Official Negligence.

How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD 

Lou Cannon

Times Books, $35, 698 pp.

The memory of the videotape remains vivid even after seven years: police officers beating a man again and again as he writhes on the ground. We remember other images too: verdicts of "not guilty" delivered by an all-white jury, mobs brutalizing innocent bystanders in the riots that followed, smoke rising over Los Angeles.

These recollections are true, but as Lou Cannon argues in the magisterial Official Negligence, they are also inaccurate and deceiving. We remember the stunning brutality of the cops, but the televised tape we remember did not include a three-second section showing Rodney King charging at police officers prior to the beating, setting off the officers' spiral of panic. More important, the tape, in making individual officers the focus of our anger, conceals the equal culpability of a police department unable to train or govern its force, and of a judicial system where individual circumstance and social justice often clash.

In over six hundred pages of careful detail, Cannon shows how an event so seemingly transparent can conceal so much. He describes how chronic underfunding and understaffing in the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) led to a situation where a training instructor could not only fail a test in the proper use of the baton but be sent out on patrol that same evening. It was King's terrible luck to meet up with that officer, Laurence Powell, and to suffer a rain of blows that looked deliberate and vicious but were actually, according to Cannon, frenzied and often ineffectual.

Cannon also describes systemic irresponsibility at the LAPD. The department did not train its officers in alternatives to the baton, methods that could have been used to restrain King with less violence. It had a history of both civil rights and excessive force complaints, complaints exacerbated by discrimination against black officers and tense relationships with minority communities. After the King beating, Police Chief Darryl Gates's ongoing feuds with both the mayor and the officer corps resulted in a rudderless department. When the riots began in South Central Los Angeles, command staff could not create a plan to protect the area. Instead, they pulled their officers out, effectively encouraging rioters to take over.

Cannon's portrayal does not excuse the individual officers who beat King, but it does humanize them and place their actions within the context of the LAPD's institutional failure. His portrayal of Rodney King is also honest and generous. He saves his harshest condemnations for the judges and politicians whose thoughtlessness created the conditions for the riots. These are not general accusations of racism or neglect of the poor: The power of Cannon's indictment lies in the details. For instance, when the accused officers were granted a venue change because of intense pretrial publicity, the trial judge, following normal rules of procedure, should have tried to find a California city that resembled Los Angeles but was outside its media market. Instead, the judge moved the trial to Simi Valley, a suburb within the Los Angeles media market that did not match the demographic profile of Los Angeles in any way. Worse, Cannon suggests, the judge did so for no reason other than personal convenience. This would be heartbreaking, were it not for the rage that arises as story after story of irresponsibility, inexperience, or personal pique is carefully linked to the eventual riots. "Official negligence" indeed - Cannon's story is one of venality compounded into catastrophe.

This focus on the contribution of individuals to history is classic journalism, and few do it better than this veteran newspaperman. But other journalistic conventions serve Cannon less well. His insistence on maintaining a chronology often undercuts the book's dramatic power and analysis. For instance, Cannon shows how the trial of a Korean grocer for killing a black high school student inflamed South Central L.A. only months before the first Rodney King trial. The officers' acquittals fanned anger that had slowly burned since the grocer, found guilty of voluntary manslaughter, was sentenced only to probation. But rather than tell this story as a whole, as a counterpoint to the King trial, Cannon switches back and forth between the trial and the King investigation, keeping the progress of each case roughly parallel. This diffuses the power of both narratives. Cannon's concern for chronology also leads him to include lengthy passages that keep us fully informed, but distract from the argument.

In a six-hundred-page book, passages like these try the patience of even the most dedicated reader. They also take space that might otherwise have been dedicated to summary and assessment. Like a newspaper lead, which puts the facts up top and leaves the least important details to the end, Cannon's book ends without concluding. He does not linger, for instance, on the most troubling question he raises: What is to be done when official negligence results in specific injustice? If it is unfair to convict officers for their supervisors' incompetence, how is that incompetence to be held to account? If it is unjust to allow the fear of riots to rule a jury's deliberations, how are we to address the accretion of official injustices and miscalculations that make riots possible? Cannon is, and teaches us to be, incensed at both official negligence and the scapegoating of individuals. In that sense he is evenhanded. But without giving us some way to correct official negligence, the only injustices that can be corrected are those to Rodney King and Laurence Powell, not those to residents of Los Angeles.

Cannon, of course, cannot be expected to solve this problem. But a picture as careful, as emotionally compelling, and as damning as Cannon's deserves more than the quick fade-to-black at the end of a videotape, more even than the memories we now call up when we hear the names Rodney King and Laurence Powell.

Ann Chih Lin is an assistant professor of political science and public policy at the University of Michigan. She writes frequently on crime and immigration.