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The morning after King’s arrest, my dad called me from Gaithersburg, Maryland, where he was living and working for the International Association of Chiefs of Police. “What the fuck are you guys doing out there?” he asked.

I had just woken up, so I didn’t have the faintest idea what he was talking about.

“Turn on the TV,” he said. “Any station.”

I did, and that’s when I first saw the dark, grainy images that would become the centerpiece of most newscasts the world over for months. An amateur cameraman had been woken by the sounds of sirens and had captured the video of a black man on all fours surrounded by four white policemen beating him repeatedly with their batons. King attempted to rise as the officers continued to take swings at him. One officer then began to stomp King’s body, while another group of officers not involved in the actual apprehension watched a few feet away.

I didn’t recognize the suspect, but I was pretty sure I could pick out two of the officers right away. One had worked in CRASH with me until he’d taken an opportunity to become a temporary P3, or training officer, at Foothill Division. I’d had my opinions about this officer. He wasn’t a bad guy, but I thought he was a putz who couldn’t fight his way out of a wet sack. With the badge on, sometimes he’d act much tougher than he really was. I’d told my supervisors, “You need to set him straight. He’s going to get himself in trouble.” But then he’d left the unit before anything had been done about it.

You can imagine the irony of it all when I watched the video and wondered if he was the one beating King. I thought, Well, if that were me getting hit all those times, I’d want it to be him holding the baton. He can’t hit that hard.

There was more to this story, a longer version of the video that the masses didn’t see. The beginning of the encounter between King and the police had been cut out of the version that looped over and over on the nightly news. Additional footage showed King going after the officer before it got rough. Of course, the edited version made for a much juicier story, so that’s what the networks aired.

In the unedited video, King was pulled over in his Hyundai with two other male, black passengers. These men did what they were told and were taken into custody without incident. However, King, in whatever drug- or alcohol-induced state he was possibly in, decided he didn’t want to follow the program.

When he came after the officer, he was met with a baton and then a Taser, which slowed but didn’t stop him.

The officers wanted to get King into a certain position: proned out, or lying on his stomach, arms out, palms up, legs spread. King wouldn’t comply, so they used the batons to make him, but it went too far. There’s no doubt it went beyond the type of force that should have been used in the situation.

When the four officers were arrested and charged with using excessive force, their fates became a national obsession, just as the trial of O. J. Simpson would a few years later.

Another officer I thought I’d recognized in the King video was a supervisor on the scene. He was a good guy. He wasn’t afraid to put his hands on suspects, but he wasn’t a racist in any way. I’d watched him give mouth-to-mouth to a Dragon in the holding cell. This black man had vomit coming out of his mouth and hadn’t showered in weeks, but this officer hadn’t hesitated in trying to save his life. Here was a sergeant who hadn’t shown prejudice in the past. Watching this officer in the video, I figured he’d been paired up with guys who didn’t really know how to handle an aggressive, high-pressure situation.

I remembered this when my dad called again and said, “The district attorney asked me to testify as an expert witness against the four officers.” The DA wanted him to speak about the incorrect procedure they’d used. My dad was pissed off about what had happened and that the whole episode had hurt his friend Daryl Gates, the chief of police at the