Word: rodney
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...four Los Angeles police officers were captured on videotape assaulting and beating a black man by the name of Rodney King. Those officers were later acquitted of all charges, and the resulting riots that ravaged downtown L.A. destroyed millions of dollars in property and illustrated the frustration burning just below the surface in the American city...
Nearly a decade later, another case of police violence captures national attention. Although the facts are similar--a city with a history of law enforcement abuse against minorities, a black victim and multiple white aggressors--this case is not at all the same. The Rodney King case led to an explosion of urban anger. The Diallo acquittal has stimulated nationwide protest, but the estimated 2,500 people who marched up and down Fifth Ave. last Saturday were largely peaceable, ordered, and multi-racial. In the King case, it was easy to blame the police officers; in the Diallo case...
There's always been a strong suspicion in popular culture--think Chinatown or L.A. Confidential--that Los Angeles cops were quietly up to no good, and there have been some dark real-life incidents, like the police beating of Rodney King. But L.A. is embroiled in its biggest police scandal ever, one that makes Joseph Wambaugh read like tepid tea. Authorities have identified 40 people who were wrongly convicted, and public defenders are reviewing 4,000 more cases. The cops "are just a gang with the law on their side," says Gerardo ("Clever") Lopez, a former gang member. "People...
While discussions of race have been aggressively squelched in the courtroom, the troubled legacies of Rodney King and Abner Louima haunt the trial of four white New York City police officers accused of murdering African trinket salesman Amadou Diallo. The police say they mistook Diallo's black wallet, which he apparently proffered in an outstretched hand, for a gun, and believing their lives were in danger, the police fired their weapons 41 times...
...rampaging police outside the 1968 Democratic convention. But no American police department has been as criticized - or feared - as that of Los Angeles. The LAPD hadn't even recovered from the stigma of its handling of the 1965 Watts riots when it created international headlines for the beating of Rodney King, which inspired a fresh set of riots in the early '90s. Now a new investigation into rampant corruption, law-bending and lawbreaking among L.A.'s finest stands to become the department's biggest scandal yet, raising questions of whether it will ever be able to gain the trust...