From the Archives: The Rodney King beating
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Los Angeles police officials are investigating a videotape filmed by a Lake View Terrace man that shows a group of police officers brutally clubbing a man about the head and back with nightsticks, then kicking and beating him some more after he appears to be face down on the ground.
March 5, 1991
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A bystander’s videotape that captures Los Angeles police officers repeatedly striking a prone, apparently defenseless man, stirred a public furor Tuesday, with Mayor Tom Bradley declaring himself “shocked and outraged” by the incident, widely broadcast on national television.
March 6, 1991
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Rodney King’s white Hyundai came to a stop on a busy San Fernando Valley street in front of a sprawling apartment complex.
March 7, 1991
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Rodney Glen King, his face battered and one eye swollen half-shut, gave his version Wednesday of a beating he took at the hands of Los Angeles police officers, insisting he obeyed their commands and did nothing to provoke their ferocious attack.
March 7, 1991
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Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F.
March 8, 1991
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Dennis Azevedo, a veteran officer with the Los Angeles Police Department’s Harbor Division, was carrying out routine duty--serving subpoenas at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.
March 9, 1991
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Los Angeles residents overwhelmingly believe that police used excessive force in arresting Rodney G.
March 10, 1991
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The attorney for one of four officers implicated in the beating of Rodney G.
March 6, 1992
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Four Los Angeles police officers won acquittals Wednesday in their trial for the beating of black motorist Rodney G.
April 30, 1992
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Thousands of looters ransacked stores and set fires Thursday in a chaotic rampage through the Los Angeles area as National Guard troops moved into the streets and a dusk-to-dawn curfew was clamped into force in numerous cities.
May 1, 1992
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National Guard troops and police wrestled to gain control of riot-ravaged neighborhoods across Los Angeles on Friday amid indications that authorities were gaining the upper hand for the first time in three days of the worst urban unrest in Los Angeles history.
May 2, 1992
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In his first interview since his beating captured national attention, Rodney G.
May 2, 1992
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Raising the curtain on post-riot Los Angeles, Mayor Tom Bradley on Sunday announced that he is lifting the dusk-to-dawn curfew as of tonight and declared optimistically that the looting, arson and violence of last week now “appears to be under control.”
May 4, 1992
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In the incident that appeared to trigger last week’s riots, at least 20 Los Angeles police officers backed down late last Wednesday afternoon in a tense confrontation with South Los Angeles gang members and other residents furious over the verdicts in the Rodney G.
May 5, 1992
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With their street corners still guarded by rifle-toting soldiers and their nerves less jittery but still frayed, Los Angeles residents went back to work and school Monday as officials grappled with how to rebuild the city--both physically and emotionally--in the wake of last week’s riots.
May 5, 1992
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an extraordinary early morning conclusion to one of the most volatile criminal trials in U.S. history, a federal jury returned guilty verdicts Saturday against two Los Angeles police officers for violating Rodney G.
April 18, 1993
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A federal judge on Wednesday ordered Officer Laurence M. Powell and Sgt. Stacey C.
Aug. 5, 1993
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Three years after the 1991 beating that made him a national symbol of police brutality, Rodney G.
April 20, 1994
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It changed Los Angeles and forced a nation to again confront the issues of racism and police brutality.
March 4, 2001
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The beating victim says he’s at peace with all that’s happened to him and that he’d go through the night of March 3, 1991, again. Now out of work and nearly poor, he wears the physical and emotional scars of his ordeal.
April 23, 2012
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He is found dead in his swimming pool in Rialto. The tape of his 1991 beating and the upheaval that followed in 1992 opened the door to widespread police reform. But he struggled with the expectations placed upon him.
June 17, 2012