Rodney King
Rodney got beat because he kept making bad choices: he'd have been beat if he was White, Asian or Latino.
~ Aristotle Sabouni
Created: 2018-04-09 |
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| Rodney King - Poor innocent black guy, beaten down for driving while black, by racist white cops doing racial profiling and joking about it afterwards. | Drugged/Drunk idiot runs from cops (in car), resists arrest/assaults cops (despite being tased), and instead of shooting him the cops (of all races) baton him into submission. The race baiters make it about race, despite no evidence of that. The LAPD was known to be rough on resisters no matter their skin color. Baton was removed as a tool because of this, so now cops shoot people instead. |
Facts[edit | edit source]
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| I don't think the cops should have beaten Rodney that bad. But the fool did keep getting up. So it is a mix for me. The cops were wrong, just not as wrong as Rodney was. But LAPD was known for being excessive if you resisted -- and Rodney resisted repeatedly. This had nothing to do with color. Yet, I still feel it was a excessive. |
- This was never about race, as no one has ever shown that the LAPD would have acted differently if Rodney was White, Asian or Latino.
- This could be about Police Abuse (excessive force), or policies and procedures. They weren't supposed to shoot him, and a Taser didn't work, so they could dogpile him (and risk life and limb), or baton him. They made the right choice.
- Because of this case, we took away batons in more cases, and now shooting of black felons is more common -- and the same people that felt the beating was excessive are less happy with the shootings. Cause meets effect, even if they can't do 1+1
- The first Rodney King trial was quickly dismissed. It was whether the Police were guilt of reckless endangering/attempted murder of Rodney King: and the answer was correctly, "nope". That wasn't racism -- but it lead to riots amongst the ignorant, angry and racists / Democrats.
- The Jurors were presented with deciding whether the Cops went out there to knowingly assault Rodney King and violently disregard his civil rights to the point of trying to kill him. That didn't fly -- after all, the Cops kept pausing in their beating, and yelling at Rodney King to "lay down" and submit to being arrested, and he kept getting up -- so they would hit him some more (with clubs). That isn't attempted murder, or they wouldn't have stopped.
- Even the prosecutors experts admitted that it was really only the last 10 or 15 seconds that was excessive (out of like 2 minutes) -- but everything before that was according to proceedures. So the first jury wisely decided that the cops were not guilty of what they were accused of.
- The media threw gasoline on the fire, and then a match. They incited racial anger, polarized the issue, and got the L.A. riots they had fanned the flames of: which was great for ratings. The media almost never stressed the DA's decision to throw out the lesser charges: so it was all-or-nothing. They never mentioned that the police would have (or have) done similar things to people of other races.
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Racism[edit | edit source]
There was racism.
- The riots were racism: a bunch of ignorant inner-city people attacking the establishment, and in a fit of brilliance, burning their own neighborhoods down. It showed the great problems we have in our inner-cities, and the incredible ignorance, lack of morality, and attitudes about opportunism that exists there.
- Because they targeted Korean properties and "white establishments" first, that certainly was anti-Korean (and anti-White) racism. Like all Asians/Whites were guilty becase of what a few cops did? That's racism.
- Beating Reginald Denny for being white, in the wrong part of town? The assailants admitted to beating the "white guy", and that they were angry at "whites", over the verdict. That was racism
- The second trial (by the Federal Govt. against the police officers) was racism. The cops had been exonerated. And the sham trial that lead to crimes far harsher than they were guilty of, to appease the riotous mob? Why not just burn them at the stake?
The black community could not be reasoned with, they demanded blood, so the city paid by sacrificing a few virgins: unjustly convicting some for the good of society. The jury was not about to consider anything other than "guilty", because they had seen the results of the first trial (the venue should have been changed). So it was more an example of politics in our justice system (or our justice systems shortcoming), than it was an example of racism.
My experiences with cops[edit source]
 On one hand, I knew many cops and taught them martial arts, called them friends, and even had family members that were cops. On the other hand, the LAPD motto during the 80's and 90's could have changed from “To Protect and Serve”, to “We’ll treat you like a King”. (Rodney King that is). While the joke is slightly overstated, there were problems with cops being willing to set examples in L.A., and elsewhere. As a teenager with a hopped-up car, the cops made me a target, and would get pulled over and harassed:
So the city, state and police themselves had started driving a wedge between themselves and the community, and the “us versus them” attitude, only magnified the problem. As there became a stronger thin blue line, there became a lot more resentment by those on both sides of it. Once at a Warehouse club, we got raided by cops in riot gear. It wasn’t enough to just disperse the crowd, they’d have a “real good time” with their show of force, and outright abuse. Including smashing a friend's windshield with a baton, just because. Or being a bit wacky-smacky with the clubs when people got too close. Complaints about that incident earned questions from the duty cop like, “what did he look like, or do we all look alike to you?” Knowing full well that in riot gear it's near impossible to offer a good description. So we were told outright, "If you want to waste our time and file a report, be our guest". (That attitude didn't defuse a situation). I even overheard some cops joking about how they took out their frustrations on vagrants, “hey if you lay a phone book on them, you can smack them with the baton and it doesn’t leave a mark... but still hurts like hell. Ha ha!”. On the other hand, they were cool if you were cool. And I saw them do great things, help people, stop bad guys -- and many take a ration of shit they didn't deserve and NOT react to it. I berated a cop for pulling me over (he was wrong), and he didn't show up when I fought it (because I think he felt guilty). And I got let off occasionally on warnings that could have been far worse for me. So you have to take the good with the bad. The problem in 1991 was that blacks in L.A. had it all wrong, they thought it only happened to them. But the issues were with anyone that wasn't looked on favorably (youths and miscreants of all colors got rough treatment). But you can't reason with the determined ignorant -- and if you lived and worked in the black community (I had done both), you knew the community could be ignorant, racist, and very determined to stay that way. And that was the 70's, 80's and 90's.... by the late 2000's, cellphones (and cameras) were so common, that cops got much better. Which makes the outrage in the 2010+ era a lot less sensible. The cops got much better, and the outrage got much worse. |
Conclusion[edit | edit source]
It helps to remember a few things:
- Rodney caused the whole mess, and had multiple opportunities to be arrested without getting beaten: he chose to escalate
- Most people arrested by the LAPD were NOT abused
- If you pissed off cops by running or fighting, it was "Contempt of cop" and they would have beaten the shit out of you, and joked about it, no matter your color
- Rodney King won $3.8M (+$1.7M for legal fees), for the beating in the civil suit -- and the city never pressed charges for intoxicated driving, assault and evading arrest (which he was guilty of), and a beating did not offset the crimes he committed
- He was later arrested/convicted multiple more times for showing equally poor judgement: crashing his car drunk in 1993, 1995 for beating his wife. A hit and run. Drunk driving (speeding and running a red light) in 2003. Drove his vehicle into a house (while intoxicated). Reckless driving. And later he married one of the Jurors that awarded him the money in the civil suit, and when he died of drunk/inebriated swimming (drowning) in 2012, she got that money and the proceeds from his memoirs.
One good thing I can say about him, is while he was a flawed individual, and was the person most responsible for the actions that happened to him on that night (and kept happening in his life), yet he never called for violence against the police, or anyone else. He might have had a substance abuse problem that ultimately destroyed him, yet he wasn't a violent person: just really dumb under the inebriants he kept seeking out.
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