Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD by Lou Cannon

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Three seconds. That's the difference between what the world saw of the infamous Rodney King beating and what the unedited videotape showed of King's arrest. Those initial three seconds show King charging LAPD Officer Laurence Powell, which precipitated the eventual beating now etched in the public mind. Alas, ten seconds of blurred footage separated the first three seconds and the latter sixty-eight seconds: you know which segment made the evening news.

Lou Cannon, L.A. bureau chief of the Washington Post from 1990-93 and author of Ronald Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, details this and many other omissions from conventional wisdom's fact file on that portentous March 3, 1991. The product of five years of interviews, analysis of police transcripts and court records, as well as internal LAPD memos, Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD is a definitive assessment of a pivotal event in the history of Los Angeles that has drawn accolades from the Wall Street Journal to the Nation.

Simply stated, Cannon finds little evidence that racism played a role in the admittedly brutal apprehension of the recalcitrant Rodney King (the two other occupants of King's vehicle obeyed instructions to get out of the car and lie face down on the ground). And as the title suggests, the LAPD in some sense merely carried out the wishes of a mayor, city council, and civilian police commission that severely limited their ability to apprehend troublesome suspects without resorting to a metal baton or firearm. "Choke holds" were banned in 1982, Taser stun guns proved ineffective at times, and money for researching alternative methods of apprehension (e.g., capture nets and "leg grabbers") was never approved. Add to this administrative negligence a police department averse to "community policing" and with some officers poorly trained in the use of the "Monadnock" baton, and you create a recipe for police brutality--at least when suspects " ;don't come quietly."

Cannon recounts much more to place the Rodney King beating in context. For starters, before King charged Officer Powell--i.e., before George Holliday pressed "Record" on his camcorder--almost five minutes had transpired since the California Highway Patrol first stopped King after an eight-mile high-speed chase. When LAPD Sgt. Stacey Koon took over the arrest from a lower-ranking CHP officer, who was approaching King with gun drawn, he ordered all weapons to be holstered. Koon then told four LAPD officers to "swarm" King by jumping on him; King shrugged two officers off his back as they tried to handcuff him. Sgt. Koon also shot King twice with a Taser stun gun, with little effect. So before Officer Powell attempted to subdue King with a side-handled metal baton, efforts were made to apprehend King using the least violent measures.

In short, what the public didn't see, but what the jurors were apprised of, made all the difference in the world when the verdict came down. Does Official Negligence restore confidence in American jury trials? Probably not enough, but it casts much light on both official and unofficial responsibility for this republic of ours. We do well to answer this wake-up call.