Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots changed Los Angeles and the LAPD.

By Lou Cannon Times Books, $30

Want to bring a pleasant evening with friends to a screeching halt? Say the following sentence: "I think the cops on the Rodney King tape got a raw deal." One way or another, that party is over. But this is one of the principal theses of Lou Cannon's book. (His upbringing in the newspaper cult of objectivity keeps him from saying it in so many words, though.) Cannon's development of this politically incorrect thought is exceptionally well-reported and fair-minded.

Reporting and fairness and Rodney King--three concepts that throughout the whole literally bloody saga in L.A. rarely made a joint appearance. While the topic was hot, we had no shortage of "coverage," but little in the way of explanation. Now that it's stone cold, we are finally in a position to get past the short-comings of journalism to the strengths of history. For the most part, Cannon, best known as a Washington Post political reporter and biographer of Reagan but who also once headed up the Post's L.A. bureau, has, with this book, done precisely that.

And history, as Edward Gibbon observed, is mostly crime,folly, and misfortune. In the case of L.A. in the early 1990s, the crime was soaring, the folly was that the LAPD higher-ups, personified by Chief Daryl Gates, believed they could still fight it the same way they had in the good old "Dragnet" days, and the misfortune (before, and particularly during the riots) fell on the well-intentioned cops in the field and especially on the law-abiding citizens they were sworn to "protect and serve." The police problem in L.A., expertly limned by Cannon, boiled down to this: The LAPD was a primarily white-male force that had long prided itself on no-questions-asked aggressive ("proactive" became the modern euphemism) tactics in a place that had become, almost without the cops noticing it, the most multi-cultural, socially complicated city in the country. The department was still trying to master the city, which now more than ever needed a public servant. There were plenty of warning signs long before the King tape: the numerous dubious shootings of black and Latino, suspects, a long-simmering dispute about the LAPD's use of a submission choke-hold that was implicated in the deaths of at least a dozen black men, and the millions spent by the city to settle excessive force lawsuits brought by citizens against the cops.

As Cannons narrative makes clear, there was no silver bullet solution to all this, but there were some identifiable problems that could and should have been addressed. Typically, they were all of the "boring" bureaucratic variety. First, there was the problem of the near-total independence of the LAPD chief, who could only be fired for cause--that is, lying, stealing, etc.--not for incompetence or policy disagreements. (During the riot's first hours, Gates was speaking out against political control of his department at a fund-raiser in Brentwood when he should have been downtown or on the scene.) Second, there was the department's near-total hostility to what is now called "community policing," getting police out of their cars and into the neighborhoods. Third, LAPD officers confronting resistant suspects did not have (especially after the department banned the choke-hold), either in their equipment or in their training, enough alternatives to the gun and the baton. Cannon relates how, after the King beating but before the Simi Valley verdicts, officers in charge of responding to possible disturbances pleaded with their superiors for such intermediate tools as leg grabbers, nets, and bean-bag guns. They were turned down. At least now the LAPD uses bean bags and pepper spray and has undertaken martial arts-based training for controlling suspects on the ground without seriously injuring them.

It's Cannon's contention that these unaddressed away-from-the-ball issues were the smoldering fuses that eventually lit off the L.A. riots. He's right. Cops who feel physically threatened will use the weapons they've got, whether they're appropriate to the level of instigation or not. Cops who only respond to emergency calls (that is still the norm in L.A.) and who are otherwise only seen driving by are harder to know, easier to hate. And a chief who won't make changes in these areas but can be fired is a threat to all the cops under him and to the citizens they're supposed to work for. Cannon rightly points to the post-riot establishment of civilian control of the LAPD as the key reform that makes all others possible.

Cannon's also good on the other parts of the system--most notably the press and the courts--that came into play during the King saga. Here too, at the time, the mistakes may have seemed beneath notice (and at several points Cannon admits that in his daily reporting on the case for the Post, he didn't notice them either), but Official Negligence adeptly shows how they added up.

Let's Go to the Videotape

Regarding the media, Cannon returns again and again to the points that a) the version of the King tape invariably shown on CNN and the local L.A. channels omitted (because news editors didn't like its blurry footage) the beginning portion that showed King charging Powell prior to any baton hits; b) the videotape didn't start until approximately five minutes after King was stopped, during which time officers indisputably tried to arrest him without hurting him; and c) the media fell into the sloppy habit of referring to the incident as the beating of a black motorist by white cops, when it would have been far more accurate to say it was the beating of a large, unsearched suspect thought to be an ex-con (true) and on PCP (we'll never know, but Cannon thinks it's plausible and accepts in any case that the cops genuinely thought this) who was resisting arrest. A particularly gross video oversimplification that Cannon criticizes is the L.A. stations' relentless habit after the riots of showing the King tape in tandem with the video of the Reginald Denny beating, as if there were any analogy between that arrest and a previously convicted felon's unprovoked racially motivated assault of an innocent person.

If you take it as gospel that the King beating was likewise racially motivated, you need to read this book, which assembles a lot of facts suggesting otherwise. Such as: Stacey Koon had previously--on his own time--investigated and gotten charges brought against a cop who unprovokedly beat two black transients. Also, Koon once gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a collapsed black transvestite he believed (correctly, it turns out) had AIDS. The strongest evidence of racial animus in the case was the infamous and offensive "gorillas in the mist" computer message sent by officer Laurence Powell before the King episode even started. But Powell handled the incident he referred to--a black couple's raucous dispute--completely evenhandedly. And as Cannon notes, Powell's message and the other few offensive ones turned up by Warren Christopher's investigation into the King beating represented "one-tenth of 1 percent of all computer transmissions" reviewed. How many other workplaces, Cannon wonders, would fare so well?

My only criticism of Cannon on the King-era media coverage is that he's a little soft on print journalism. (Some of this may be professional courtesy, or perhaps his research immersion in the best of the local press distracted him from the worst.) Yes, the dailies did a more nuanced job than TV, but the city's main newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, was poisonously politically correct, coming up with such b.s. as this prose right next to a picture of rioters trashing a supermarket: "Empowered by their sense of the verdict's injustice, they are applying a different standard." The first issue of the Times magazine to address the Simi Valley trial aftermath used the word "riot" only in quotation marks.

Location, Location, Location 

Cannon explains how the King trial got moved to Simi Valley, a jurisdiction so saturated with current and retired white cops that it was even less ethnically diverse than Ventura County as a whole. In granting the change of venue, an appeals judge stressed the dangers to a fair trial posed by the extensive coverage the King tape had already received in the L.A. media market, but the specific choice of venue was left to the trial judge, Stanley Weisberg, who then assigned it to Simi, which is completely within the L.A. media market. Cannon suggests, but doesn't quite say (he uses a quote from Warren Christopher instead), that Weisberg, who lived in western L.A. County, made his selection for personal convenience.

Cannon gives the jurors of the three Rodney King cases (that's right: the state criminal trial, the federal criminal trial, and the local civil damages lawsuit) higher marks than conventional wisdom issued them. His ultimate view is that Koon, although mistaken in (and legally ill-served by) his belief that the King arrest was from start to finish a well-controlled use of force, committed no actions providing evidence of criminal intent, and numerous actions providing evidence of professional intent. And Cannon often notes that Timothy Wind stopped to evaluate the effect of each of his baton blows and kicks as LAPD policy requires and only hit again when King moved. He doesn't pretend to know exactly why Theodore Briseno put his foot on King's upper back at one point, but believes his motivation was probably to keep King down so the baton hitting would stop. (Remember, Briseno had previously grabbed Powell's baton.) It's only Powell's behavior that Cannon views as a "close question" He feels that Powell was probably an arrogant and technically lousy police officer. (Most experts he quotes agree that one of the reasons Powell had to deliver so many baton blows was that he was delivering them ineffectively.) But he stops short of calling him a criminal. That these are the opinions of a veteran reporter after five years of study suggests that there was wisdom operating in each King jury. It's forgotten now, but the Simi jury deadlocked on one assault count against Powell. Wind and Briseno were acquitted twice. And Koon and Powell were (under extraordinary community and government pressure to convict) only held criminally responsible in the federal case for the last 35 seconds of violence, which the jurors recognized didn't produce any of King's serious injuries. And the civil jurors refused to award any punitive damages.

I learned a lot from Cannon's discussion of the Soon Ja Du murder case, which shortly before the first King verdicts generated immense anti-Korean, anti-white, and most importantly, anti-system, sentiment among South Central's blacks when the trial judge, Joyce Ann Karlin, refused to send shopkeeper Du to jail after she was convicted of voluntary manslaughter of a black teenage girl customer, Latasha Harlins. But I don't agree with his condemnation of Karlin's decision. After all, Cannon's own reporting shows that the key event that moved Karlin to her decision was her trip to the jail where Du would be sent, which she learned had neither Korean prisoners nor a Korean interpreter and was no stranger to violence--the judge arrived shortly after one female inmate slit the throat of another. This shows that Karlin's decision was not a matter of racism but of humanity. And even Cannon admits the decision took courage, a virtue he finds lacking in the several other judges who played their part in the "sad pattern of official negligence" by ducking the case before it was assigned to Karlin because "they did not want to face the pickets and the protests."

Above all else, Cannon's fine book shows that if such humanity and courage had been more widely distributed throughout the system, the L.A. riots never would have happened.

Scott Shuger, contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, writes the "Today's Papers" column for Slate.