Rodney King
Based on Wikipedia: Rodney King
On the night of March 3, 1991, a man named George Holliday couldn't sleep. From his apartment balcony in Lake View Terrace, a neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, he heard sirens, then shouting. He grabbed his camcorder—one of those bulky early models that recorded onto VHS tape—and pointed it at the street below.
What he captured would change America.
For eighty-one seconds, Holliday's shaky footage showed police officers beating a Black man on the ground. The man tried to rise. They hit him again. He tried to crawl away. They hit him again. The batons rose and fell, rose and fell, at least fifty-three times by the official count. When the tape ended, the man lay motionless on the asphalt, his bones broken, his face swollen beyond recognition.
His name was Rodney King. And what happened to him—and what happened afterward—would expose fault lines in American society that remain unhealed to this day.
The Chase
To understand what happened that night, you need to understand who Rodney King was before he became a symbol.
He was born in Sacramento, California, in 1965, one of five children raised in Altadena, a working-class community in the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains. At John Muir High School, he found inspiration in a social science teacher named Robert E. Jones. His father, Ronald, died young—just forty-two years old—when Rodney was nineteen.
King's life took a dark turn in 1989. He robbed a convenience store in Monterey Park, threatening the Korean owner with an iron bar, striking him with a pole, and fleeing with two hundred dollars. He was convicted and sentenced to two years in prison. He served one year and was released on December 27, 1990.
Two months and four days later, he would become the most famous victim of police brutality in American history.
That Sunday night, King had been watching basketball and drinking with two friends, Bryant Allen and Freddie Helms. Around half past midnight, they were driving west on the Foothill Freeway—Interstate 210—when California Highway Patrol officers Tim and Melanie Singer, a husband-and-wife team, noticed King's Hyundai Excel speeding.
They hit their lights and sirens. King didn't stop.
What followed was an eight-mile chase that reached speeds of 117 miles per hour. King later admitted he was trying to avoid a drunk driving charge, which would have violated his parole and sent him back to prison. He blew through at least one red light. Police cars and a helicopter joined the pursuit. Finally, near the Hansen Dam Recreation Area, officers cornered King's car.
The first officers on scene included Sergeant Stacey Koon and Officers Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, Theodore Briseno, and Rolando Solano—all from the Los Angeles Police Department, which had taken command of the scene from the highway patrol.
King's two passengers, Allen and Helms, exited and lay face down as ordered. Allen would later claim he was kicked, stomped, and taunted. Helms was struck on the head while prone; police kept his blood-stained baseball cap as evidence.
King stayed in the car.
Eighty-One Seconds
When King finally emerged from his vehicle, witnesses said he acted strangely. He reportedly giggled. He patted the ground. He waved at the hovering helicopter. Then he grabbed his buttocks—a gesture that Officer Melanie Singer interpreted as reaching for a weapon, though King was later found to be unarmed.
Singer drew her pistol and ordered King to the ground. She approached to make the arrest. But Sergeant Koon intervened. As the ranking Los Angeles Police Department officer, he announced that the department was taking command. He ordered all officers to holster their weapons.
What happened next would be debated in courtrooms for years.
According to the official report, Koon ordered his officers to use a technique called a "swarm"—where multiple officers grab a suspect with their bare hands to overcome resistance quickly. The officers claimed King fought back, standing up to throw Officers Powell and Briseno off his back. Both King and witnesses disputed this account.
The officers also believed King was high on PCP—phencyclidine, a powerful hallucinogen that can make users impervious to pain and capable of extraordinary strength. Toxicology tests later proved this suspicion wrong. King had been drinking, but he had no PCP in his system.
By the time George Holliday retrieved his camera from another room and began recording, King was already on the ground after being shot twice with a Taser—a device that delivers an electric shock through wires that embed in the target's body. On the grainy footage, you can see those taser wires still attached to King's body.
King rises. He moves toward Officer Powell—prosecutors would later argue about whether he was attacking or trying to flee. Powell swings his baton. King goes down.
Powell keeps swinging.
Officer Briseno tries to intervene, stepping in to stop Powell. Sergeant Koon reportedly shouts: "Stop! Stop! That's enough! That's enough!"
King tries to stand again. The batons resume.
Koon would later acknowledge ordering what he called "power strokes"—full-force baton blows—directing his officers to "hit his joints, hit the wrists, hit his elbows, hit his knees, hit his ankles." In all, King was struck thirty-three times with batons and kicked seven times. Eight officers eventually participated in subduing him.
When it was over, King lay handcuffed and cord-cuffed—his wrists and ankles bound—and was dragged on his stomach to the side of the road to await an ambulance.
The Tape Goes Public
Two days after the beating, George Holliday called Los Angeles Police Department headquarters at Parker Center. He told them he had videotape of the incident.
No one was interested in seeing it.
So Holliday went to KTLA, a local television station. Reporter Warren Wilson took on the story, interviewing King in his hospital ward. The station aired the footage.
It spread like wildfire.
Remember, this was 1991. There was no YouTube, no social media, no smartphones in every pocket. The idea of a civilian capturing police misconduct on video and broadcasting it to millions was almost unprecedented. News networks around the world replayed those eighty-one seconds over and over. The footage "turned what would otherwise have been a violent, but soon forgotten, encounter between the Los Angeles police and an uncooperative suspect into one of the most widely watched and discussed incidents of its kind."
At Pacifica Hospital, doctors catalogued King's injuries: a fractured facial bone, a broken right ankle, multiple bruises and lacerations. In a later legal claim, King alleged he had suffered eleven skull fractures, permanent brain damage, kidney failure, and broken bones and teeth.
Nurses at the hospital reported something disturbing. The officers who accompanied King—including Officer Wind—openly joked and bragged about the number of times they had hit him.
Five hours after the arrest, King's blood was drawn. His blood alcohol content was 0.075 percent—just below California's legal limit of 0.08 percent, though the five-hour delay meant he had been well over the limit during the actual chase. The tests also found traces of marijuana in his system.
The Los Angeles Police Department initially charged King with felony evading. Then something remarkable happened.
They dropped all charges against him.
The Trial
At a press conference, Police Chief Daryl Gates announced that four officers would face discipline for excessive force, and three would be criminally charged. "We believe the officers used excessive force taking him into custody," Gates said. "In our review, we find that officers struck him with batons between fifty-three and fifty-six times."
The Los Angeles County District Attorney charged four officers—Sergeant Koon, and Officers Powell, Wind, and Briseno—with assault and use of excessive force. But the defense successfully argued for a change of venue, moving the trial from Los Angeles County to Simi Valley in neighboring Ventura County.
This was a crucial shift.
Ventura County was whiter, more conservative, and home to many police officers and their families. The jury that was eventually seated consisted of ten white jurors, one biracial man, one Latino man, and one Asian American woman. There were no Black jurors. The lead prosecutor, Terry White, was Black—a Deputy District Attorney with eight years of experience.
The defense employed a strategy that would prove devastatingly effective. They played the videotape over and over, in slow motion, breaking it down frame by frame. The prosecution later argued that this desensitized the jury to the violence—that watching something horrifying enough times makes it seem almost clinical, almost justified.
The defense also focused on the first three seconds of a blurry, thirteen-second segment that many news broadcasts had not aired. They argued this showed King being aggressive, justifying the force that followed.
On April 29, 1992, after seven days of deliberation, the jury delivered its verdict.
Not guilty. Not guilty. Not guilty.
All four officers were acquitted of assault. Three were acquitted of using excessive force. The jury deadlocked on one charge against Officer Powell, unable to reach a verdict.
Film director John Singleton was in the crowd outside the Simi Valley courthouse when the verdicts were announced. He watched sheriff's deputies escort Sergeant Koon through angry protesters to his car.
"By having this verdict," Singleton said, "what these people did, they lit the fuse to a bomb."
Los Angeles Burns
Within hours of the acquittals, Los Angeles exploded.
The 1992 Los Angeles riots were among the most destructive civil disturbances in American history. What began as outrage over the verdict quickly became something larger—an eruption of long-simmering tensions over race, poverty, police brutality, and the relationship between African American and Korean American communities in South Central Los Angeles.
Korean-owned businesses were specifically targeted, a legacy of earlier conflicts including the shooting death of fifteen-year-old Latasha Harlins by a Korean store owner the same year as the King beating. That store owner had received probation and community service rather than prison time, adding fuel to community anger.
The violence lasted six days.
Sixty-three people died. More than 2,383 were injured. Thousands of buildings burned. The damage was estimated in the billions of dollars. It took the California Army National Guard, the United States Army, and the Marine Corps to restore order—one of the few times since the Civil War that federal troops were deployed on American soil to quell domestic unrest.
And somewhere in the midst of this chaos, Rodney King appeared on television.
He stood before cameras, his face still bearing the marks of his beating, and asked a question that would become one of the most quoted phrases of the decade:
"Can we all get along?"
It was a plea for peace from the man whose brutalization had sparked the violence. King's simple question—half desperate, half hopeful—cut through the rage and destruction with something that sounded almost naive. But it was sincere. He had never wanted any of this.
Federal Justice
The state acquittals were not the end of the legal story.
The federal government has the power to prosecute civil rights violations separately from state criminal charges—a doctrine that doesn't constitute double jeopardy because the federal and state governments are considered separate sovereigns. This principle, controversial to some, exists precisely for cases like this one: when local justice systems fail to hold accountable those who violate citizens' constitutional rights.
Federal prosecutors obtained grand jury indictments against all four officers for violating Rodney King's civil rights. The trial took place in federal district court in Los Angeles, not Simi Valley.
In April 1993—almost exactly a year after the state acquittals—the jury delivered a split verdict. Officers Koon and Powell were found guilty and sentenced to federal prison. Officers Wind and Briseno were acquitted.
It was, at best, partial justice. But it was more than the state had delivered.
King also pursued a civil lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles. In 1994, a jury found the city liable for his injuries and awarded him $3.8 million in damages, plus $1.7 million in attorney's fees. It was a significant sum, though King would struggle to manage the money in the years that followed.
The Commission and Its Aftermath
In April 1991, even before the state trial began, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley created the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department, better known as the Christopher Commission after its chairman, attorney Warren Christopher—who would later serve as Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton.
The commission's findings were damning. It documented a pattern of excessive force within the Los Angeles Police Department, particularly against minorities. It revealed a departmental culture that tolerated and even celebrated violence. It recommended sweeping reforms.
Police Chief Daryl Gates eventually resigned, though he insisted it was his own choice rather than a firing. The department implemented some reforms, though critics argued they didn't go far enough. The beating of Rodney King had exposed something that many Black residents of Los Angeles had known for decades: the police were not there to protect them.
The Holliday video also sparked a movement. In the years following, "copwatch" organizations sprang up across the United States—groups of civilians who make it their mission to observe and record police interactions with the public. The October 22 Coalition to Stop Police Brutality became an umbrella organization for these efforts.
In many ways, the Rodney King beating was the beginning of the citizen journalism era of police accountability. It proved that video evidence could force the public to confront what marginalized communities had long experienced in silence. It was a precursor to the smartphone videos that would later document the deaths of Eric Garner, George Floyd, and countless others.
Rodney King's Later Years
The man at the center of all this lived another two decades, though his life was never easy.
King struggled with alcohol abuse—the same problem that had led to that fateful chase in 1991. He had multiple run-ins with the law for various offenses, though nothing approaching his earlier robbery conviction. He was married and divorced twice, and had three daughters with different partners.
In 2012, King appeared on the reality television show "Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew," openly discussing his struggles with addiction and the psychological toll of being, as he put it, "the poster child for police brutality."
On June 17, 2012, Rodney King was found dead at the bottom of his swimming pool in Rialto, California. He was forty-seven years old. An autopsy determined that he had drowned, with alcohol, cocaine, and PCP in his system. His heart disease was also a contributing factor.
The man who had begged Los Angeles to stop destroying itself, who had asked "Can we all get along?", died alone in his backyard pool.
Legacy
George Holliday, the amateur videographer whose insomnia changed history, died on September 19, 2021, from complications of COVID-19. He was sixty-one years old. In his final years, he had reflected on the strange accident of fate that put him on that balcony with a camera at precisely the right moment.
The officers involved in the beating took different paths. Some returned to law enforcement. Some disappeared from public view. Sergeant Koon wrote a book about the incident. Officer Powell's assault charge was eventually dismissed after his federal conviction.
The Los Angeles Police Department continued to face accusations of racial bias and excessive force in the years that followed, though reforms did produce some changes. The relationship between police and minority communities in America remains fraught—a fact demonstrated by protest after protest in the decades since Rodney King's beating.
What does it mean to be a victim of police brutality?
For Rodney King, it meant becoming a symbol he never asked to be. He was not a civil rights leader. He was not an activist. He was a man who made bad choices, who drank too much, who fled from police because he was afraid of going back to prison. He was also a man who was beaten nearly to death while lying on the ground, who was shocked with electricity and struck with clubs until his bones broke and his face swelled shut.
Both things can be true.
The power of the Holliday video was that it didn't require King to be a saint to be a victim. It showed, in grainy but unmistakable detail, what excessive force looks like. It forced viewers to ask: Whatever this man did, does he deserve this?
The jury in Simi Valley answered yes. The streets of Los Angeles answered differently.
And three decades later, when another Black man named George Floyd died under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, and another civilian video spread across the world, and another American city erupted in protest, many people remembered Rodney King. They remembered his question.
Can we all get along?
We still don't have a good answer.