STILL CAN'T GET THAT STORY STRAIGHT, HUH?:

Rodney King, whose savage beating at the hands of Los Angeles police officers led to widespread rioting and a reassessment of race-relations in America, has died.

[T]he purpose of my book was to find the truth, not reinforce stereotypes. Mr. King is a muscular person who led police on a 7.8 mile chase, ignored police commands to lie down on the ground, threw four officers off his back who tried to handcuff him without hurting him. He was wearing a T-shirt but was sweating on a cold night, and the officers thought that in addition to being drunk (which he later acknowledged) that he was on PCP. They became convinced of this when he rose to his feet after being hit with two volleys of a stun gun, each of them containing 50,000 volts of electricity, and then charged at an officer. It has never been determined whether Mr. King was in fact on PCP, but it is almost certainly true that anyone who behaved as he did would have been beaten. There have been many lawsuits against the LAPD settled by the city where people of all races were beaten for far less resistant conduct. I think the beating went on far too long, but the issue of whether it constituted criminal conduct is a complicated one that in discussed from many points of view on my book.

The problem with understanding the incident is that the events described above occurred before the famous videotape of the incident--except for the first three seconds of the video in which King charges toward Officer Laurence Powell. These three seconds, and ten other seconds that follow, were deleted by the Los Angeles television station that showed the beating, which is the version that most people saw. Neither the leading state prosecutor (who is an African American) nor the federal prosecutors thought that King was beaten because of his race, although they believed the beating was criminally excessive.

In any case, there is no doubt that Officer Powell was poorly trained and that his panic when Mr. King charged toward him contributed to the subsequent events. Training is supposed to overcome fear in the teachings of LAPD, but Officer Powell had by coincidence flunked a baton text against a stationary target (a rubber tire) at the beginning of his shift that night, and Rodney King was not stationary. I quote veteran officers as saying that Powell should not have been sent out into the field after he failed the test.

There is also no doubt that the verdicts of the Ventura County jury in Simi Valley were widely seen as an act of racial injustice, in large part because there were no blacks on the jury. I fault not the jurors but the judges who defied their own precedents and moved the trial out of diverse Los Angeles into mostly white Ventura County, where there were few blacks in the jury pool. Also, the prosecution in Simi Valley was put at a definite disadvantage by the prior editing of the videotape on television. When the full videotape was played during the trial, it reinforced the perception of conservative jurors that the media had not told the full story of Rodney King.

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