TIMOTHY GOLDMAN: I don't even need to look at the videotape to tell you.
The attack on Bart Bartholomew.
The Vacas.
The Bejars.
I believe that's the Volvo.
Larry Tarvin.
Reginald Denny.
Fidel Lopez.
You know, I don't need the videotape
to see those attacks.
I... I can still picture them
and almost how they happened
or what the individual looked like.
Or what was taking place.
I mean, I can remember that whole day.
You can ask me what happened on April 23rd, I probably couldn't tell you,
but I can tell you everything that happened on April 29th.
The radio was putting out calls like...
The radio operator couldn't speak quick enough to get her calls out.
And these weren't calls like shoplifting.
These were assault with deadly weapon.
Robbery in progress.
Assault with deadly weapon in progress.
Looting in progress.
I mean, these were all Code 3 calls, which are the highest priority.
Lights and siren calls.
I remember seeing a lady coming down the street,
she was driving eastbound on Florence
and I could see her face through the windshield of her car.
She was scared to death. She was driving really slow.
There was a guy in front of her with a rock in his hand,
as if he was going to throw it through her window.
It was... It was crazy.
It was scary.
I'm watching the buildings burn up,
the indoor swap meets I used to go in to buy things, on fire.
The neighborhood grocery stores we used to go in, um, in shambles.
(SPEAKING KOREAN)
(KEE WHAN HA SPEAKING ENGLISH)
You could see the fire, you could see the broken windows.
And you could see the assaults taking place.
And the arson, the crime,
and it kinda gave you a sick feeling.
I can't say it was as bad as terrorism,
but you can kind of say it was terrorism in the community.
But any type of terrorism needs to be handled.
Everybody I spoke to from that day on,
when I asked them where they were
and what they were doing
and what they were watching on the TV
or what they were hearing on the radio, they were terrified.
Whether they lived in Brentwood, Bel-Air, Long Beach, East L.A.,
South Central L.A., downtown L.A...
They were terrified,
because they were watching the city begin to burn.
(DAMIAN WILLIAMS SPEAKING)
My goal was to make it to the NFL.
That was one of my biggest dreams.
(WILLIAMS CONTINUES SPEAKING)
GEORGIANA WILLIAMS: I'm from Vicksburg, Mississippi.
I grew up on a plantation.
And I know about the colored signs
and the white signs
and the back door
and not being able to go to school
as long as some cotton was in the field.
I can smell racism from 1,000 miles and I hate it.
And I will spend the rest of my life
making it better for our sons and our daughters.
I moved to California with my parents when I was a small child
and lived in Santa Monica briefly.
And then ultimately relocated to Placentia, California,
in Orange County.
And I grew up next door to a, um,
a Los Angeles Police motorcycle officer.
So, at a young age I was interested and fascinated with police work.
(JUNG HUI LEE SPEAKING KOREAN)
Growing up in South Central was great.
I mean, you had well-manicured lawns.
All the kids played on the street.
We played baseball, we played football on the street.
We played basketball in each other's driveway.
Um, it was just a great time.
All my friends were there.
When I lived here from '80 to '83 going to law school,
I didn't really stray from the west side of Los Angeles.
I was so involved with, you know, learning how to be a prosecutor
and working 14 to 15 hours a day
that, uh...
I didn't really have time for much,
other than working, getting married. (CHUCKLES)
My dad worked in downtown Los Angeles.
My mom stayed home and raised my sister and I.
And my parents, they were born here.
They were both kids when World War II broke out.
When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor,
they, um...
The U.S. government rounded up most of the Japanese Americans
and put them in a concentration camp.
Um, so my mom was in a camp for,
you know, about five years.
My dad, my grandfather took him,
sent him to Japan to get an education when he was 10.
And right when...
Right after he sent them,
that's when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor,
and then he got stuck over there.
And they knew he was an American too,
so he had a rough time.
I lived in Pacoima, California and... It was all right.
It was mixed. Black and Mexican, mostly.
We got along pretty good.
So we hung out and doing things,
you know, like hangin' out at the park,
sometimes we'd go to the beach.
My brother probably had problems with the police, but...
Like I said, I was young. I didn't have any problem with them.
Um...
Mincey had a problem with them. (CHUCKLES)
I'm sorry, I called James "Mincey"
because I had too many Jameses in my life.
(LAUGHS) So I was like, "So, what can I call you besides James?"
I was 17. He was 17 too. We was around the same age.
My birthday is on the 3rd and his on the 5th of January.
Um, I was walking home
'cause my ride didn't show up
and he started walking with me.
But then he got me in trouble
'cause my boyfriend did show up later
and they end up in a fistfight.
(LAUGHS)
So after they fought, I ended up going with Mincey.
(LAUGHS)
To me, he had a good heart. He was a kind person.
He loved karate. He was a black belt.
And, um...
He was goofy. He loved to take pictures.
He took a really pretty picture of me with...
Smelling a flower.
After we turned 18, we thought we was grown and we jetted to Missouri
to live there. (LAUGHS)
But when winter came, I ended up leaving him.
'Cause it was too cold for me in Missouri.
I was like, "No, I have to go home."
So we all came back and he was trying to save for an apartment.
And, um, I had got pregnant.
I don't know, he was only 20 but he acted older.
Oh, my God, he was only 20 at the time. (CHUCKLES)
Uh...
We was young.
Early 1982, I got out into the streets in Foothill Division.
Drugs had become a real big deal.
The rock cocaine and PCP was everywhere.
When I'm talking about PCP, it's phencyclidine.
It was mostly the PCP
where the people were acting violent.
It wasn't just that they didn't feel pain,
they were extremely strong.
Their system just goes into overdrive with that drug.
(MAN SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY OVER POLICE RADIO)
We tried Tasers,
and the Tasers most of the time didn't work
on a person under the influence of PCP.
So, if you can't do that,
how are you going to control them?
INSTRUCTOR: Okay, okay.
Well, we had choke holds, and the choke holds worked.
(INSTRUCTOR SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY)
Well, there were two choke holds that LAPD used.
The one choke hold was the bar-arm.
And that's where the bone in your forearm is placed against the person's windpipe.
And that was the most dangerous one.
And the other one is the carotid,
where they do sort of a "V" shape
and then come in behind the head.
And that cuts off the blood to the carotid,
and that's much less dangerous.
ROBERT SIMPACH: I think it was March of '82.
I'm in a pursuit of a James Mincey Jr.
The way I heard the story,
he was driving to his mom's house,
one set of cops pulled him over...
He was, uh... He'd been stopped by two other officers
for a cracked windshield.
MARJEAN BANKS: They gave him a ticket.
And so he was continuing, going to his mom's house.
Five minutes later, he's driving somewhere...
There was another set of police there.
And so, they put the siren on him.
SIMPACH: So he's thinking we're the same cops that had stopped him before.
BANKS: He thought they was harassing him, by the end.
SIMPACH: It's not a fast pursuit.
It's 45, 50 miles an hour.
BANKS: He's trying to continue to his mom's house.
They always told us if you didn't feel safe,
drive to where you feel safe.
SIMPACH: Because of the pursuit,
now we have to handcuff him.
I'd ran out of the car as he pulled up in the driveway
and I... I dropped my baton to grab him.
And so he's coming toward me and I spray him with tear gas.
And he puts his hands to his face
and says, "Ow, my eyes."
And I'd run up with my partner to grab him.
He was trying to struggle to get the mace out of his face.
I mean, he's real slippery and he just pulls away from us
and he runs toward the house.
And I think Mrs. Fowler, his mother,
is taking pictures.
BANKS: And she was trying to tell them that she wanted to help her son.
SIMPACH: And I rush up to him to grab him
and he shoves me away real hard, knocks me down.
And all this... These people being under the influence of drugs and stuff,
I've heard about it.
About the PCP and how strong they are.
And now I'm thinking this is my first encounter with one.
And we're wrestling out there, standing up in a rose garden.
And I'm trying to get him to put his hands
behind his back so we can handcuff him.
He won't let us do that.
Finally, the backup officers arrive, who tells him,
"Now, this is what we're going to do.
"We have to handcuff you behind your back."
They cuffed his hand behind his back.
Well, tried to, but he wouldn't let them.
He threw both those officers off that were holding him up.
BANKS: 'Cause he was trying to get the stuff out of his face.
So then Officer Cannon gets a carotid choke on him.
Lieutenant Rubio is on his hands and knees in the street
looking at Mr. Mincey, who's being... Who has the carotid on him.
He's saying, "No. Don't let up,
"he's not out yet, he's not out yet."
Even after they choked him, they still handcuffed him,
and handcuffed his foot and threw him in the car.
Like he wasn't human, so...
SIMPACH: And as soon as we get those handcuffs on,
I go to the hospital. I've timed it, it's under 60 seconds.
He was taken in there
and at some point after that, they said he lost consciousness.
BANKS: They was going to keep him on the machine for two weeks
just so we could say our goodbyes.
But he was pretty much gone already.
After a while, I started accepting that he wasn't gonna come back.
So I just had asked God to bless his soul
and to take care of him.
SIMPACH: We didn't know why James Mincey Jr. died
from a choke hold when we get choked out in the academy.
Every week, half of the class gets choked out.
Everybody knew how painful it was to get choked out.
We didn't realize what that could do to somebody under the influence of drugs.
And we also didn't know how to transport people.
So we were having deaths from the choke hold,
the bar-arm choke hold.
And we also had some deaths from transporting people, from asphyxia.
SIMPACH: When we heard that his girlfriend was pregnant,
supposedly with his baby,
uh, I don't know if it didn't add to any of the guilt.
I don't know that there was necessarily guilt,
it was just... To me, it was too bad it happened.
BANKS: It was so hard. I kept looking for him for like a year.
Every time I see somebody, I'm thinking, "This got to be him."
I don't know, I just didn't wanna... My mind didn't wanna give up.
But I couldn't believe that that happened so fast.
We was so young.
MAN: I call on you to act courageously
and demonstrate your commitment
to the children of our community
by calling for the resignation
of Mr. Daryl Gates. Thank you.
(CROWD CHEERING)
REPORTER: Say what you want about Daryl Gates, but say this.
Nobody in Los Angeles is neutral about their police chief.
MICHAEL MOULIN: Daryl Gates and Mayor Bradley didn't like each other.
Daryl Gates didn't get along with the district attorney.
He didn't get along with the sheriff.
He didn't get along with the community.
The LAPD was known to be a very well-run, a very disciplined,
and also a very tactically aware department.
We were the number one department in the world.
That's how every single LAPD cop felt.
We were the best trained, which is true.
We always got the best-looking uniform in the country award,
which is true.
Somehow it got into my psyche that I needed to be a police officer.
When I looked around,
I just said, you know, "This is where I want to go."
MOULIN: It was a paramilitary organization and they specifically targeted
the white, Anglo-Saxon person.
That's who became a police officer in Los Angeles.
REPORTER: In 1979, a black woman was shot dead by police
when she emerged from her home armed with a paring knife.
GOLDMAN: The Eula Love shooting,
the comments about Latinos,
and the SWAT and the D.A.R.E. and it was just,
you know, one common factor, and that was the LAPD.
REPORTER: In the last seven years in Los Angeles,
16 deaths have been associated with the use of choke holds.
Twelve of the victims were black.
MOULIN: One of the many issues that came up during his time
as the chief was the choke hold.
There was a controversy for a long, long time in the media.
The Los Angeles Police Commission
late today officially reprimanded police chief Daryl Gates
for comments he made last month about black people
and a police restraint method.
REPORTER: Chief Gates said, "In some blacks, when it is applied,
"the veins or arteries do not open up
"as fast as they do in normal people."
That's asinine. That's insanity. That...
I still, to this day, can't believe someone said that
and of course, that raised a firestorm.
(PEOPLE CLAPPING AND CHEERING)
There is a direct parallel between the disproportionate
killing of black people in this city
and the irresponsible remarks of the chief of police.
SIMPACH: What he was saying was that
it's not normal for a person to be choked unconscious and die.
And the way it ended up coming out all over the news
is he is saying that, "Blacks aren't normal."
MOULIN: When the chief of police was appointed by the police commission,
the chief of police is appointed for life.
And he serves until death, if that's what he wishes.
I have absolutely no apology to make at all for what I was thinking.
(PEOPLE CHATTERING INDISTINCTLY)
MAN: Because you hate black people, that's why you won't apologize.
But I very deeply want to apologize for the manner in which I expressed myself.
MAN: You hate us like a dog.
SIMPACH: After the Mincey death,
it was all over the news and there was a lot of cry
for getting rid of the choke hold.
Police didn't win and basically the choke hold was banned.
And the training division for LAPD
was trying all kinds of different non-lethal techniques and tactics.
And one of the things they came up with was the PR-24, the metal baton.
There was also discussion where the police said,
"Look, if we can't choke somebody out who's extremely combative,
"we're gonna have to beat 'em with a metal baton,
"and that's gonna be the only remedy."
Can you let them through there, please?
(PEOPLE TALKING INDISTINCTLY)
(INTERVIEWER SPEAKING)
In addition to the enormous prestige
which comes to any city which hosts the Olympics,
there is a special spirit and excitement.
I met a young girl who is a gymnast.
She is already preparing for the 1984 Olympics in our city.
DARYL GATES: We want this to be a very secure period.
I think it will be.
And I think the Olympic organizing committee shares in that desire.
And again, I think it's gonna be a great time and I hope you all come.
(PEOPLE CHEERING)
MAN: This torch relay has stimulated
new sense of patriotism in this country.
It has sparked a new pride in what we are about
as a people and as a nation.
MAN: I wanted to cry. You know, it was really great.
REPORTER: You seem like you're even a little
emotional now. I am.
Does it make you proud to be an American? Absolutely.
No question about it.
That was you know, '84, and L.A. was the place to be, everything was going on
and, you know, you had the Lakers winning championships.
And it was just a great place to be at.
When Magic was winning a lot of championships and bringing a lot of joy
and happiness to the city
with that big smile of his, it brought the city together.
We had it all. We had weather, we had beautiful mountains,
we had beaches, we had, you know, Disneyland.
MOULIN: Whether you go to Mexico City, whether you go to Canada,
whether you go to Alaska, and you tell people,
"Wow, you're from Los Angeles."
And right away, they see the ocean,
the Hollywood sign.
If I want to move to California, it's a better life.
You are our team.
And each and every one of you, well, we're with you 100%.
REPORTER: The Los Angeles Olympic Games opened tonight
in a near-flawless Hollywood-produced spectacle.
(ALL NIGHT LONG PLAYING)
The entire community during the Olympics, the atmosphere was so different.
I mean, it was one friendly place.
Everybody was friendly. Everybody was glad we had the Olympics.
We wanted to put our best foot forward on that.
It was just magical, it was fabulous.
I mean, it was like one big party.
Tom Bradley, he was basically the genius behind it.
MAN: Good job, Mayor. Thank you.
BOBBY GREEN: Bradley was the first black mayor,
and he's a role model as a black man, now.
That made everybody happy that we got a chance in this world.
NARRATOR: In 1963, Tom Bradley took the oath as the city's first black council member.
Ten years later, he moved into the mayor's office
for what became a record stay.
GREEN: My mom used to say, "I'll never stop dreaming
"a black man always gonna come on top."
I'm saying, don't give up hope.
Keep your hope alive.
LINDA GRIEGO: I think that the Olympics really opened his eyes
to the potential of what this city could be.
It actually put L.A. on the map
as an international city, not just a U.S. city.
So it was a really golden time for L.A.
But, you know, I remember thinking to myself,
"There are many parts of L.A.
"that have been neglected for a really long time.
"And the only services that they get are
"encounters with the police."
And the floor was gonna drop.
And it was just, when?
NEWSREADER: Well, there's no question the nation's drug problem
is getting major attention these days.
Especially the potent new form of cocaine called "crack."
THOMAS ELFMONT: In the late '70s and early '80s,
when the street gangs started to connect
with the drug dealers,
that's when things really started to change.
Because then there was a lot of money to be made.
When this drug came into the community,
you know, you got...
This drug we got... It was available,
at the smallest form, like $5.
When you started doing that,
now you've given too much power to a kid.
I mean, you letting this stuff get in the wrong hands.
And it just...
It just got out of control.
(GUNSHOT) (MAN GRUNTS)
(GUN FIRES TWICE)
(O.G. ORIGINAL GANGSTER PLAYING)
MARK JACKSON: Everybody in the neighborhood,
as kids we all clicked together and hung out.
And then, as adults we did the exact same thing.
But now, they just put a label on it.
Gangbanging.
ELFMONT: I mean, you can trace Hispanic gangs back over 100 years.
And the black gangs were starting to come out
of that whole Black Power,
black radical movement because those groups,
the Black Liberation Army, Black Panthers, the Republic of New Afrika,
they were fading into the sunset.
And so, a lot of the people that were members of those groups
began to form street gangs in L.A.
JACKSON: It impacted South L.A., it impacted West,
it was over in the Valley,
it was up in Pomona.
It was everywhere.
It just wasn't in one certain area.
GANG MEMBER: Only reason why we gangbang, we defending our turf.
This our turf. We expect for them to stay over there.
And us to just stay over here.
All the violence totally soared,
because people were protecting their territory.
GANG MEMBER: You know, anything can happen to you
when you walk out on your front porch.
So, you may as well be involved in it.
You know what I mean? You could be innocent
and get killed.
So, why get killed for nothing?
It wasn't just "bad guy on bad guy," so to speak.
Gang member on gang member. It affected the community.
GREEN: When you're in L.A., you gotta be alert.
I'm saying, you gotta watch what you're doing.
I'm saying... Twenty-four hours, it's like, you gotta be alert 24 hours.
You cannot be caught sleeping in L.A.
If you do? You got got.
I grew up on the Eastside.
Between Avalon and San Pedro.
That's a bad neighborhood.
(LAUGHING)
It was all about drugs, dealers in my neighborhood.
And gangbanging.
They rob you, kill you,
jack you, do anything to you.
You gotta be very alert in L.A.
Every day I leave the house, I get up and say a prayer
and tell God to watch over me.
And that I come home safe to my family.
To my mom, and my brothers and sisters.
I had strict parents.
And I grew up with 11 brothers and one sister.
That was our gang right there.
And my mom kept us in church and play sports.
We was playing football in high school, so we walking home,
and, uh...
This guy thought we was gangbanging,
but we just got finished playing a football game.
And, uh,
we was walking towards our neighborhood
so he was sniffing down we was gangbanging it,
asked what set we're from, and we said, "We ain't no set."
We turned around and started walking.
And he shot him and killed him.
My homeboy, Little Blue.
(WOMAN SCREAMING)
(SHOUTING IN GRIEF)
REPORTER: All those people that were killed last year,
half of them were innocent bystanders.
There's not just gangs shooting each other up,
but they're shooting each other up
and they're killing an awful lot of innocent bystanders.
(CRYING)
GREEN: Little Blue was 17.
He was my heart and soul right there.
He was my roll-dog.
It was like you're leaving, uh...
Lose your mom or your parents.
He's... Your brothers.
(STUTTERING) He's part of my heart.
Till today, I still think about him.
My mama was hurt by it because she knew that me and Little Blue was real close.
I'm saying, if you see one, you see the other.
I'm saying, that's how close we was.
And she say, "You know what? It's time for you to go out of town.
"Stay with your grandma for a while."
I stayed for one year then came back.
Then I told my mom,
"It ain't for me. I ain't no coward so it's time for me to come back home."
So I came back home.
So I believe in God. Believe me, I believe in God.
And his angels.
WILLIAMS: If I would have knew the overwhelming effect
that that crack cocaine would have had...
(WILLIAMS SPEAKING)
Well, the handwriting's on the wall, Alice.
When everything's against you,
and all hope is gone... (AUDIENCE LAUGHING)
There's only one thing left to do.
What?
Really get in there and fight.
KEVIN TOSHIMA: You know, being in a suburb,
it was kinda like The Brady Bunch.
If you remember that show from the '70s.
And in fact, that was kind of our favorite show to watch.
I grew up in a city called Alhambra.
Great neighborhood, families just came out during the summertime
and the kids just played on the street.
It was really an ideal neighborhood to grow up in.
I wouldn't trade it for the world.
It was just a wonderful experience.
My sister, Karen, was two years older than I am.
And she always did what she was told.
She played piano growing up.
She listened to my mom and dad,
and she always got straight A's.
And she was just ideal
as a daughter and an older sister.
Going into the late '80s,
the only exposure I had to the inner city
was basketball games, believe it or not.
We used to always go to Los Angeles Laker games.
And back then, they were played at The Forum in Inglewood.
So, my dad would take us and we would cut across on Slauson
and that would just take us right through South Central.
And I remember,
as a kid, just looking around and just thinking,
"Wow, this is really different than Alhambra."
Karen, you know, she of course went along.
But she wasn't too much into sports so much.
She was more, you know, into music and art
and drawing and piano and those sorts of things.
Her dreams were to go into graphic art and advertising
and she was able to design her own business card,
um, which was a big thing, and she drew a big illustration of it
and blew it up and hung it in the hallway of our house.
Karen finished Long Beach State
and went on with an advertising firm
in Studio City.
She went to Westwood to celebrate a promotion
that she had received at the advertising firm.
At that time, Westwood was the place to go on the weekend,
on a Friday night or a Saturday night.
On the weekends, you couldn't even walk through Westwood.
You'd barely be able to walk through the sidewalk,
a lot of times you actually had to walk on the curb or on the street
just to make it through from place to place,
from restaurant to restaurant.
But Westwood started to attract gang members as well.
I remember coming home. It was late.
I think it was probably at like 2:00 in the morning
or 2:30 in the morning,
and all of a sudden I heard the phone ring in the kitchen.
And I picked it up and it was my dad.
I just thought, "Oh, this is strange, what are you...
"You know, I thought you guys were all home
"sleeping already." But...
He said, "Well, there's been an accident and...
"It's Karen, and you need to come to the hospital.
"We're in Westwood."
So,
I just asked him, "Well, is she okay?"
And he said,
"It doesn't look good."
(HELICOPTER HOVERING)
(SIREN WAILING)
Apparently, there were two rival gangs there.
And she was walking down the street
and one of the gang members
pulled out a gun and just started shooting.
And she was just
right in between the two parties that were having this fight, so...
She had been shot.
You know, this is something that you always
see on the news and...
And you just see it on the news,
like, "Oh, someone got shot."
Or "Someone got killed."
And then you just switch the channel.
But this time, it happened to us.
I remember going to the hospital
and, you know, my mom was just crying
and my dad was just trying to keep it together.
And a few doctors came in and just said,
"This is the situation. Her brain is not functioning.
"We're able to keep her on life support
"through a ventilator.
"But...
"For all intents and purposes, she's brain dead,
"so at a certain point, we'll probably need to
"take her off the ventilator."
Um, you know, we just...
As a family, just got in a circle and we prayed
and we just asked, "God, you know,
"Lord, just... Just take her.
"You know, take her. She's yours now."
And I guess only folks who have gone through
something like that
really knows what it feels like.
MAN: I think this needs to be put
in some perspective and context.
We don't have homicides here very often.
And when we do, it's news.
And that's why you're all here.
I think people who had never previously thought
about what went on in South Central and the Eastside
got very, very concerned.
Now, this is supposed to all be down in South Central
or in the ghetto, or in the barrio. It's not part of us.
NEWSREADER: The shots that rang out through Westwood Village
did more than take the life of Karen Toshima.
They broke the psychological peace that has surrounded
this community like a bubble for generations.
I don't feel safe on Saturdays and Fridays.
REPORTER: It's that serious?
NEWSREADER: When Karen Toshima was killed in gang cross-fire,
police response was quick
and plans were made to triple patrols for the area
in a massive show of force.
POLICE OFFICER: We have several foot beats and certainly
our officers will be doing
the same basic job that they've been doing all along.
But there'll be more of them? There will be more of them.
MOULIN: Resources were redirected to that area
because the community was appalled
that something like this could occur in their community.
The media really dramatized the killing of the young lady in Westwood
and they should have.
And then, on the other hand, when you have these killings
day by day in South Central, well, it's a way of life and it's not newsworthy.
I think the week prior, right around that time,
we had three or four at one incident,
three or four kids shot
in South Central L.A. and it never made the news.
A lot of folks from South Central were saying,
"This happens every day in our neighborhood
"and no one seems to pay attention."
I remember a lot of talk and discussion about that.
And rightfully so.
I could really understand and empathize with
those folks who have to deal with that every day
and not get much attention.
We are determined to take back the streets of Los Angeles,
to run the hoodlums off the streets
and return them to the decent law-abiding people of Los Angeles.
NEWSREADER: Today the city council gave the go-ahead
for the hiring of 150 more police officers.
We have a war.
We are going to be successful.
Whatever it takes, we will do it.
ELFMONT: The thinking was, "Okay, if we have an unbelievably bad area,
"what we need to do is saturate that area for two or three days
"and make as many arrests as we can, for anything."
You know, we had to look for probable cause to stop them.
It could be a traffic violation,
jaywalking or whatever it be.
And search them, run them for warrants.
And see if you can come up with guns or contraband or something.
NEWSREADER: Police call it "Operation Hammer"
and its purpose is to force as many gang members
as possible off the streets of Los Angeles.
Police would plant drugs on you,
um, police would set you up.
They would use snitches.
Police would, um...
They would take your money.
I mean, you know what I'm saying? And regularly.
Operation Hammer was a, for lack of a better word,
it's a free ticket to go out there
and do overly-aggressive police work.
So they would come in and would say, "Drop the hammer on them."
That's where it... That's where the term comes in.
LAPD would put a thousand officers
on a Friday and Saturday night
into different neighborhoods.
And set up a jail situation for mass bookings.
And the officers would go out and just arrest and arrest and arrest.
(HELICOPTER BLADES WHIRRING)
(INDISTINCT POLICE RADIO CHATTER)
Tonight, we'll be out in even more force.
MAN: Can you just please, oh, please send me an ambulance.
We'll have at least 300 officers, probably more.
OFFICER: Step to the wall, step to the wall.
Get down on your knees when you get to the wall.
Passenger, get out!
What we're doing is really putting gangs on notice.
REPORTER: The LAPD broke through the rear of what police are calling
a "rock house."
Oh, my God, man. Why my family and everything is harassed,
and now look at my car.
MOULIN: Yeah, Operation Hammer I'm sure put a lot of bad people in jail.
But did they put those bad people in jail lawfully and legally?
What was the conviction rate?
How many people were killed as a result of that?
Or harmed? Or injured?
(STUTTERING) I don't know.
They just came in with guns and they were saying, "Get down!"
And they grabbed me by the back of my head
and he threw me on the floor and then he kicked me.
And he hit me on my back and he said,
"Get down, bitch."
ELFMONT: There was a Hispanic family.
They lived in between two... I think two or three unit,
like, duplex or triplexes.
They had been the victims
of different kinds of intimidation
by gang members, The Rolling 30s.
And they told them that they couldn't have lights on the house.
And they couldn't have any outdoor lights.
'Cause that's where they would basically sell and sling all their dope.
So, I called Narcotics Division and I asked them
if they would start working The Rolling 30s.
And basically, get 'em.
And of course, nothing happened.
So then, the detectives came to me and said,
"Well, how about if we get the search warrant?"
So I said, "Okay.
"You guys get the search warrant."
And then, I kinda... I kinda forgot about it.
WOMAN: Jesus, help me! Have mercy, Lord!
I ain't never seen nothing like this in all my days.
MOULIN: Well, they enforced the search warrant, all right.
But the officers went into that home
and literally destroyed it.
REPORTER: We're at Dalton.
The dining room area has glass all over the floor.
The wall in the hallway is pulled out.
This is outrageous.
NEWSREADER: All of this resulted in seven arrests.
Three quarters of an ounce of rock cocaine seized,
along with six ounces of pot.
A sawed-off rifle was also found.
They tore up my freezer, they tore up my stove.
Tore up my table.
Well, they even broke all the mirrors and stuff out by the bed.
This is America, we don't do things like that.
It's not how we, as Los Angeles police officers,
were initially trained.
We like to see the officers exercise some caution
when looking for the evidence.
Uh, sometimes that's not possible.
If they think that it's hidden in a location
that they can't easily get to,
sometimes they have to remove something or tear something up.
PAUL JEFFERSON: The commanding officer at the time, Tom Elfmont...
I knew Tom. We made sergeant together at the same time.
Even from the standpoint of police work,
if you're gonna come in and search a location,
you surely don't want to throw everything
in the middle of the floor
or tear it apart, because where's your evidence?
You know, are you destroying evidence?
How you gonna find it? How you gonna catalog it?
It just doesn't make sense.
ELFMONT: They purposely interpreted my proactiveness,
my aggressiveness towards gang members,
saying, "Oh, well, Tom, he wants us to get rid
"of The Rolling 30s."
Well, yeah, I want you to get rid of The Rolling 30s,
arrest their ringleaders.
But I don't want you to go bust houses and break toilets
and smash walls.
WOMAN: Cereal that was up on top of the refrigerator for the kids,
they poured it in the sink so we couldn't use it anymore.
REPORTER: They took her medication, as well?
WOMAN: This is all over the place.
And that's medication that she needs.
What I was trying to accomplish
was a good thing.
And trying to do the right thing.
But it went terribly wrong. So I feel bad about that.
REPORTER: Did they break these stairs as well?
Your back stairs, so you can't get out in a fire emergency? WOMAN: No.
REPORTER: And they trashed the doghouse down to shreds.
WOMAN: Oh, yeah, that too.
ELFMONT: And I came out high on the Commander's exam.
So, a lot of people thought that I would be the chief.
Yeah.
But Dalton totally shut that down.
My biggest regret was, I wasn't there.
'Cause if I was there, it wouldn't have happened.
So, I mean, to this day,
you know, it's... It was my biggest regret, for sure.
It's just one story that adds to the next one, to the...
And it's a domino effect.
That domino tip,
it's gonna make the rest of them fall.
If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything.
And we just can't keep falling for police brutality.
DONALD JONES: My view is, when a police officer pulls over a black man,
as opposed to a white man,
there is a difference. Not with every cop.
But with a lot.
(STUTTERING) And the difference is,
that I see, is that with a white man,
when they pull you over,
they're enforcing the law.
Their whole attitude is about enforcing the law.
When they pull over a black man,
it's about control.
"Put your hands on the steering wheel.
"Don't move.
"Don't reach for anything till I tell you to."
That's how a black man is treated.
Put your hands up. For what? What did...
I don't know if you got a fucking knife, you asshole. I don't have a knife.
Put your fucking hands on your head and turn around.
Fucking asshole.
(GLASS SHATTERS)
It's all right, okay?
JONES: When they pull over a white man,
or someone that's white, it's about enforcing the law.
"Sir, do you realize that you just ran the light?"
But the conversation doesn't start off with,
"Put your hands on the steering wheel.
"Don't move until I tell you to move."
SIMPACH: We were heading to the station. We were almost to the station at end of watch.
And a pursuit came out.
And so I said, "We're gonna go over there"
because at the end of a pursuit, a lot of times, suspects flee,
and over there where they stop,
it's right next to a marshy area
and a lake.
So they could be running out there in the bushes.
We may need a lot of officers to try and find the suspects.
And we don't even know what they're being chased for, at that point.
And we get up to about a mile away
when it's a Code 4,
which means situation is in hand, they don't need any more officers.
I said, "Well, you know, this is right
"at the end of this... At the end of the park there.
"Let's cruise by and make sure everything's okay."
Because you never know what's gonna happen.
REPORTER: Can you just explain what happened?
Well, about 1:00 in the morning,
my wife and I got woken up by a bunch of sirens.
And we hear sirens go by every so often, but not...
Not as many as that night.
And so, I told my wife,
"Why don't you film it?" We just had bought the camera.
So, "Start filming it" and she said, "Nah, I don't wanna."
So I got up, I went to the living room,
picked up the camera, and went out to the balcony.
By the time I got out there, they were hitting the guy.
(HELICOPTER WHIRRING OVERHEAD)
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
GATES: Howdy. (CLEARS THROAT)
Like every man, woman and child in probably the United States,
you have witnessed this Foothill incident,
a videotape, in your own living rooms
over and over again.
Because it's been played by the media and television
over and over again.
(WILLIAMS SPEAKING)
When I saw it...
It reminded me of Emmett Till.
If you're familiar with Emmett Till.
That's what I thought about.
MAN: What was on that horrifying video was a riot.
It was a police riot, in a sense.
It was almost homicide, according to the doctors...
You used the words of the Kerner Commission.
By design? I used those words on purpose.
What I saw made me sick.
It was sickening to see the beating that was rendered
and there's no way, in my view, to explain that away.
GATES: We've been the model. We've been the model. LAPD.
The model for every other law enforcement agency.
And those thoughtless officers,
those couple of minutes destroyed that image.
MOULIN: The whole thing was an absolute horrible
example of the worst policing that I can think of.
When the law says that you will use
"only that force which is necessary,"
then you will only use that force that is necessary.
I can, right off the tip of my fingers,
name 10 incidents where there was much more violence than this.
ALEXANDER: What happened to Rodney King, that was unfortunate.
And believe me, we've seen that happen more than once.
Maybe not to that degree.
But that was normal.
People don't look to you for a beating.
They look to you to protect them from a beating.
(SPEAKING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE)
MAN: We are not in South Africa.
Slavery is over and we insist
that we be treated accordingly.
People in the community, they're saying, "Oh, that's... They do that all the time.
"That's just another day at the office."
It really isn't.
To this day, have you seen anything else like it?
You know, my first thought was, sort of, as a prosecutor,
as an attorney, as a trial attorney was,
"I wonder what caused this."
SIMPACH: We were heading to the station. We were almost to the station
at end of watch.
And a pursuit came out.
And we get up to about a mile away
when it's a Code 4,
which means situation is in hand,
they don't need any more officers.
I said, "Well, you know, it's just right at the end of this...
"At the end of the park there.
"Let's cruise by and make sure everything's okay."
And so we cruise over there and when we get there,
there was cars everywhere.
And we get out.
And Rodney King is lying in a prone position.
He has the Tasers on him, he has officers around him
and the sergeant is giving him orders.
My impression when I arrived is that
Sergeant Koon had the situation well in hand.
I said, "Okay, they don't need us here, there's plenty of officers."
So we started backing out.
As we're backing out, my partner said, "Hey, look!"
And I looked back there, and all of a sudden
you could see some batons and stuff
and some rolling around.
Well, the first thing I noticed when I pulled up
was the Taser wires.
And from that I assumed that they had tried
the Taser on him and it didn't work.
And he's on the ground and they're trying to control him.
Tell him what to do.
Trying to use a pain compliance with a baton.
You hit 'em, if it hurts enough,
the way they trained us, they'll do what you tell 'em.
And if that doesn't work, then you incapacitate him
by breaking a bone or a joint.
I know I was convinced, and probably lot of other officers were also,
that the guy's on PCP. He's just not feeling...
The pain compliance isn't working
because he's not responding to it.
(BRYANT ALLEN SPEAKING)
SIMPACH: And at that point,
something happens with Rodney King.
I guess what happened is,
that's where Officer Briseno had put his foot on the back of Rodney King's neck
and pushed him down.
And that got the fight started again.
The last part of the whole incident, of what I saw,
is Rodney King's trying to get up again
and Officer Wind puts his foot up...
He lifts up off the ground and he pushes down on Rodney King's shoulder.
They described it as kicking him, but he wasn't kicking him.
Officer Wind pushed him down and instead of taking his foot off,
he pushed him twice and got him all the way down.
And Rodney King on his...
Now he's on his knees and he goes, "I give."
And it was over.
And we rushed in and we handcuffed him
and took him to the hospital.
MAN: That is not the way to treat nobody.
I don't care.
FREDDIE HELMS: The ambulance, they pulled up
and then they say we can leave.
We asked them where the phone booth was or something.
They wouldn't even tell us where the phone booth was.
Luckily, there was some people across the street and we asked them.
WOMAN: There's a phone right there at the corner.
Right there, by that brick wall.
MAN: Mr. King. WOMAN: Right there.
INTERVIEWER: What were you feeling at that time?
RODNEY KING: Pain.
Pain, um...
Shock. Shocked and worried.
You know, scared. Real scared.
I'm glad I'm not dead. That's all.
'Cause, you know, they could have very easily
killed me when they threw me in the car
and took me off. Um...
I'm lucky though. I'm lucky. I was scared.
I was scared for my life.
Um...
So I laid down real calmly
and took it like a man.
Rodney King was observed driving in some manner
that the California Highway Patrol thought that
they needed to stop his vehicle.
The simulcast was heard.
All of a sudden, the two CHP officers
are standing there as observers
watching their person they had stopped
be subjected to Tasering,
hitting with the PR-24.
I mean, he was being beat like a dog.
What I witnessed at the scene was 100% LAPD policy.
BRADLEY: I saw the articles in the newspapers.
I've heard about the incident.
And I am as shocked and as...
As outraged as anyone.
At the same time, black and brown people are being beat up,
shot, choked to death by police forces all over this country.
NEWSREADER: The seed of outrage planted by a police assault on a black citizen
blossomed into a citizen's assault on the police chief today.
People will slowly come back to the realization
that this was an aberration.
PROTESTERS: They all gotta go! They all gotta go!
(SPEAKING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE)
We're here to see that Gates is fired and all fifteen are prosecuted.
BRADLEY: When the public begins to lose confidence in the chief,
he must step aside.
Anyone thinks I'm gonna slink away is just absolutely wrong.
Because I had been, you know, directly involved in 39th and Dalton,
and I saw how that got dragged out,
I sent Gates a memo.
And I said to him, "You know, Chief, you need to arrest the guys
"so that you take the momentum away.
"They'll bail out, and then continue the investigation,
"and then let the district attorney handle it."
WOMAN ON PA: Please be seated!
(CROWD PROTESTING LOUDLY)
Please be seated.
We will today, or tomorrow morning at the latest,
request the district attorney of this county
to file criminal charges against three of our officers.
TERRY WHITE: It just happened, my supervisor came to me
and said, "Can you look into this?"
You know, I was an attorney in the division that would handle this type of case.
Which had nothing to do with being black,
it just happened to be I was in that division.
I mean, it didn't...
You know, the case didn't happen,
and they plucked me out of Pomona or...
(STUTTERING) Somewhere... You know, I just...
I was an attorney in the division that would handle this type of case.
We were one of the rare, or only divisions,
where we actually did our own investigations.
So, we went out and we started scouring the area,
looking for the apartment complex
that was across the street from where the beating occurred.
We knocked on doors, apartment doors.
Um, and we met George Holliday, who filmed the incident,
and we talked to the people who lived across the street
who witnessed it.
There was never a thought in my mind that there was justification. (CHUCKLES)
After talking with the witnesses and viewing the whole tape,
it was clear there was no justification for this.
I'm announcing today that we have obtained indictments
against four Los Angeles police officers...
You know, you had three officers who used, uh, force.
IRA REINER: Laurence Powell... WHITE: Two primary officers.
REINER: Timothy Wind... WHITE: Being Officer Powell and Officer Wind.
REINER: Theodore Briseno... WHITE: He delivered a kick towards the end.
REINER: And Sergeant Stacey Koon.
And then you had the sergeant who seemed to be directing the activity.
...have been indicted for assault with a deadly weapon
and for excessive use of force under color of authority.
Officers Powell and Wind and Sergeant Koon are further charged
with inflicting great bodily injury.
Sergeant Koon and Officer Powell
have also been indicted for filing false reports.
There was a police report on the incident
and the police report did not accurately reflect what you saw on the video.
REINER: And finally, Sergeant Koon is charged for engaging in a cover-up
to conceal from superiors his own criminal conduct.
WHITE: You know, at the very day it was assigned to me,
it wasn't that big of a story.
You know, there was an article in the L.A. Times,
it was like on page eight or nine.
After the grand jury,
it was like, "Okay, this is going to be a big deal."
(INDISTINCT CHATTERING)
WHITE: Bigger than most of us could've ever imagined.
LAKESHIA COMBS: In 1991, I was 12 years old, going on 13.
We always had a good life.
A good advantage, 'cause our dad
was, like you say, he had a good job.
He was an ex-Marine.
He liked to travel, so we did all of the...
All of the things that, I wanna say "privileged kids" did, we did it too.
We were just middle-class privileged.
Growing up in, you know, L.A.,
I guess we had a very strong sense of community with the Korean community.
You know, a lot of my friends, a lot of Korean American friends
have the same immigrant story.
I was a latchkey kid, we came home by ourselves
and our parents were working through the nights.
You know, they worked hard and we knew why they were doing it.
They were working for our future,
and because they love us.
Never did I feel that no one was better than me, or I was better than them.
Or because of my color, or their color, that they were better than me.
Only people that you would...
That I've seen my mother have problems with
when I was young as far as race was, like,
Asian, Korean, at the...
They have the indoor swap meets they used to have all over.
(SPEAKING ENGLISH)
There was no grocery store
large like a Ralph's or a Vons anywhere in South Central
for 20, 30 years.
And there had always been tensions in South Central
between the Korean community that owned the liquor stores, the 7-11's,
the swap meets and everything,
and the black community.
When you go into the Korean stores,
they follow you around.
When you first walk in, they follow you around.
Make sure that you don't steal nothing.
You walk into a store, you figure you can buy something,
but then somebody following you around...
Makes you feel uncomfortable. It's just an uncomfortable feeling.
I mean, under suspicion, just constantly?
That's... It's not good.
JENNY LEE: I grew up in a very, I would say, multicultural school,
and so, in that sense, I had contact with,
you know, different ethnic groups.
(SPEAKING KOREAN)
The liquor store where we used to go to,
their store, it was like a grocery store.
They carried the produce, video games, baby items,
the video machines...
So, it was just like a hangout, for some kids.
Mrs. Du, she didn't like us to hang out at the store.
"Go home! Go home!"
That was always her favorite saying, "Go home! Go home!"
'Cause she had like, three video games, so, we wanted to play Pac-Man,
she's like, "Play once and go."
But it's like,
"We're here to play, we have money."
(SPEAKING ENGLISH)
REPORTER: A 53-year-old grocer
became the fifth murder of a Korean shopkeeper in seven months.
COMBS: Mrs. Du, um...
She probably could've been intimidated by some of the gangbangers around,
maybe...
But I didn't see no reasons for her to be intimidated by us as kids.
Our mom sent us to the store, we had to go get her some, um...
Curl activator.
Some oil sheen for her hair.
So, we had to go the store to buy it for her.
So, me and my brother, Ishmael...
At this time, he's nine.
And we walk to the store,
and his favorite thing, as soon as he go in,
he don't do nothing but go straight to the video games, like he does.
He goes to the video games, I go
and I talk to Mrs. Du,
because the product I need is behind the counter.
And she gives it to me. I pay for it.
Then, I walk back to my thing, the video game, Ms. Pac-Man,
and then Latasha comes in.
She had on like a little wind jacket,
a pair of jeans
and some tennis shoes.
A young, brown-skin lady, hair pulled back in a ponytail.
Just our early morning,
trying to grab something to drink before we go to school.
She goes to the back.
So, I walk back over to the register
to buy some nail layers.
And as I'm watching her come forward,
she sticks the orange juice in her backpack,
which, you know, is opened, so you could see the whole thing hanging out.
And she's walking forward with her money in her hand.
And so Mrs. Du is like, "You're trying to steal."
And she's like, "No, I'm not. I just wanna pay." (CHUCKLES)
And then she's like, "No."
As they're arguing and fighting, I'm just standing here, like,
a little off to the side and looking like...
(INHALES SHARPLY)
Wow, like, over orange juice?
Mrs. Du started snatching Latasha's backpack.
She's like, "Let my bag go," and Latasha socked her.
When she socked her, she pulls out the stool and slings it at her.
And I call for my brother, I'm like, "Come on.
"We got to go, 'cause they're fighting."
And then he's like "Wait, I'm almost finished. I'm almost done."
Because he's playing Pac-Man.
"I'm almost done. I got one more... One more life."
After the fistfighting back and forth,
she went backwards a little,
and then she came back up with a gun.
REPORTER: A security camera in the store
shows storekeeper Soon Ja Du
shooting the 15-year-old girl in the back of the head.
COMBS: Mrs. Du, all she had to do was take the money.
That was it.
For so long, I seen it over and over,
like, for years.
So, this just was, um...
It was really, really, really hard
to just stand there and just watch it.
Because I was...
I was just, like, literally not even five feet away.
And it was an argument for no reason, like...
She could still be alive today if she just listened
and just took the money.
WILLIAMS: Latasha could've been my sister
or she could've been my daughter
or she could've been my classmate.
(WILLIAMS SPEAKING)
Mrs. Du will only tell you certain things.
Only certain things that she wants you to know.
Mrs. Du, she'd never handled a gun before,
never knew how to use a gun,
was never taught how to use a gun,
didn't know the gun was loaded.
(WHAN HA SPEAKING ENGLISH)
(SPEAKING KOREAN)
REPORTER: Although the trial has moved quickly,
tensions are running high.
The defense says this is not a murder trial
but the District Attorney's Office thinks
Du should get nothing less than second-degree murder.
REPORTER: It seemed bound to be a verdict no one would like,
and so it was.
Soon Ja Du guilty of voluntary manslaughter
with the use of a firearm.
A potential prison sentence of 16 years.
It is now a time for healing.
REPORTER 2: Judge Joyce Karlin
sentenced storekeeper Soon Ja Du
to five years' probation without jail time.
MAN: I would like for you, the black community, to see once again,
I mean, you can have a black person killed with a video,
with eyewitnesses, and this is what you'll get.
I thought she was going to go to prison.
I found out she did not go to prison.
She got away with murder.
COMBS: And she had just got five years' probation.
You know, you had a white judge,
and she decided to give this lady five years' probation
for killing, basically, a black person.
REPORTER: Soon Ja Du, found guilty of killing a 16-year-old girl,
received no jail time.
By contrast, Sheen beat a dog
and will spend 30 days in jail.
WOMAN: Because of the slapping on the wrist
of the murderer, Soon Ja Du,
Judge Karlin showed favoritism towards the Du family.
So, the judge is the one who sent the message
saying, "It's okay you took a little black girl's life."
JUDGE KARLIN: To suggest that any sentence that this court might give
results in the conclusion
that young black children don't receive full protection of the law,
that is dangerous rhetoric.
Had it been a child of a different color,
maybe a white child,
I think she would've probably been sentenced.
RUTH HARLINS: I think justice has not been served.
For a lady to come over here from Korea,
over here to America,
and kill my 15-year-old granddaughter.
It was not a good time and it...
It really drove a wedge between the two communities
that already did not really get along all that great.
I guarantee you, you will see some kind of civil disobedience
that will close these stores down.
I tell you, my concern is that if nothing is done,
then those who feel that there is no other response
will make what we feel is an inappropriate response.
(HUI LEE SPEAKING KOREAN)
You know, I admit I was wrong, you know, for speeding
and not stopping the car sooner.
But once I had stopped the car,
I did nothing to provoke the officers
into being almost killed that night.
TIMOTHY WIND: I was just doing my job.
You know, it was kind of a non-event,
other than it was pretty significant.
I've never seen anyone like that and...
INTERVIEWER: Like Rodney King?
Yeah, never...
You know, never seen anyone on PCP.
INTERVIEWER: You thought he was on PCP?
Yes, and so I...
Not knowing that, not being familiar with that,
being the first encounter,
I was uncomfortable with
how those things go and how dangerous those people can be
and the fact that you have to...
You know, you may have to use a lot of force,
and, in this case, I did.
Um, it was the first time in my entire police career
I ever used my baton on anyone.
MAN: I got him.
(SIREN BLARING)
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
WHITE: Ladies and gentleman, you'll be seeing that video
a number of times during this trial.
We believe the evidence will show
that you'll see you have a man who is down,
a man who is not aggressive,
a man who is not resisting.
Yet, those blows from Officer Powell and Officer Wind's batons continue,
and continue, and continue.
I knew this thing was starting to become a big deal.
We sort of just hunkered down in sort of a bunker mentality
and we sort of just focused.
It was my job,
10 to 14 hours a day,
to work on this case.
And that's what I did.
REPORTER: What if they move for a change of venue?
Uh... Where would they go?
(ALL LAUGHING)
I don't know.
We'll... We'll deal with that when it comes up.
They'd filed in the trial court for a change of venue.
With a change of venue, it basically says
you can't get a fair jury anywhere in this county.
You know, this is Los Angeles County.
It's a large county, you know.
Because we go from Lancaster to Long Beach
and from Pomona to Santa Monica.
So, it's like...
There are places in this county where you can get a fair jury.
We knew that in L.A. County,
you know, there had been numerous high-profile cases over the years.
Those had not been moved.
He got a metal stick from right there from the gate,
hit him in the head.
WHITE: You know, the Night Stalker.
He had the entire county terrified.
You know, you didn't even leave your windows open at night, at that point.
Charles Manson, I mean, that was a large case.
That was a national case.
If those cases stayed,
what's so different about this case?
And we haven't even talked to the potential panel yet.
REPORTER: An appeals court ruled that because of publicity
and the political turmoil surrounding the case,
the four officers cannot get a fair trial in Los Angeles County.
WHITE: We were assigned to Judge Kamins.
So, he'd handled most of the pre-trial motions,
including change of venue.
And then he sent a message that was delivered to one of my law clerks,
saying, you know, "Don't panic."
Well, you know, I don't know why he felt we were going to panic.
You know, ethically, as prosecutors, we had to disclose that to the defense.
And he is removed.
You know, it was reassigned to Judge Weisberg.
He's going to make the decision about
where the change of venue is going to be.
REPORTER: The options given to Judge Weisberg were
Alameda, Riverside, and Ventura counties.
WHITE: And we asked for Alameda County.
'Cause we felt the demographics of the county
more closely resembled
the demographics of Los Angeles County,
whereas we didn't think Ventura did.
The court selects the County of Ventura
as the venue for the trial of this case.
And Ventura is like, "Well, we got this courthouse.
"It's not being used."
So, you know, we didn't even know there was a courthouse in Simi Valley.
I think he thought it was convenient for witnesses,
uh, for all parties,
for himself.
All the parties during the trial lived in Simi Valley.
We all pretty much lived in a hotel out there during the trial.
Judge Weisberg commuted.
I believe he lived on the Westside.
If it had been in Alameda County,
he wouldn't have been able to do that.
He would've had to live at Alameda County
just like we would've had... We would have.
Now, I never asked him that.
I never... But, you know, we always suspected that.
That that was part of the decision in his mind.
REPORTER: Simi Valley is a town of 100,000 people
just 35 miles north of Los Angeles.
Simi Valley residents are 88% white.
Just 1.5% are black.
It's where people who don't want the problems of Los Angeles move.
And, of course, they tend to be white.
WHITE: And I think it was maybe 1 or 2% African-American.
So we knew, as far as African-Americans,
there weren't likely going to be very many on the jury.
And how I got the notice that I was going to go to that particular trial,
I was sitting out in my little workstation
and I got a call from the county jury services.
And it says, "You're not going to come to Ventura County Courthouse.
"You're going to Simi Valley Courthouse."
And then I thought, "Whoa, what am I going there for?"
'Cause it was about probably 30, 40 miles from my home.
When I got there and then I found out what this case was about,
I says, "Oh, my gosh!"
And I says, "This is something I want, uh...
"I want to know what happened."
Because my initial feelings on this case was
they were all guilty.
WHITE: We had a juror questionnaire,
and that was the first time where we thought
we might be in trouble.
Okay, this is an extremely conservative group.
This is an extremely law enforcement-oriented group.
MOULIN: Who lives in Simi Valley?
Every third house is either occupied by a fireman or a policeman.
Sure, why not move this to an all-white community?
That was the smartest thing those attorneys ever did for those four officers.
They have a point,
because, you know, we had like one Filipino, one Hispanic,
and the rest of us were mostly white.
You know, that's a point,
but should that... Should that determine the outcome of the case?
I don't think so.
REPORTER: In Southern California today,
four Los Angeles police officers accused of beating Rodney King
have gone on trial.
WHITE: Laurence M. Powell,
Timothy E. Wind,
Theodore J. Briseno,
and Stacey C. Koon
have entered pleas of not guilty.
We thought we had a strong case.
So, whatever doubt we may have had
during jury selection or looking at questionnaires,
once the case started, there wasn't any doubt.
But I think the prosecution thought they had a slam dunk,
which probably I did too.
And so I don't think they brought their best prosecutors there.
I don't think they did a very good job.
REPORTER: Without naming names, Reiner says
the District Attorney's Office was almost evenly divided
over the question of whether or not to call Rodney King as a witness.
WHITE: He was still extremely traumatized
and didn't really have the recollection.
INTERVIEWER: Did you hear any kind of slurs at all?
What do you mean by slurs?
Were there any kind of racial comments made at all?
Oh, racial? No.
WHITE: I mean, I don't know that we could've even
shepherd him through an effective direct examination,
let alone worry about what was going to happen on cross-examination.
Rodney King has had another run-in with the police in Los Angeles.
Did you intentionally try to run down a police officer?
No, no. I wouldn't hurt... Not at all?
I was completely in fear for my life, scared to death
that if this guy got back up, he was gonna take my gun away from me
or there was gonna be a shooting.
And I was doing everything I could
to keep him down on the ground.
WHITE: You didn't see him to have any weapon, did you?
Yes, I did see him to have a weapon.
What kind of a weapon did Mr. King have?
It was his body, and he was under the influence of PCP.
But, you know, after we learned that there was none in his blood,
well, then, I guess he wasn't on PCP.
The attempts to characterize Rodney King as acting foolish
or that he was under the influence
are all red herrings.
They're all essentially side issues.
The real issue here is that these cops
used excessive force and almost killed this guy.
When they executed this procedure,
the passengers, Freddie Helms, who is unfortunately deceased,
having nothing to do with this case, will not testify,
and Mr. Bryant Allen complied.
They got out. They got down in a prone position on the right side of the car.
Mr. King did not.
Something had to happen before the video began.
And I really want to know what all happened.
WHITE: The argument was going to be made by them that he ran at them,
and that's why they had to start using their batons.
Okay, but it went on too long.
JONES: There was some initial hitting or striking Rodney King
with a baton that was necessary.
I understood that as a police officer,
a reserve police officer.
But then somewhere around 30-something strikes with the baton
and after tasing him several times,
this wasn't working.
This was a man in pain,
and at some point, you have to look at that video and say, "Enough is enough."
Most officers knew that with a big guy like that,
you got to jump on him.
I mean, you got to swarm him.
STACEY KOON: I had never been trained in the swarm.
I'm one of these officers that fell through the cracks.
MOULIN: Stacey worked for me, and I was a very happy lieutenant
when he got transferred out of my division.
And, of course, we all know how his career ended.
What you see on that tape is the training that LAPD teaches.
That is the policy. That is the procedure. That is the training.
ATTORNEY: Now, you turn away right there. THEODORE BRISENO: Yes, sir.
I went up to Sergeant Koon.
ATTORNEY: Well, and what did you say?
I asked him what the fuck was going on out here.
Well, did you use just those words? Yes, sir.
HENRY KING: Briseno's attorney's point of view was like
the other officers were the bad guys
and Briseno was there to help Rodney.
The only thing we were trying to do
was keep away from going to the highest level,
the deadly force of the choke hold and the use of a gun.
REPORTER: What other techniques would you have used?
As in Simi Valley, I testified to that.
I would've used a choke hold.
There would not have been one baton blow.
This whole incident would've been over in 15 seconds.
You mean to tell me that he's trying to justify
he can't use the choke hold
but he can beat the guy with his PR-24 and tase the hell out of him?
How ludicrous.
HENRY: In high school, I didn't, you know...
I didn't really have any black friends.
All I had, you know...
The people in my neighborhood were white
and my friends were white.
So, I guess there I chose to be white.
And I... You know, I...
I guess I wasn't proud of being black then.
My mother is Caucasian.
She is from Arkansas.
Their family is white.
And my dad, he was not all black.
I guess he was maybe two-thirds.
Because I did a DNA test on myself
to see, you know, how much black I really was,
and it came up 29%.
It's definitely easier being white than being black.
I would think if you...
You know, if you had to live your whole life one way or the other.
And I guess that's why I chose to be white,
because it was easier.
But... (SNIFFS)
Then, you have to... You have to live with yourself.
You have to say,
"Well, I'm not just white.
"I'm part black."
And I'm proud of it now.
So, you know, I did change.
WHITE: Mr. King, he wasn't an animal, was he?
No, sir. Just acting like one.
He wasn't... He was just acting like one? Yes, sir.
ELFMONT: Officer Powell, he didn't have a good reputation.
And so a lot of people weren't surprised
that the first thing that happened when he gets into
big use of force with a big guy
was he starts, you know, smacking him with a baton way too many times.
I looked up at Stacey Koon, you know, thinking,
"This isn't working." "Hey, you got a better idea?" You know, just the thoughts.
He caught my eyes. He caught those thoughts.
And he says, "You keep him down on the ground.
"You hit those joints. You keep him down on the ground."
Because he also knew there wasn't anything else I could do.
And at that moment, that night,
I suddenly knew that LAPD policy is deficient.
And that's what caused what we see on that video.
That's what may cause people to say, "Why were there so many blows?"
That's why there were so many blows.
Not because I was excessive.
Not because I was out of control,
but because the LAPD policy
was tailored to cause that situation.
Why is it every time, every piece of evidence
regarding Laurence Powell that's bad, it's somebody else's fault?
It's Terry White's fault. It's Alan Yochelson's fault. It's Ted Briseno's fault.
It's Lawrence Davis' fault. It's never this man's fault.
Why not?
This is the man. And look at him.
This man laughed.
This man talks... (MAN SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY)
These little LAPD politicians that said you can't use the choke hold.
Well, give me something else.
Give me something where I don't have to hurt this guy.
Where I don't have to use a metal pipe to beat people into submission,
which is what they sent us out there to do.
That wasn't necessary.
INTERVIEWER: Did it matter to you that he was black?
If he'd been white in that condition, would you have done the same thing?
Sure.
You know, most people won't believe that.
Yeah, well, most people are stupid.
Most people, you know, they don't do this job,
and that's perfect for them.
They don't want to.
What do you mean by that?
They want you to do it and not tell them about it?
Sure. That's...
It's obvious even more, now.
What's obvious, tell me?
That they do that. That they feel that way.
So, they think they... Everybody has a better idea.
Then why don't they come on out and try it?
And they'll find out very quickly that this is a pretty difficult job.
INTERVIEWER: You're looking, though, for atonement, aren't you?
You're saying, "Sure, I could forgive them, if they apologized
"and said they were sorry," which they haven't done.
No, I, um... You know, I...
I...
(STAMMERING) It's just, you know, it's like...
It's real hard to answer that question, you know?
I mean, I'm not, uh...
I'm not face-to-face with them, you know?
So, I mean, it's quite...
It's not them asking me do I...
"Do you forgive us?"
You know, it's different. You know, I...
It's going through somebody, you know, and...
It's like, you know, I...
It's different with somebody else asking me,
"Do you forgive those guys?"
You know, I...
INTERVIEWER: But if they asked you?
(CHUCKLES) That's all I... You know, that's all I ever wanted.
WHITE: What these officers are saying here,
because of their job, because of their responsibilities,
they cannot be prosecuted.
No one can second-guess them.
No one can come in here and say,
"You did your job wrong. That was unreasonable use of force."
They think they are above the law.
And I'm here to tell them, and they should know,
that no man is above the law.
HENRY: We were sequestered.
I think one or two of us said
before they came to deliberations,
their family members told them,
"You better vote guilty.
"Don't come back with an innocent vote."
MOULIN: Maybe the reading of the verdict
was going to find all of the officers guilty.
Or maybe the verdict was going to find all of the officers innocent.
Or maybe there would've been some officers innocent, some officers guilty.
You never can tell with a jury.
They got 'em.
About time. They got... They got somebody on camera.
They got 'em. They got 'em.
Ain't no justifiable...
They're gonna find them guilty.
The talk on the street was,
"Oh, man. It's going to hit the fan.
"If those cops get off, there's gonna be trouble."
That's what the community was saying.
Howdy.
I have something I think is very...
Very important, and I hope you'll listen up.
As you know, as the world knows,
the Simi Valley trial of our officers is about ready to wind down.
In the aftermath of whatever the jury decides,
I think we need to look at ourselves
and look at what it is that we do.
What our particular job is.
And our job, as you know so well,
is to provide peace and safety and good order in our community.
Maintain peace. Maintain a calmness.
Maintain a maturity. Maintain a professionalism.
That's your job.
No matter what all these other people are doing at the time.
I know it has been a difficult year for us,
a very, very difficult year for us,
and I know in this instance
you'll go out and show the people
real quality in law enforcement.
WEATHERMAN ON TV: And we finally have low clouds back
that'll cool us off just a bit today.
High today at the Civic Center will be 80 degrees. High clouds drifting around...
WHITE: The defense, they came to me a few days before the verdict
and said, "Are you gonna ask for our guys to go into custody?"
I'm like, "Sure, yeah. Yeah.
"Yeah, they're not leaving the courtroom,
"they're going into custody. We're going to ask for that."
And even... Even when we had a verdict
and we went into the judge's chambers before the verdict, um...
The judge told them,
"Your guys are going into custody."
So, you know, it wasn't...
People weren't sitting there thinking,
"Gee, I wonder what this verdict's gonna be."
So, the verdict goes from the foreperson to the judge,
who looks at the verdict forms,
and then the clerk is the one who reads the verdicts.
And the first time
I had an inkling there was a problem
was when I saw the judge's face
as he's looking at the verdict forms.
And he looked stunned.
I told my co-counsel, I'm like, "Uh-oh.
"This is not good."
JUDGE WEISBERG: All right,
the clerk, in one moment, will read the verdicts.
(INDISTINCT CHATTERING)
Check, one, two, three, four.
CLERK: Title of court and cause.
We, the jury for the above-entitled action,
find the defendant, Laurence M. Powell, not guilty...
(MAN SHOUTING INDISTINCTLY) (CROWD SHUSHING)
...and with a deadly weapon.
We, the jury in the above-entitled action,
find the defendant, Timothy E. Wind, not guilty
of the crime of assault by force likely to induce
great bodily injury and with a deadly weapon. (INDISTINCT CHATTERING)
We, the jury in the above-entitled action,
find the defendant, Theodore J. Briseno, not guilty of the crime...
They're gonna get off on every one of them. What a signal does that send.
CLERK: ...and with a deadly weapon.
We, the jury in the above-entitled action,
find the defendant, Stacey C. Koon,
not guilty of the crime of assault by force
likely to produce great bodily injury
and with a deadly weapon.
This 29th day of April 1992, signed by the foreman.
NEWSREADER: It was a clean sweep for the defendants.
Not guilty, the verdict for all of them.
Sergeant Stacey Koon,
Officers Tim Wind, Laurence Powell, Ted Briseno.
Not guilty of assault,
not guilty of filing false reports.
Only on one count against Laurence Powell
on excessive use of force under color of authority
could the jury not agree.
On that count, the judge declared a mistrial.
As far as I was concerned,
it wasn't against the law.
And then I couldn't convict 'em because
to me, they were doing what they were supposed to do.
And the majority of us felt the same way.
I just can't believe it.
I almost started crying, 'cause...
I want to know why God let this happen like this.
I stopped having faith,
'cause I couldn't believe it, what happened.
You got it on cameras. You got evidence.
Strong evidence, what happened. And look what happened.
My client, Rodney King, he's not happy with this.
I have not spoken to him.
But I just know in my heart that
this is not over yet.
WHITE: Um, I just think
we were sort of stunned.
Um...
It was totally unexpected.
I think it was unexpected to anyone
who had viewed the trial.
REPORTER: Officer Powell, your reaction to what has happened today?
Very happy. (LAUGHING)
It's going down. Trust me.
We ain't gonna keep sitting back and accepting this.
If you're going to shoot Latasha Harlins
in the back of the head for some orange juice
and get probation,
you're going to beat Rodney King 57 times with a stick
and then somehow want to justify that.
You're going to take a battering ram and decide that
that's the way you need to get in the homes
in the black community,
then what you're telling me is you have no respect for us.
Everyone needs to feel the same pain.
In their schools, in their churches.
You understand what I'm saying?
The same anguish, the same heartache.
They need to feel the same thing.
(CROWD SHOUTING)
WOMAN: You're guilty!
MAN: I got you.
MAN 2: That fucking piece of shit pig.
I hope you burn in hell, you bastard!
Attaboy, Stacey!
MAN 3: Attaboy, Stacey!
You asked me if I'm surprised. No, I'm not surprised. Because I felt...
Today, this jury told the world that what we all saw with our own eyes
wasn't a crime.
REPORTER: We're watching a live picture of the jury bus.
MAN: I hope those people know that God is going to be the one to judge them.
Now that they've judged these guys,
and we found something that I think most of the world knows is injustice.
The verdict which they rendered today...
Innocent.
Acquitted.
Crime didn't occur.
It was something that in my wildest imaginations I could not have imagined.
(INDISTINCT SHOUTING)
I do not think that there are any winners at all in this situation.
Isn't there any justice for us in this racist society?
(HORN HONKING)
Stop the racist war on the poor!
LAPD must go!
I'm hopeful, also, that the people of this city will recognize
that this is indeed our system of justice.
(INDISTINCT SHOUTING)
(REPORTER SPEAKING)
Well, I've said, time and time again,
we do have contingency plans
for earthquakes, fires, floods,
and if we have civil disturbances we are prepared to deal with that.
REPORTER: What do you think is going to happen now, ma'am?
I'm scared to death. I'm scared to death, because I know the rage.
I know the anger
and I know exactly what my people are feeling.
REPORTER 2: We're going to take you live now
to South Central, Los Angeles.
There is violence going on.
REPORTER 3: This is at the intersection of Florence and Normandie Avenues
in South Central, Los Angeles.
REPORTER 4: They're now pulling the door off the car.
The Tom's Liquor store is being looted.
Terrible, terrible pictures.
All this guy did was enter this area.
That's his only crime.
Oh, the van has been looted, there's nothing left.
He is bleeding, unconscious in the street.
There's another driver badly beaten.
Terrible. And there's no police presence down here.
This is attempted murder.
Someone's standing there taking a videotape,
but nobody's helping him.
They're picking his pockets now.
The LAPD is nowhere to be found.
OFFICER: Hold the line! Hold what you have! (CROWD SHOUTING)
Hold your line, nobody leaves the line!
(SHOUTING CONTINUES)
No violence!
We came here to be heard!
REPORTER: Back to the South Central,
Los Angeles intersection of Florence and Normandie.
PREACHER: Oh, God, we come tonight,
some with mixed emotions...
I was shocked, I was stunned.
I was... I had my breath taken away
by the verdict that was announced this afternoon.
We have come tonight to say,
"We have had enough."
(CROWD CHEERING)
We don't intend that any of you should go out
and burn down any buildings,
or break out any windows.
(CROWD CHEERING)
We don't want you to resort to violence.
That would only destroy every positive thing
that we have been doing.
REPORTER: National Guard has been authorized,
but so far we have not seen any National Guardsmen called in.
REPORTER 2: Yeah, it is an incredible amount of destruction
and there are cars that are burned out,
left just where they lie
along several areas here.
This... As I remember or recall,
this is about the original area that everything started to happen.
REPORTER 3: You're right, at Florence and Normandie,
that's where it all started, about 7:00 this evening.
MAN: I've been standing on Florence and Normandie for about an hour.
WOMAN: You been down there?
MAN: Shit, I got all this shit on tape.
I probably spent more time at that intersection,
at Florence and Normandie, than anybody.
(GUNSHOTS)
MAN: All they doing is shooting the tanks. He's not going to shoot at anybody.
WOMAN: Look at that preacher over there.
Look at the preacher!
Man, we got some great pictures.
(INDISTINCT CONVERSATION)
We were just recording what was going on.
Well, you know, I just love to record.
And there were three cameras.
I had an RCA 8 mm.
My friend had a Super VHS.
My brother had a regular VHS, my first camera.
I didn't think there would be a riot,
because I didn't think there would be an acquittal.
CLERK: Not guilty of the crime of assault by force likely to produce great bodily injury...
The riots were not about Rodney King, in my opinion.
It was an incident that happened on 71st Street.
I had walked out of my job
and I was on my way home. By the time I got here,
I got to 71st Street,
and that's where everybody was, collectively.
"Do we go to Hollywood, take our protest there?"
'Cause that's how... That started out like a protest.
People just wanted to vent.
But before we can vent and even make it there,
somebody said, "Let's go to Payless."
So, somebody led the line to Payless, so everybody goes to the Payless Liquor store.
(CROWD SHOUTING)
(OPERATOR SPEAKING)
(MAN SPEAKING) (OPERATOR SPEAKING)
The store owner's son got hit or something.
(MAN SPEAKING)
Somebody must have called the police.
(MAN SPEAKING)
So, police are coming to that area
because of the call from the liquor store.
I was actually at home, working on a car.
We heard numerous sirens.
So, we wanted to see what was actually going on.
So, we came out the yard,
walked around the corner.
The young man got upset about the verdict
and he threw a brick through a Japanese store owner's window.
It didn't pertain to us.
It was no part of ours, so we left.
We get to the corner, two police officers pull up.
And they were smiling like, "Ah, na-na-na."
Whatever, okay.
No problem, we're not tripping off you guys.
You all do your thing. It's happening.
All of a sudden, out of somewhere
the police car was hit with a brick.
(POLICE OFFICER SPEAKING)
Two officers put out a help call
at Florence and Normandie,
that they were in foot pursuit of a suspect
who had thrown a rock or bottle
at their police car.
Never saw where the brick came from.
Exactly what I told them not to do.
And then we see a young man, Seandel,
standing on the corner with two bricks in his hand.
(OPERATOR SPEAKING)
So, they put out a help call,
we all go responding over there.
I could see the police vehicles converging on the block
north of Florence and Normandie,
at 71st and Normandie.
(OFFICER SPEAKING)
And that's when you had Seandel and the incident where
the police were treating him rather inappropriate.
JACKSON: When Seandel was done bad,
it could have been the main reason
why everything happened the way it happened.
This was a minor, and we in the community,
we know he's a young guy.
And you take him, and you're just grabbing him, you doing him any kind of way.
That's manhandling.
You just did this kid bad for no reason.
By the time we make it to Normandie and 71st,
the police merge on us.
By then, it's about 50 to 75 people.
And boom, that's when it started happening.
(SIRENS WAILING)
(PEOPLE SHOUTING INDISTINCTLY)
We hear over the radio,
an officer's requesting a backup.
(OPERATOR SPEAKING)
LISA PHILLIPS: They were trying to arrest a man.
71st and Normandie.
I got into an altercation
with a couple of police officers.
WOMAN: Get that video camera.
They put me in handcuffs.
I went buck-wild crazy.
I ended up by the third police car
and the police officer, which was black.
And he said, "Look, brother.
"We can do this all day long.
"It's not really worth it.
"Why don't you come on, calm down,
"get in the police car
"and let's end this right now."
I said, "Cool. Since you asked so politely,
"let's go ahead and do this." I was tired anyway.
(WILLIAMS SPEAKING)
GEORGIANA: They came and told me Mark had been arrested.
But I did not see that, I wasn't home.
It took me more than an hour to get there.
It was cars, vans, trucks,
and people was just running and screaming.
Oh, it was chaos.
MOULIN: I mean, there's a whole lot of people
that are not real happy with us.
And they certainly don't want us to take that man
that the officers just took into custody.
They're not happy we're taking him to jail.
MAN: Get that riot gear. Hit me, motherfucker!
MOULIN: You know, they can see this scenario just repeating itself, right?
And the jury just told them it's okay.
By the time we got there, we were just getting out of our cars,
we saw the crowd...
We saw that a skirmish line of police officers had started.
MOULIN: We initially had a little skirmish line,
but we don't have helmets, we don't have vests,
we don't have shields, we don't have anything.
All the equipment at that time was stored in the Police Academy.
I know, doesn't make sense,
but that's where it was stored.
It was evident real quick, "You know what?
"We need to retreat for another day."
(OFFICER SPEAKING)
And we were resistant.
"No, LT, no.
"We don't want to leave, we're not supposed to leave."
Had I allowed my officers to begin to use deadly force at that intersection,
God knows
what that riot would have turned into.
That riot could have been a riot
of not just burning down buildings.
It could have been a riot of just pure anarchy against the police.
And not just against the police in Los Angeles,
but against all police across... Across America.
(MAN SPEAKING OVER LOUDSPEAKER)
(CROWD CLAMORING)
We need to back out of here before we have to use deadly force.
We have to back out of here before deadly force is used against us.
Because if somebody starts shooting at us
then I've lost control,
because those officers are going to...
They're going to start shooting back, believe me.
It says "Protect and Serve" on their door, but they ran.
Technical terms.
They didn't care.
They just left, and when they left...
It was like pouring gasoline and striking a match and just leaving.
(CROWD SHOUTING)
(TIRES SCREECHING)
It's not a protest anymore. Now, it's a full-blown riot.
Anybody that wasn't black
was getting their ass kicked.
MAN: Get the fuck out of here!
Get the fuck out of here, man.
Fuck you!
(INDISTINCT YELLING)
I mean, it was just...
One of those days, compassion was...
It wasn't handed out to other races.
It was a movement, I was a part of a movement.
A black movement.
To let motherfuckers know, "We're tired of this."
It's not going to keep happening,
you can't keep killing us.
You think you're going to keep killing us
and we're going to accept this?
Just flat-out murdering us?
In the street like we don't even exist?
You just disrespect us like this?
Like our lives don't matter?
And it's cool? No. Mmm-mmm.
And it's never going to be cool.
(WILLIAMS SPEAKING)
JEFFERSON: Lieutenant Moulin was the incident commander,
which means that he was the highest-ranking officer at the scene.
He was in charge.
I was the area captain.
When I came to the station,
Lieutenant Moulin briefed me on the incident.
I went into his office and said,
"We've lost this."
And that was my exact words.
"We've lost... We've lost the city. It's gone."
And I said to him, I said,
"But you handled 71st and Normandie, right?"
And he said, "No, it's still going on."
I said, "Why are you here?
"Get your ass back out there and handle it."
That was the order.
He said, "Well, get in the field and give me updates."
Well, so that's what I did.
He was ordered to go back to 71st and Normandie.
There's some question if that occurred or not.
No one ever said, "Go back to that intersection."
Um, and had they, I wouldn't have.
I'm sorry, I would have disobeyed the order.
(OFFICER SPEAKING)
Then he decided, based on what was going on,
to move to 54th and Van Ness,
to the bus yard.
Each division, they had locations
that were pre-setup in case something happened in the field.
Not necessarily a riot,
but it could be a broken gas main or anything.
MOULIN: So, we went there and we started establishing a command post.
JEFFERSON: Then we soon realized
everything we touched turned to crap.
All those phones shut off.
We didn't know they didn't have television.
Buses were coming back, so the space that we thought we had, we had lost.
We had cars there without the keys.
We had cellphones but we overwhelmed the systems.
The cell towers went down.
We couldn't get that help from other city departments.
At public works, they had a state of the art,
at that time, it might still be,
communications truck.
We said, "We need it."
They wouldn't give it to us
because they didn't want to get it damaged.
(CROWD SHOUTING)
(SHOUTING INDISTINCTLY)
The... The liquor store got broke into.
And most all the attacks started to intensify.
REPORTER: Ron, maybe you've seen it by now,
I haven't. No law enforcement presence in this intersection.
JONES: On television was where
they were showing some things happening at Florence and Normandie.
Um, I decided to go take a look.
And then I saw Mr. Choi Sai-Choi...
And I didn't know his name at the time,
but I saw his car drive in.
I remember his car being stopped in the intersection.
JONES: Those folks at that intersection
took advantage of him and ran towards his car
and just pulled both doors open,
butterflying his car, dragging him out,
and started to beat him and kick him and...
And rummage through his car, throwing things out.
You know, he was robbed.
And I guess he was assaulted.
And I remember standing there watching that and saying to myself
that I'd just had enough.
One of the neighborhood friends I grew up with
came to his aid.
JONES: And so I walked out in the middle of the street,
said a few choice words to some people that were around
that I won't say now.
But, uh,
told them to stay away, get back.
Once I reached Choi, I stood there for a while,
stood over him.
He did not know where he was, he was disoriented.
Someone walked over from the corner and told me...
They said, "Hey,
"you've got about another minute in this intersection."
So, I picked Mr. Choi up, walked him over,
put him in the passenger side of the car
and told him to put his head down.
Because I didn't think that they would throw rocks or bottles at me.
But I knew that if Mr. Choi raised his head, they would.
And so, we drove out back towards Fire Station 57.
The paramedics transferred Mr. Choi,
and the captain is talking to me and for my concern,
he said, "Hey, Don, I'd like for you to stay here at the station for a while.
"I know your truck is still over at the...
"At Florence and Normandie," he said,
"but I would like for you to stay here,
"I'd just feel better about that."
JUANITA TARVIN: I was at the bar, at Diego's, at the club, getting ready to go to
the meeting hall.
Then my daughter called,
told me to have the bartender put on Channel 13.
I go, "Why?" (CHUCKLES)
"Mom, your husband's getting beat up."
REPORTER: Okay, this is it.
Terrible, terrible pictures.
All this guy did was enter this area.
That's his only crime.
I had to leave.
They... My friend took me home, you know?
I just went to my room and cried, you know?
'Cause I couldn't get to him.
They wouldn't let nobody go to the hospital.
And then talked to my son-in-law, when they called him.
He got him, brought him home.
I think he scared my two granddaughters, you know?
'Cause of the way he looked, you know?
It scared me.
INTERVIEWER: What kind of people are these
that do this kind of thing?
LARRY TARVIN: I think they're sick.
Why four or five guys,
I'd say they weigh about 170 or more,
took on a 125-pound old man.
It don't make sense.
Not to me, it doesn't.
(COUGHS)
INTERVIEWER: You think they were trying to kill you?
Oh, very well possible.
Very well could be.
MAN: No pity for the white man. Lay your white ass down.
That's how fucking Rodney King felt, white boy.
TARVIN: Had a delivery to make
about four, five blocks right down the street from where this happened,
and they took the freight off the truck.
If I had known something was going on
in that street particularly,
I would have taken a different route.
You know, I really felt...
Really bad for him.
MAN: What up, Mr. White Ass? Hey, go back home.
GOLDMAN: But you know...
You know, there was no... You know...
(STAMMERING) You know, there was no stopping what was going to be going on.
INTERVIEWER: Tell me a little bit about that,
that young man that helped you out.
(STAMMERING) I'd say he's about 23,
maybe 25-year-old young black kid.
He said, "Come on, get in the truck,
"I'm taking you to the police station."
He pushed me in the truck
on the driver's side.
I got over on the right-hand side
and he jumped in the truck and he took off.
At the same time while he was being rescued,
Denny's truck comes into the intersection.
JONES: The TV is on and we are now watching
Reginald Denny be attacked
at the same intersection that Mr. Choi was at.
We're now watching it on TV.
REPORTER: Terrible. And there's no police presence down here.
They will not enter the area.
This is attempted murder.
While we're watching that, the first thing that I'm thinking is,
"Why am I not there to help him?"
If I'd have been on that corner, I would have done something.
I can't tell you what I would have done,
but I definitely would have intervened.
There was no reason for him to suffer.
He had no part to play in any of this.
He was just an innocent man driving his truck through an intersection.
Just like a lot of people that day.
I don't think I like the fact that
people are victimized.
Um, that just doesn't sit well with me.
And if I'm there and I can do something about it,
I don't know what that is,
but I'll do something about it.
MOULIN: Did I see on the television
Reginald Denny being beat?
MAN: Did you get it? MAN 2: Got all that.
Yes, I did.
And it's ugly.
And in war,
ugly things happen.
But you have to make the hard decisions.
And the hard decision I made...
We cannot get him help.
We can't.
So, you know what?
Turn the television off.
It's ugly, it's horrible, it breaks my heart,
but there's nothing we can do.
GREEN: When I seen on the TV
he was driving a bottom dump...
We call them bottom dump. He's hauling some sand or some gravel.
He stopped on Florence and Normandie
and everybody was beating him up so bad.
But the last thing I seen was the brick.
I looked behind me, somebody was whispering to me.
"Go down there, save him."
I said, "You say anything? That's funny."
I thought I was crazy or something, you know what I'm saying?
My mom was in the kitchen,
she says, "Why are you talking to me?" I don't see nobody behind me.
I thought I was dreaming.
Somebody was whispering to me three or four times to get up.
So, I got up and go, I said, "Mama,
"we're gonna have a group hug right quick."
She said, "Bobby, where you going?"
I said, "I'm going to save that man's life."
"Who told you that?"
I said, "I think God told me, Mama.
"God told me three or four times to go save him."
I was on a mission.
I don't know why God picked me.
But he chose me.
Out of a million people, he chose me.
My brother Pete said, "I'm gonna drive down there on Florence and Normandie,
"you just ride with me."
When we got there, Florence and Normandie, it was a big old crowd.
I step out again and said, "God, please, please.
"What should I do?"
He said, "Don't worry. I got angels.
"I got four angels protecting you."
So, I ran toward the truck, it was going through the crowd.
So, I jumped in the truck.
It was unbelievable that he stayed alive that long.
I thought he was dead at first,
but he's still trying to drive.
When I got there, it was two women
and a guy named Titus.
They got there first.
Those three didn't know how to drive the truck.
So, I told Reggie to slide over because I'm here to save him.
Titus was on the running board on the passenger side.
Anybody come on the driver's side trying to steal the truck from him,
he could kick them off.
Lei was helping Reggie
and Terri was in the car, escorting us like a police officer,
because the front windshield of the truck was all beat up, cracked.
I was doing about 50, 60 miles on that street trying to make it to the hospital.
And I told the nurses that this guy needs help real bad.
They was hesitating for a little second
because they was kind of nervous.
So I raised my voice real loud,
screamed at them, saying "Come on, get this man right here.
"He's in bad shape."
And the doctor came back 10 minutes later on,
and he said, "You know what? This man is gonna live.
"If this man wasn't here a minute... Little later,
"he would've passed away."
When he told me that, I said "Oh, God, thank you.
"You saved this person right here."
If those four people hadn't have showed up,
I just would've bled to death basically right there at the intersection.
INTERVIEWER: But did they almost lose you in the hospital?
There was two times that things got real touchy.
What do they call them? A Code Blue, I guess.
Where they had to cut open my throat
and my head was swelling.
So, they got drains coming off my head.
So, I'm getting fresh blood...
PHILLIPS: Our chief was not
there at headquarters.
Or at a division, or anywhere close,
to see what was happening.
That was a humungous failure, in my judgment.
You're the chief and you're not there?
You're not even in the city?
What the hell are you talking about?
What are you doing?
Where the hell are you?
And he wasn't there.
I was there.
I was doing my job.
The radio was putting out calls like...
The radio operator couldn't speak quick enough.
(OPERATORS SPEAKING)
And we were given orders,
"Do not under any circumstances
"go handle any calls in that area
"because it's too dangerous."
And we were like, "Ugh."
I mean, it ran against every grain of our being as cops.
The call came out
and it sort of hung there in the air with all the other calls.
(OPERATOR SPEAKING)
And we just said, "Man..."
"We can't... We gotta go. We gotta go."
There were some officers that, make no mistake about it,
they disobeyed a direct order.
And we turned the lights and the siren on.
(SIREN WAILING)
But I thought, as we were driving there,
"Man, I don't know.
"I don't know if we're gonna make it.
"It's just us."
There's no other cops around.
Some people in the department knew that I was gay.
But my partner, I'd never come out to him.
My partner says,
"I want you to call my wife
"if I get killed because you're my partner.
"I don't want somebody that she doesn't know
"to come knocking on the door."
I'm like, "All right.
"I'll call your wife."
And, uh...
And I thought,
"I've got a lover at home. (SNIFFLES)
"And nobody knows that she exists.
"Who's gonna tell her, what if..."
You know, "Who's gonna call my mom?
"Or my girlfriend?" (SNIFFLES)
I said, "Partner, look. I'm gay.
"You probably figured it out but I'm coming out to you.
"I've got a lover.
"Will you call her if something happens to me?"
And he said, "Don't worry."
He said, "Partner, I got your back."
I said, "All right, I love you. Let's go."
(TIRES SCREECHING)
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
(MAN SHOUTING INDISTINCTLY)
He's running back to the car with this woman in his arms.
We're being attacked.
Yelled at, screamed at. People were throwing rocks and bottles at us.
A rock or a bottle or something hits him in the back
and he goes down in the street.
It knocks him down.
The woman rolls, flies out of his arms
into all this glass.
I'll never forget, when he fell, the crowd laughed.
I'll never forget that my whole life.
"Oh, fucking stupid fucking..."
You know, whatever they were saying. "Pigs."
And I always thought to myself,
"This is man's inhumanity to man right here."
This is what it's all about.
This is the worst of the worst.
So I thought the woman was dead.
I go to my partner and I'm like, "Get up, get up, get up."
He got up, we ran back up to the woman.
He picked up an arm and a leg. I picked up an arm and a leg.
And there's nowhere for the car to go.
We don't have an exit, we don't have an escape route.
There's nowhere to go.
We're surrounded.
(OFFICERS SPEAKING)
My partner's eyes locked with somebody in the crowd.
I'm not sure how it all happened.
But some people stepped aside
and created a space big enough to let our car go through.
(OFFICER SPEAKING)
I was not home.
Had I been there, I can guarantee you
I would've went to that corner
and I would've started yelling,
"Get your butt off of this corner.
"Come on back on 71st Street."
It would not have happened, but I was not home.
When I got home, it was all over.
I'm sorry it happened.
That's not the way I talked to the kids.
I do not believe in violence.
I believe in peace.
(CARS HONKING)
JACKSON: All right, they take me to 77th.
We sit there for a little while.
They take us out of the cell
and Officer Liddy said,
"I'ma show you what you motherfuckers done did."
And he took us right next to the TV,
and we seen everything burning.
And my statement to him was,
"I didn't do that shit because I've been with you this long."
"This is what y'all did.
"This is the shit y'all started."
"I didn't, bruh. I've been with you."
Florence and Normandie just happened to be the epicenter.
But you see, it broke out sporadically all over
because that was just the heartbeat of the whole community.
(HUI LEE SPEAKING KOREAN)
(CARS HONKING)
(MAN SPEAKING KOREAN ON RADIO)
MAN: This is rape.
True enough, of our own community and our own backyards,
but they started raping us way before the fires even started.
That's why you see what you seein' right now.
All these shops and places being burned
are all Korean-owned.
(SOBBING)
(CRASHES)
(HUI LEE SPEAKING KOREAN)
REPORTER: Korean language media are reporting today
that nearly 100 Korean-owned businesses
in South Central and Koreatown...
(SPEAKING KOREAN)
JENNY LEE: Edward, he wanted to protect and he felt a sense of justice.
And with different, you know, whatever was going on.
There was always that sense of justice.
And I think that's why he wanted to be
you know, like, a police officer
or go to the army or do things like that.
I think for him, he understood and knew how difficult it was
for people to have businesses.
And to grow those businesses
out of almost nothing, coming from Korea, being immigrants.
And especially, knowing our story with our parents.
He knew really well how hard they had worked.
And so, to see those businesses getting looted
and being burned down, it was very personal for him.
(WHAN HA SPEAKING ENGLISH)
REPORTER: So, the two gentlemen you see up there are armed.
They're up there keeping watch over their store.
They don't believe the police can do it
and they have good reason to believe that
because right across the street,
a cheap auto parts store over there is being looted.
(SPEAKING ENGLISH)
REPORTER: All of the merchants here are not going to wait for the National Guard
or police or anybody else.
You talked about guerilla warfare
and it's right here, right on the premises here.
(SPEAKING ENGLISH)
REPORTER: This is Linda Moore, live.
I think that you started to take this picture just about two minutes ago.
Some of the Korean shopowners here...
Hold on a second, guys.
Just a few minutes ago, some of the Korean shopowners here
pulled out of their stores
and they started pulling out weapons.
These are all loaded guns.
(GUNSHOT)
REPORTER: Koreans are starting to shoot at some of the people here.
(SHOUTING)
MAN: I never had such a experience before.
Several bullets were coming to our direction.
Our two female employees got shot.
One lady got shot in her leg.
Another lady got shot in her stomach.
We open fire to the public,
it's not because
we wanna protect our materials.
Because we wanna protect our lives.
(HUI LEE SPEAKING KOREAN)
JENNY LEE: Edward, he said he wanted to go out and help.
So, I was just asking him, "Well, what are you gonna do?
"Like, what can you do?"
And for him it was, "I don't know what I can do
"but I have to do something."
(HUI LEE SPEAKING KOREAN)
REPORTER: Eighteen-year-old Edward Song Lee was another innocent victim.
He was shot to death while trying to protect
his Koreatown neighborhood.
(SPEAKING KOREAN)
Right now, it doesn't seem real.
Like, it doesn't seem like he's really dead.
Seems like he's out somewhere.
He's gonna come back home soon.
Yeah, it felt like it wasn't real.
Like, it couldn't be happening to us.
Yeah.
GATES: This is not the first riot I've been involved in.
I was deeply involved in the 1965 riots.
And this one, quite frankly,
went much faster...
NEWSREADER: The death toll in Los Angeles has now risen to 18.
BRADLEY: I said, "Go home and stay there for the night."
NEWS ANCHOR: They are left homeless now.
BRADLEY: I know it's an imposition on you.
Tune into the Cosby Show, maybe you'll hear him make a final appeal on his show.
(INDISTINCT SHOUTING)
REPORTER: Forty-eight hours or so, 31 dead now here in Los Angeles.
Families, entire families that would never do this behavior.
You need to get us some food, we are hungry, hungry, hungry.
They would never have done this behavior
if they didn't think now that it was okay.
REPORTER: The confirmed death toll is now 38,
surpassing the 34 deaths in the Watts riots of August...
I believe Malcolm X's way. I don't believe in turning a cheek.
We done turned our cheek for far too long.
Now it's time for retaliation. They don't understand talking.
KING: It's not right, and um...
It's not gonna change anything.
We'll get our justice.
GEORGE H.W. BUSH: Early today, I directed 3,000 members of the 7th Infantry
and 1,500 Marines
to stand by at El Toro Air Station in California.
MARVIN COVAULT: It had never occurred to me that we would be called on to deploy
inside the continental United States for civil disturbance
because it happens so rarely.
It hadn't been done for a couple of decades.
The first thing that occurred to me when I got on the ground
was that, "No one is in charge."
Pete Wilson, the governor, was there with a small staff,
doing all the right kinds of things.
They didn't have a planning capability,
they had no commanding control.
Mayor Bradley was in his office.
A grand old gentleman,
but by that time...
I'm trying to be kind here.
Everybody loved him to death,
but he really wasn't in charge.
Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block, nice gentleman.
He didn't have a plan, didn't have a planning staff.
He was not in charge.
There was the California National Guard.
They weren't in charge. They were streaming in.
Then there's the chief of police,
Daryl Gates,
who I considered to be
a little bit too egotistical for the position.
First day we deployed,
I walked into this conference room
and here's a table and here's Gates and Block sitting right there
and there was a chair right there for me and I sat down.
Daryl Gates did one of these, he said,
"General." First words out of his mouth.
"General, we don't want you and we don't need you."
(WILLIAMS SPEAKING)
REINER: There was a pattern.
A pattern of malicious beatings
and assaults and robberies.
Engaged in not just by this mob,
but by these three defendants.
REPORTER: Watson, Miller and Williams
are considered by police to be the prime suspects in the brutal attack
on truck driver Reginald Denny, April 29th.
GATES: We arrested this evening three individuals, as I said.
One identified as Damian Monroe Williams,
AKA "Football."
Aged 19, from Los Angeles.
Henry Keith Watson, AKA "Kiki."
Aged 27, Los Angeles, California.
And Antoine Eugene Miller, AKA "Twon."
Aged 20, Los Angeles, California.
They actually had zoomed-in shots on Kiki,
zoomed in on Damian's tattoos.
Things like that, from the camera that was up in the sky.
A fourth suspect, 33-year-old Gary Williams,
surrendered to police at the department's 77th Division.
REPORTER: The four original defendants in the Denny beating
have become symbols of what some see as racial injustice.
Many cite the high-profile bust of Damian Williams.
I wanted very much to personally arrest him.
I did that all by myself
with the aid of about 200 police officers.
(ALL LAUGHING)
All y'all can suck my dick, all right?
REPORTER: How much time do you think you're gonna get?
I don't know but I don't wanna see you when I come out.
(MEN LAUGHING)
MAN: You're a young man, you're what, 20 years old? MILLER: Yeah.
What has this done to your life?
It didn't change it.
I knew right from wrong,
I've been doing it from the start.
But I know now, even more.
I know what to get involved in.
I know when not to...
I know what not to get involved in.
See, I'm not violent at people
who is not violent against me.
It was just something that happened that day.
It ain't like something
we do every day, it's just something
that happened that day.
The man was at the wrong place at the wrong time.
ALEXANDER: Antoine Miller, I miss him
because he's dead now.
This was a young dude who never really had
the opportunity,
you know, to see what, really, life is about.
GEORGIANA: They had the Reginald Denny case.
It was a young man and they accused him of robbing Mr. Denny.
That young man spent two years in prison
because he didn't have anyone to speak up for him.
I was accused of attempting to rob him,
which is kind of fraudulent.
Because a robbery, a 211 can only be
if I robbed you and you can identify me.
The man was unconscious.
I didn't get nothing from him.
Like I said, I do have a heart and compassion.
I might've been just getting his wallet
to find out who he was and give a call to get him some help.
I have compassion for anybody.
But you have to understand, at that time...
Please, at that time...
The compassion line was closed.
ALEXANDER: Kiki was a year younger than me.
We played high school football together,
Junior All-American Football together.
We went to dances together, got our hair permed together.
We did it all together, you know what I'm saying?
Kiki has been in the military and all that.
And for him to put his boot on Reginald Denny at a moment like that?
And to serve our country?
All of that stuff meant something.
You know what I'm saying?
Because Kiki,
he went to Westchester, he had white friends.
He's not a racist.
Now, the years have made him bitter.
But I know Kiki,
he's not a racist.
He loved white girls, you know what I'm saying?
And I tell him to this day, I said,
"God chose you for a reason.
"It's your life, you've been to the military,
"you've done all the things that America said we were supposed to do.
"Now, why is it one of their own
"did such a thing like this?
"So, you're gonna have to search yourself and find out why you guys did what you did.
"And that's what the people need to hear from you."
You know what I'm saying? And once they can do that,
I think we can better understand what happened.
HENRY WATSON: There's a war on black men. Do you understand that?
Because they only accept black men two ways in America.
Either you're a homosexual, or you're a fucking transient.
You understand what I'm saying?
Anything in between? You're a threat.
Look at what they're doing to us.
They're killing young black men.
They're killing threats.
Therefore, anything that isn't black
doesn't mean nothing to me at all.
Of course, we kill our own. You know what I'm saying?
And that's not right, I'm not condoning that whatsoever.
You understand what I'm saying? But shit happens. You know?
And we have to get ourselves together first
before we can deal with anybody.
There's a South Central in every city and every state.
There's a Florence and Normandie in every city and every state.
You know what I'm saying?
The way I feel, I'm sure there's plenty of people feel the same way I do.
So, we have to get ourselves together.
When I say get ourselves together, we got to...
You know...
These are old words,
these are old terms that have been used for years.
They've been passed on.
You know, unity, empowerment,
you understand what I'm saying?
These things...
They're not just cliches.
They're just not words. You know, words are powerful.
If you say them enough, you believe them.
(INDISTINCT SHOUTING)
JACKSON: Damian had the sweetest heart.
Would give you the shoes off his feet.
He would give you the clothes off his back.
If you're hungry, he will take care of you.
He will feed you if he got it.
But if you come at him sideways,
he will take care of his business.
ALEXANDER: He was a handsome dude,
he would have been a perfect dude in the community.
'Cause people looked up to him. You know what I'm saying?
He was good at football, he was articulate.
I mean, we be locking up our martyrs and we're killing them.
You know what I'm sayin'?
I mean, he did some bad, but everybody's done some bad.
But he could do so much good.
His voice would mean a lot to this community.
(WILLIAMS SPEAKING)
GEORGIANA: Damian is, first, very much like me.
Very kind.
He would come and ask for money
to get his tennis shoes, t-shirts, caps.
He would feed 'em, he would tell 'em, "Come and take a bath."
Um...
He was very caring.
It's just that he listened to his friends.
And he didn't listen to me or his brother.
So, that's why he locked up.
Have you ever heard of "evil communication
"corrupts good manners"?
That's what happened to Damian.
(WILLIAMS SPEAKING)
GRIEGO: Could we have prevented, you know, the riots?
I doubt it.
I think they were going to happen.
The intensity in which they happened
goes to the ill-preparedness of our police department.
MOULIN: Daryl Gates stepped out in the national media
and right in front of national television,
in front of God and everybody else.
"The lieutenant at Florence and Normandie didn't do the right thing.
"He should have gone back in there with his men and..."
You know, his typical gunslinger,
nonsense rhetoric.
I had a friend go to my locker at 77th Division
and clean my locker out.
Yup.
That's how my career ended.
GATES: My point is with Mike Moulin.
But the question was raised, why did we not respond
to that one particular intersection?
And so I looked into it and I examined the fact
that the lieutenant had withdrawn the forces from 77th Street Division,
where that intersection is, and had not redeployed them.
And so I simply said, "This was a mistake."
Should the commander of all commanders,
the chief of police, been off at a fundraiser
during precisely that period?
And, you know, Ted, that's another thing.
It's very irritating.
I've said on national television,
I should not have been there.
I don't think a lot of people know that one of your own kids
has struggled with a long-term drug problem.
In the middle of the L.A. riots, in fact,
he had some sort of a relapse and wound up in the hospital.
Well, it was very, very tough,
when you're trying to fight a difficult situation
from a police standpoint in the city of Los Angeles
and you get calls that your son just had an overdose.
It's... It's very, very tough to keep your mind on
and your focus on what you're supposed to be doing.
(WILLIAMS SPEAKING)
(INDISTINCT SHOUTING)
(MAN SPEAKING KOREAN)
I've had fun, this had been the grandest trip of my life.
I loved every moment of it and I love
every moment right down to the very last moment.
Thank you very much.
(CROWD APPLAUDING)
NEWSREADER: The four police officers who were tried and acquitted
of beating Rodney King will go back on trial.
A federal grand jury today indicted the officers
on charges they violated King's civil rights.
I've served a record five terms as your mayor.
(CROWD APPLAUDING)
Others should now have the opportunity and the responsibility
to bring their vision to bear on the future of this great community.
MOULIN: When assigning blame for failure of the Los Angeles Police Department
to properly respond to the events of April 29th,
perhaps Chief Gates should look into the mirror.
NEWSREADER: The Los Angeles Police Department
Medal of Valor is presented to Officer Lisa Phillips.
NEWSREADER 2: The trial of two black men accused of beating
the white truck driver Reginald Denny
at the start of last year's riots in Los Angeles is coming to an end.