Listen to an audio story from Annenberg Radio News:
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You can’t hear much on the video tape. But the pictures of a man on the ground beaten by a crowd of police officers startled the nation. His name was Rodney King – a name that would become synonymous with Los Angeles Police Department brutality.
“When I watched the beating, it was a severe one. With a number of officers it just kept going on and on,” said Paul Skolnick, who worked as an assignment editor at KNBC at the time of the beating. His station was one of many that played the video shot by bystander George Holliday.
“The Rodney King beating brought to the forefront something that people knew about but seldom discussed and that was how people were treated by law enforcement and really in all city services,” Holliday added. “Moving on took quite some time. We still think about those incidents.”
For many African American residents, scenes of the beating touched a raw nerve.
Daphne Bradford, a teacher in South Los Angeles, said it reminded her of the civil rights era.
“They put the dogs on you and you were fighting for your rights,” Bradford said. “And you see this happening during your time and you’re like, really?”
Four white officers were tried in the beating of King, when they were acquitted in April of 1992. South Los Angeles and other parts of the city erupted in violence.
Bradford remembers that at the time she was heading home from a heated community meeting at First AME church.
“The one thing I remember and that I will never forget that when I drove I had to drive through the fire, the smoke and all that stuff,” Bradford said. “I was just hoping that the tires on my car didn’t melt. Because it felt like hell on earth. I was just praying all the way home that nobody shot my windows out, that nobody killed me, that my tires didn’t melt. That I could just make it.”
After she made it through a fire that was like an inferno, she knew she would make it through the rest of the riots.
The riots are painful memories for many Korean Americans as well.
Ae Kyung Kang was living in Gardena. The family had an auto parts business. When the riots broke out her husband wanted to get a gun, but Kang didn’t want him involved in the violence. The trauma of having her business looted and eventually closed is still fresh.
“We lost everything,” Kang said. “At the riots—many businesses is broke and they close out. After that our business is closed. Closed.”
Kang faults the police for not intervening: “They did nothing. Just chewing the gum and they laughing. And just watching.”
Civil rights activist Earl Ofari Hutchinson explains why Korean American store owners became targets in the riots.
“There was a feeling that they were disrespectful, that they were just in the community to make money,” Hutchinson said. “They wouldn’t hire you. That they weren’t part of the community – so they were easy and soft targets.”
Kang’s family went back to Korea and lived there for many years. They eventually returned to the United States and now own a dry cleaning business in Torrance.
Ethnic tensions and poverty, some of the things that led to the riots, still persist – but Police Chief Charlie Beck talked about what’s changed in the police department.
“Inargulably we are a much better police department in the intervening twenty years,” Beck said.
Beck said the L.A.P.D has an approval rating of 83 percent. In 1992, there were 90,000 violent crimes; last year, only 20,000.
The police department has changed as well. The police chief has term limits and serves at the pleasure of the mayor.
Jasmyne Cannick is a communications strategist in West Adams. She noticed changes in the L.A.P.D.
“We see a lot more black officers in leadership, a lot more black female officers on the street,” Cannick said.
Technology has changed things too, she added.
“I think people, especially officers are a lot more careful with what they do in public because everyone has a phone,” Cannick said. “Sixth graders walk around with phones; senior citizens walk around with video on their phones.”
Bradford still sees the history of the riots when she drives around South L.A.
“When you see a building that’s vacant, or just a lot there,” Bradford said. “You kind of think, I wonder if that’s still from 1992 when they burned it.”
What do you remember of the Rodney King beating and the 1992 riots? We want to hear from you.
Awful :/ I hope such things will never happen in UK…