the riots was praised for its earnest intent, yet ridiculed as feckless and naive in relation to such searing, deep-seated anger.

"I never went to school to be 'Rodney King,'" he told The Times two months ago on the 20th anniversary of the riots.

He didn't even use that name much; his family called him by his middle name, Glen.

But whatever the transgressions of his life, he caused, however inadvertently, profound change.

"Rodney King has a unique spot in both the history of Los Angeles and the LAPD," Police Chief Charlie Beck said in a statement. "What happened on that cool March night over two decades ago forever changed me and the organization I love. His legacy should not be the struggles and troubles of his personal life but the immensely positive change his existence wrought on this city and its Police Department."

The Rev. Jesse Jackson said King's life exposed the nation to racial profiling and police brutality.

"We thank God for the use of Rodney King's life to lift us to a higher degree of consciousness. Let the burden upon the living be to continue the struggle so that the days of racial injustice will end. Let us answer Rodney's pressing question: Yes, we all can get along."

King's family moved from Sacramento to the foothills of Altadena when he was 2. His parents cleaned offices for a living. His father, Ronald, was a hard-fisted drinker who took his anger out on his son. The boy began drinking in junior high school and often got into trouble with authorities.

In 1989, King was accused of attacking the owner of a market in Monterey Park with a tire iron. He pleaded guilty to robbery and received a two-year sentence.

He had just been released when the California Highway Patrol clocked him going west on the 210 Freeway on March 3, 1991, at speeds over 100 mph. It was just after midnight. He saw the flashing lights in his mirror and raced to get away. He had been drinking with friends and knew he'd be back in custody for violating his parole if he was caught. Los Angeles officers quickly joined the pursuit. He stopped eight miles later on a darkened stretch of Foothill Boulevard.

His two friends obeyed orders and got out of the car without incident. King delayed, then got out and acted erratically. He did a little dance, waved to a helicopter whirring overhead and blew a kiss. The cops later said they thought he was on PCP, though he was not.

What happened next was debated and analyzed in granular detail in courts, investigative panels and living rooms for years to come. LAPD officers swarmed King, shot him with Tasers and rained some 50 blows upon him with batons and boots.

A resident named George Holliday caught the beating on videotape, which showed King facedown as he was struck repeatedly by three officers as others stood by watching. Holliday gave the 81-second tape to KTLA, then CNN replayed it the next day, causing a national uproar. The officers involved wrote reports suggesting that the video did not depict the entire confrontation, saying that King rushed at them, swinging and kicking.

The four — Laurence M. Powell, Theodore J. Briseno, Timothy E. Wind and Sgt. Stacey C. Koon — were indicted for the beating on March 15 by a grand jury.

An independent investigative panel led by Warren Christopher simultaneously looked into the issue of brutality by the Los Angeles police. In July, the Christopher Commission released a blistering report, saying "too many patrol officers view citizens with resentment and hostility" and that the problem of "excessive force" was a problem of leadership from the top down. It pushed for sweeping changes, overhaul of the department's disciplinary system and a shift toward community policing. More pointedly, it called for the combative and militaristic chief to step down.

Gates refused, calling the beating an aberration. Tensions rose throughout the city as the officers' trial approached in Simi Valley. When all four were acquitted on Wednesday, April 29, 1992, by a jury with no black people on it, the response in the streets was immediate.

A crowd of black men gathered at Florence and Normandie avenues. Police arrived to disperse them, but they were outnumbered and backed off. Gang members pulled a gravel truck driver named Reginald Denny from his cab and viciously assaulted him for 20 minutes before bystanders rescued him as news choppers filmed from above. Smaller groups formed downtown.

By the end of the night, rioters touched off more than 150 fires, stormed police headquarters and ransacked numerous downtown buildings as sporadic gunfire rang through the streets. Mayor Tom Bradley ordered a curfew, and Gov. Pete Wilson called in the National Guard.

Gates was attending a Brentwood fundraiser to defeat a police-reform ballot measure when the rioting started. Several hours passed before he returned to take charge, and by then his officers were in retreat.

The insurrection and looting spread throughout the city over the next few days. Whole blocks of South Los Angeles burned to the ground. Stores were gutted. Military convoys rumbled up and down the smoky streets.

King made his famous plea before the television cameras on Friday, looking like a terrified child groping for what to say. "Can we all get along? Can we … can we … get along? Can we stop making it horrible for the older people and the kids. I mean, we've got enough smog in Los Angeles, let alone to deal with setting these fires and things. It's not right. It's not right. It's not going to change anything."

With the help of 5,700 National Guard troops, federal agents and Marines, police put the riot down after three days. At least 54 people were dead, and property damage amounted to $1 billion.

The next year, the four officers were tried in federal court for violating King's civil rights. Koon and Powell were convicted and did prison time. Gates stepped down in June. Under heavy pressure from the U.S. Justice Department, the police reforms recommended by the Christopher Commission gradually took effect.

King sued the city and won $3.8 million in damages. He told The Times that after his legal fees, he had $1.6 million or so, with which he bought a house for his mother and one for him. He started a hip-hop label that didn't go anywhere.

He could never find stability in his life. He entered rehab in 1993 after crashing into a wall while drunk. Two years later, he did 90 days in jail after being charged with a hit-and-run for knocking his wife down with his car. He got hooked on PCP for a spell, was shot by pellets riding his bike and had so many encounters with police that in interviews he couldn't recall them all.

"There was the time my car went off the road and came to a stop on a tree," he told The Times in April. "PCP ain't no joke."

His money dwindling, he bought a fixer-upper in Rialto and struggled to make the mortgage payments. He put a tarp along the back fence to keep people from trying to catch a glimpse of an icon. He earned small paydays doing celebrity boxing matches or pouring concrete at construction sites. But even those odd jobs were hard to get.

He recounted how one employer laughed and said, "Get out of here — too high-profile."

In 2008, he briefly re-entered the public light when he signed to appear in the TV show "Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew." He then faded away again.

Then this year, the 20th anniversary of the riots, reporters were calling and knocking at his door for interviews, and his book, "The Riot Within," was published.

He seemed a man still deeply haunted by the past and the expectations of him. He said he suffered nightmares and flashbacks from the beating. He smoked marijuana and drank. He was always trying to calm his raw nerves, swimming in his pool, fishing in a nearby lake with worms he dug from his yard. The water had always been a refuge for him.

"I sometimes feel like I'm caught in a vise," he said. "Some people feel like I'm some kind of hero. Others hate me. They say I deserved it. Other people, I can hear them mocking me for when I called for an end to the destruction, like I'm a fool for believing in peace."

He was more contemplative than he had been before. And the man who just wanted to escape to that park his father took him to was beginning to accept his broader legacy.

"Yes, I would go through that night, yes I would. I said once that I wouldn't, but that's not true. It changed things. It made the world a better place."

Civil rights attorney Connie Rice saw King a few weeks ago at an event.

"I've never seen him look less broken. He looked happy, and it looked for the first time like he had really kicked his addiction. I know that police love to talk about the fact that he was a criminal. But he was not a criminal. He was a broken and sick man, but did his best not to hurt people. He had a real streak of decency.

"He could have poured gasoline on the fire. At a time when he could have said something destructive … he said 'Can we all get along?' When you think about it, there aren't a whole lot of guys I know that would have done that."

Times staff writers Kurt Streeter, Andrew Blankstein, Kate Mather and Matt Stevens contributed to this story.

joe.mozingo@latimes.com

phil.willon@latimes.com

Rodney King: Beating case 'made the world a better place'

Rodney King: Beating case 'made the world a better place'

June 18, 2012 | 5:49 am

Rodney King may have faltered for most of his life in his role as a symbol of police abuse and racial tensions, but in talks with The Times just weeks before his death Sunday, he appeared more contemplative than ever about his role.

More than 20 years ago, King was pulled over for speeding by Los Angeles Police Department officers and beaten. The incident was captured on video by a civilian bystander, and the recording became an instant international sensation. Four of the officers were tried on charges of using excessive force. Their acquittal on April 29, 1992, touched off one of the worst urban riots in U.S. history.

This year, for the 20th anniversary of the riots, reporters were calling and knocking at King's door for interviews, and his book, "The Riot Within," was published.

He indicated he was beginning to accept his broader legacy.

"Yes, I would go through that night, yes I would. I said once that I wouldn't, but that's not true,” King told The Times. "It changed things. It made the world a better place."

In interviews with The Times this year, King had seemed a man still deeply haunted by the past and the expectations of him. He said he suffered nightmares and flashbacks from the beating, that he smoked marijuana and drank. He said he was always trying to calm his raw nerves, swimming in his pool or fishing in a nearby lake with worms he dug from his yard. "I sometimes feel like I'm caught in a vise," he said. "Some people feel like I'm some kind of hero. Others hate me. They say I deserved it. Other people, I can hear them mocking me for when I called for an end to the destruction, like I'm a fool for believing in peace."

Early Sunday morning, at age 47, King was found dead at the bottom of his swimming pool in Rialto. Authorities say there was no evidence of foul play and are investigating his death as an accidental drowning.

King's fiancee, Cynthia Kelley, discovered him around 5 a.m., authorities said. They said she told investigators that she had been talking to him intermittently through a sliding glass door. At some point. authorities reported, she heard a splash, and ran out to find King submerged at the deep end of the pool.

Kelley said she could not swim well, so she called 911, official said. When police pulled King's body out of the water, he showed no signs of life, they said.

Rodney King was haunted by memories, daunted by pain

Rodney King was haunted by memories, daunted by pain

By Kurt Streeter, Los Angeles Times

June 17, 2012, 10:08 p.m.

Rodney King spoke candidly of death. I recall a time last March when he and I were walking through his Rialto home. He looked at photos of the LAPD officers who'd beaten him. Without prompting, he opened up. "I'm just glad I survived what he did to me," he said, speaking of one of the officers, Stacey Koon. He held his two fingers about a quarter-inch apart. "I was this close to death," he said. "This close."

He went on to say there were long moments that night in Lake View Terrace in 1991 when it felt as if he had, in fact, died. Moments when it seemed he was outside his body, looking down at a scene of horror below. King explained how, as boots and batons fell, as electricity from Tasers ripped through his body, he thought of what it was like for African slaves to withstanding whippings. The thought of what they went through helped him stay alive.

Make no mistake, that wasn't the only time Rodney King could have died. He was extremely candid about his addiction to drugs and alcohol; about the damage he'd done to his body and how addiction could have cost him his life on several occasions. He felt lucky to have survived moments like the time in 2003 when he sped down a street in Rialto, high on PCP, and crashed into a tree.

He compared himself to a cat. "They've only got nine lives," he said. "I don't want to get to nine."

He was a man who wanted badly to get his life together. In my handful of visits with him this year it seemed as though he was headed in a positive direction. Sure, he was jobless and basically broke. But he had a loving fiance, and he was working hard to mend personal relationships that had frayed during two decades of instability and trouble.

When I interviewed him, the 20th anniversary of the riots was coming up and also the release of a book — "The Riot Within: My Journey from Rebellion to Redemption" — he'd worked on with author Lawrence Spagnola. Because there were parts of the book I had to tell King about, I was never quite sure he'd read it. Or maybe he'd read it and couldn't remember. Still, a book tour was planned and he was excited. He told me he thought this year could be a new beginning for him. He thought maybe one day there would be a movie made about his life.

Even when he imagined things going well he spoke of how nothing is promised to anyone, how any day might be his last. He didn't want to take his time on Earth for granted. Rodney King was raised by a deeply religious family of Jehovah's Witnesses. He said that before he passed on he needed to get closer to "Jehovah God." He said he was working on this. He promised he'd get there one day — even though to him that would mean giving up things like drinking.

Right now, nobody knows what killed him. I do know that he hadn't stopped drinking. Of course, I couldn't know the full truth of his life in this regard. That was something only he had a handle on. But he told me he still smoked pot — for medical reasons. What I witnessed was a man still struggling against alcohol. He wasn't buying the notion that addicts cannot imbibe. "All addicts are different," he said. "And I'm different. I've learned that I'm one of those who can manage it."

When I showed up at his house one morning about 9:30, he was carefully using a finger to dab peanut butter on his teeth. He explained that it was an old drinker's trick. Peanut butter masks the smell. When I pulled up at a Chevy's restaurant in Ontario for a lunch interview, I noticed him running to his car. He came back, breathing hard from the exertion, and explained that he'd gone back to his car to get his flask of apple cider and champagne. He had to make sure to have it before we spoke.

Around me, those few times, his drinking was always just a sip here, a sip there. He was never out of control. When he offered me some and I turned him down he laughed at me. "Kurt, you're such a square," he laughed.

He didn't want to be a square. He told me drinking helped take the edge off, helped keep a haunting past at bay.

Rodney King had a striking physical presence. He was handsome, tall and strong. But underneath it all he seemed fragile. He spoke haltingly. When he talked about his life and all that had happened, it was clear that he cared deeply about others. He couldn't let go of the fact that 54 people died in the 1992 upheaval that he ruefully noted were known as "the Rodney King riots."

On a wall in his backyard pool he used black tile to inscribe the dates of both the beating and the riots: 3/31/91 and 4/29/92.

One day in March, I watched him sweeping leaves from the pool. He told me that he'd considered adding another inscription. He looked at the pool. "I thought of putting the number of people who died down there on the wall, the number 54," he said. "But that would be too much. Just too much death."

kurt.streeter@latimes.com

King case led to major LAPD reforms

King case led to major LAPD reforms

By Paul Pringle and Andrew Blankstein, Los Angeles Times

June 17, 2012, 10:48 p.m.

Daryl F. Gates was in his 13th year as head of the Los Angeles Police Department when four of his officers pummeled Rodney King on a darkened roadside in Lake View Terrace.

If the reforms later inspired by the King episode had been in place at that time, Gates would have been in his third year of retirement.

Among the sweeping changes brought to the Los Angeles Police Department because of the 1991 King beating was a voter-approved law limiting police chiefs to two five-year terms.

Charter Amendment F, adopted about a month after the riots that were sparked by the acquittals of the four officers in the King case, ended civil service status for chiefs. Before that, chiefs had been appointed by the Police Commission and essentially were allowed to serve indefinitely barring formal findings of serious wrongdoing.

The measure empowered the mayor to select a chief with the City Council's consent and provided for civilian review of police misconduct.

The amendment grew out of the recommendations of a special commission led by Warren Christopher, who later became U.S. secretary of State. The commission plumbed what critics said was a racist and brutal LAPD subculture that led to the assault on King, a black drunk-driving suspect. The panel also laid the groundwork for a 1995 law that created an inspector general's office to handle complaints against officers.

Local civil rights attorney Connie Rice said Sunday that Charter Amendment F pushed the department "down the road to reform, because the chief was no longer an imperial political figure but subject to civilian rule and the rule of law.

"Charter Amendment F broke the bulwarks against outside control," she said.

As it turned out, Gates was attending a Brentwood fundraiser for opponents of the amendment when the 1992 riots erupted. He faced a chorus of blame for the LAPD's slow response to the violence and, after a battle of wills with much of the city's political establishment, stepped down about two months later.

The amendment proved to be no cure-all; the LAPD would be tarnished again by rogue officers and the superiors who failed to manage them, particularly during the Rampart scandal that unfolded in the late 1990s.

But the King beating clearly set in motion a generation-long transformation of the LAPD that shapes today's far more accountable, respected and diverse department. Since 1992, the proportion of non-white LAPD officers has grown from 41% to 64%, according to department figures.

With Gates' departure, the city appointed its first black police chief, Willie L. Williams. He was succeeded by another African American, Bernard C. Parks, now a city councilman.

Parks, who was ousted from the chief's job in 2002 after clashing with then-Mayor James K. Hahn, hasn't embraced every part of the King legacy. He said Sunday that the charter amendment has allowed elected officials, the LAPD's labor union and other interest groups to "politicize" the selection of chief, making it more of a beauty contest among candidates than a search for the most qualified person.

But Parks said the post-King strengthening of the civilian role in the LAPD's disciplinary process helped "change the attitudes of officers" who had once believed the worst of their actions could go unpunished.