The Meaning of Rodney King

Don't we gladly judge others? Don't we think it's weak to try to understand why someone has fallen? Don't we mock compassion?

Isn't it out of step with our times to say, "To understand all is to forgive all" – or, more famously, "You can’t understand someone unless you’ve walked a mile in his moccasins"?

1. Rodney King is dead.

Rodney King is dead. He was found submerged in his swimming pool in Rialto. He has been in and out of jail for drugs. I suspect that drugs played a role in his death.

2. Judging Rodney King.

And for that he will be scorned as a loser and as a drag on the gene pool. And people will judge him harshly when they remember that he blew through the slight fortune that he gained in a verdict against the City of Los Angeles after four officers of the L.A.P.D. beat him on videotape. He died jobless and pennyless.

3. How Rodney King’s beating changed his life.

Knowing what the present would be if the past were different is like trying to tell the future. It can’t be done. But it’s fair to predict that if a videographer hadn’t taped the police beating of Rodney King, his life would have been different in two important ways.

First, he would have been convicted of resisting arrest. The officers who beat him wrote reports that claimed that he had charged them, as I recall, even though that wasn’t true. They wrote that to justify beating him.

The officers could not justify the beating merely because Rodney King had fled from them in his car. But almost certainly that was the reason for the beating. As a former prosecutor and as a private attorney, I have many times seen that arc from flight to beating.

And when police officers write false police reports to cover up wrongfully beating a suspect, their victim is almost always prosecuted with false evidence based on those false police reports. Without some objective proof that the officers are lying, jurors want to believe the officers.

The second difference is that Rodney King almost certainly would have lived and died unknown to the world.

 2. How Rodney King’s beating changed the world.

But whatever might have been, Rodney King’s beating changed the world.

Before the videotape of the Rodney King beating played over and over on the news, people in general had no idea that the police could be so punitive and brutal.

I should correct what I just said. Before the videotape of the Rodney King beating played over and over on the news, middle-class White people in general had no idea that the police could be so punitive and brutal. In minority and poor communities, that was not news.

Also, the acquittal of the officers in a Simi Valley jury trial led to riots. Sixty persons died. The greater Los Angeles area suffered one-billion dollars of property damages. Buildings were burned down.

And the acquittal affected, for a while, the criminal justice system. Most immediately, during the riots, my workplace the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office was evacuated. The courts were shut down.

And some African American jurors for a time would not vote to convict a defendant; the amount and quality of the evidence made no difference. It was a form of protest. As a prosecutor in that time, I dreaded African American jurors, for that reason. But there was nothing ethically that I could do. I am proud of our justice system that it forbids rejection of a prospective juror because of his race. But under the influence of the Rodney King acquittals, my enthusiasm for this high principle waned. After the officer-defendants were convicted by a later federal jury, things more-or-less got back to normal.

I now do not begrudge the African American jurors their protest. In fact, the rule against rejecting jurors for their race exists for the sake of justice among races. And, certainly, those protesting jurors saw a White Simi Valley jury’s acquittal of officers who beat an African American man on videotape as a denial of justice among races.

Ultimately, justice was served, even if a number of criminals in the time between the two Rodney King jury trials gained an undeserved benefit.

5. Rodney King’s character.

But – to get back to understanding Rodney King. In his life, he did wrong. He probably did wrong up to the day that he died. But, like all of us, he was not all good nor all bad. You rarely err to expect complexity in another person.

His flight from L.A.P.D. officers began a chain of event that led to riot and death. Lives were ruined. He seemed genuinely tormented by that. He seemed in real turmoil when he said in front of television cameras, "I just want to say: Can we all get along? Can we get along? Can we stop making it horrible for the older people and the kids? " He had a conscience.

6. Thinking about Rodney King.

I never knew Rodney King. So I don’t know why he made the life choices that he made. But we would do well to think of him and remember the saying, "There but for the grace of God go I."

Of course, we are all under the eyes of an all-seeing God who knows our own failures as vividly as he knows Rodney King’s. And who knows if God judges Rodney King more harshly than he judges us? God is inscrutable. So maybe we would do better to think of Rodney King an say, "There I go."

7. "Send not to know for whom the bell tolls".

A John Donne poem comes to mind:

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

This poem from 1624 reflects a very old idea. Compared to 1624, our modern technology is vastly superior. But our modern ideas about humanity do not surpass this poem.