These riots and drawn a heavy presence by the National Guard and resulted in 34 people killed, over 1,000 injured, 4000 arrested and hundreds of buildings were burned.3 These riots set the tone for tension and what would ensue. In March of 1991 a man by the name of Rodney King involved in a car chase with police. The man had a prior criminal record and had been out of jail for a while on parole. When he was stopped and out of the car he lunged at the police and was resisting arrest. After the police subdued him they continued to beat him well beyond the point of compliance.
There is a widespread and persistent problem of police brutality across the United States. Thousands of individual complaints about police abuse are reported each year and local authorities pay out millions of dollars to victims in damages after lawsuits. Police officers have beaten and shot unresisting suspects; they have misused batons, chemical sprays, and electro-shock weapons; they have injured or killed people by placing them in dangerous restraint holds. This is the first paragraph of an unprecedented and historic report, USA: Rights for All, issued by Amnesty International (AI) on October 6, 1998. Simultaneously, the organization announced the theme of its U.S. education campaign: "Human rights aren't just a foreign affair."
Racism and police brutality goes hand in hand, and causes a major concern in today's society, in the United States. On March 3, 1991 in California, Rodney King an African American, was pulled over after a high-speed chase, and after stopping was beaten by four white police officers (Worsnop 635). Tracy Brock also an African American was arrested in Manhattan in November of 1986. An officer smashed his head through a plate glass window, when Brock refused to go into the officer’s lunchroom (Police Brutality and Excessive Force in the New York City Police Department 14). Ki Tae Kim a Korean grocer was assaulted when he was accused of passing a counterfeit bill.
The Los Angeles riots kicked off on the twenty-ninth day of April 1992 following the acquitting of four officers who had beaten and injured a motorist in the previous year. In the year 1991, California Highway Patrol officers detected Rodney King speeding as he drove in Los Angeles. King then led the officers on a high speed chase for the fear that the court would revoke his probation for a robbery offense he had committed (Gray, 2014). He was caught and ordered out of his car surrounded by several L.A.P.D cars and this led to a struggle between him and the police officers with some of them thinking that he was resisting arrest. One sergeant, Stacey Koon, used a Taser gun to fire at him before they beat him with their buttons mercilessly.
(Tripod.com, 2012) Finally, in August of 1985, the police had enough information from many of his victims to release a sketch of him to the media. The sketch had only been on the news for one day before he was recognized while trying to steal a car, and he attempted to flee when the civilians began to shout that he was the “Night Stalker.” Before long, a mob formed and attacked him. One of the men finally subdued him by hitting him on the head with a pipe. The police arrived to arrest Ramirez just in time to keep the mob of angry civilians from killing him. (Bruno, 2012) He was convicted of forty-three counts which included rape, burglary, murder, and sodomy on September 20, 1989.
In this one, he 's accused of texting racist and homophobic messages to other cops. On Tuesday, among all the uproar, he wanted to get his side of the story out. The offensive texts were released by federal prosecutors during a bail hearing last week. The four other officers have been reassigned to units with no public contact while the department investigates the scandal. First thing to remember the court system has sentence an individual who is charged with enforcing the laws and put into the same system he protect.
Months later, after reviewing all the evidence, the officer charged with the shooting of Michael Brown was proven justified by court of law. However many citizens in Ferguson viewed this as unjust, and while the Brown family asked for peaceful protests, the town saw violent riots for days. These Ferguson riots lasted almost a week, as shops were raided, looted, and set ablaze, with officers trying to peacefully contain the situation without violence, as to prevent another incident. One of the stores happened to be the one that was robbed by Brown, with a picture being shown of the clerk standing in the middle of his destroyed store. While the riots happened, news stations all across America aired it live as the rest of the country looked on, either praising or rejecting the actions of the
Chanel Evans History 301 Professor Namala Final paper May 5, 2014 The Watts and LA riots On the night of August 11, 1965 the Watts community of Los Angeles County went up in flames. A riot broke out and lasted until the seventeenth of August. After residents witnessed a Los Angeles police officer using excessive force while arresting an African American male. Along with this male, the police officers also arrested his brother and mother. Twenty-seven years later in 1992 a riot known as both the Rodney King riots and the LA riots broke out.
There has been controversy in the world about police brutality and whether police have used excessive force to apprehend a subject is increasing. Police brutality has been around for a long time, but it just now televised. In the late 19th century, the issue of police brutality was often tied to business owners’ efforts to break up strikes by workers attempting to organize and form labor unions, also on a day known as Bloody Sunday where a group of peaceful protesters were literally beaten to the ground, sprayed with tear gas, and water hose by the police (“Police Brutality”). Even in 2015 in Baltimore Freddie Gray, 25-year-old African-American male, died while in police custody due to injuries in the spine and in some parts of Baltimore the
Rodney King, one of America’s most powerful civil rights activists for people abused by police, has taught the world a lesson in his plea: “People, I just want to say, can’t we all get along?” On March 3, 1991, after a high-speed chase, King was pulled out of his car, thrown on to the ground, and beaten up by the Los Angeles police, which George Holliday videotaped. The four L.A.P.D. officers involved were charged with assault with a deadly weapon and one officer was charged with using of excessive force. However, after a three-month trial, which was held in Simi Valley, a suburb of Los Angeles, a predominantly white jury acquitted the officers. This inflamed the citizens, which resulted in the violent 1992 Los Angeles riots.