Let's Get It On!_ The Making of MMA and Its Ultimate Referee - Big John Mccarthy [38]
The riots left undeniable damage in their wake. It seemed as if every corner I turned on had buildings and cars gutted by fires. Graffiti and vandalism were also rampant. In the aftermath, 53 people had died, another 2,000 had been injured, 1,100 buildings had been destroyed by about 3,600 fires, and material damage to the city was estimated at somewhere between $800 million and $1 billion.
What impacted me most was the feeling that the LAPD couldn’t handle a crisis of this proportion and our leadership was downright pathetic.
Honestly, though, I don’t believe the riots themselves had anything to do with Rodney King, the police, or the perceived racism between them. Yes, there were people who were frustrated that the police were acquitted. But if you look at the case, including the missing moments of video when King attacked the officer, you can see why the jury came to their conclusion. It was hard to find the officers guilty based on the letter of the law.
However, a lot of the black community honed in on four white officers beating on a black man and getting away with it. “That’s our lot in life,” they said. “This is the way we get treated, and we just got screwed again.” They were upset and felt cheated. I understood that. They were cheated in some ways, but it didn’t give anyone the right to harm others.
And during the payback moments of taking or wiping out what others had, looters and vandals destroyed their own neighborhoods and belongings without even thinking about it. I looked at people differently after the riots, just as people had looked at officers differently after the King arrest.
An officer couldn’t walk into a restaurant to pick up his dinner without hearing people whisper, “I wonder if he was one of them.” In their eyes, anyone who wore a uniform was guilty. Every time we’d go to do something, people would yell, “Rodney King! Rodney King!”
I was never embarrassed to be a police officer, but I was embarrassed by the way people perceived what had happened when they didn’t really know anything about it. I also knew some people were looking for reasons, contrived or not, to blow the whistle on police officers. Videotaping became a big trend, so officers had to be smarter about how they went about their work on the streets. I changed the kind of police officer I was; I didn’t go about being as free-willed as I’d been when I went after suspects. As a result, I didn’t put as many bad guys in jail.
The LAPD had been forced on the defensive.
About four months after the Rodney King beating, the Christopher Commission report was released. Chaired by attorney Warren Christopher, who later became the secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, the commission had been formed in 1988 to identify officers who were considered heavy-handed.
The commission came up with a list of forty-four repeat offenders, officers who had received six or more allegations of excessive force between 1986 and 1990. However, the screening process was flawed because they looked only at police reports, and officers’ definitions of use of force varied. While one might write up a report for grabbing a suspect’s wrist, another wouldn’t consider that worth reporting at all. Some who made the list were clearly not offenders.
I wasn’t on it, but one of my partners from Southwest made number one. He was strict about the way he did his police work, but I never saw him use force when he shouldn’t have. He was a great cop who just got caught up in the political game and didn’t survive it.
I didn’t need the Christopher Commission report to tell me what had gone wrong during the Rodney King incident, the first falling domino that had set a string of destructive events in motion. The problem was that too many limitations were being placed on officers in the heat of the moment and they didn’t know how to react. For instance, we had been told we couldn’t use chokes on suspects. In fact, the officers