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There was ample cause for embarrassment in the March 3 incident. The police claim to have clocked King's 1988 Hyundai going 115 m.p.h. on the Foothill Freeway, although the audio transcript of their initial radio reports does not mention excessive speed. The manufacturer later stated that the car could not exceed 100 m.p.h. The police said they subdued King because he reached into his pocket as he emerged from the car, a movement they felt was menacing. Yet the videotape shows the man lying helpless on the ground as the officers repeatedly beat and kicked him. One eyewitness said that she heard King begging the policemen to stop and that they "were all laughing, like they just had a party." When King was released from jail three days later, he told reporters he was "lucky they didn't kill me." Though he was still on parole after serving a year for second-degree robbery, the D.A. declined to press any charges against him.
< Instead his tormentors were facing charges. Last week a grand jury indicted Sergeant Stacey Koon, 40, and Officers Laurence M. Powell, 28, Timothy E. Wind, 30, and Theodore J. Briseno, 38, on charges of assault with a deadly weapon and excessive use of force "under the color of authority." They face possible prison sentences of four to seven years. When the grand jury goes back into session this week, it will continue to investigate the 11 other officers present during the beating. King's attorneys say he is preparing to file suit against the city of Los Angeles, which paid out $10 million in judgments against it in police-brutality cases last year.
Gates, who earlier singled out three of the officers for departmental discipline, said they had "brought shame and dishonor upon the police profession." Yet he dismissed the beating as an "aberration." In fact, the roots of the incident have much to do with both the history of the L.A.P.D. and the stewardship of Daryl Gates.
Over the years, television programs such as Dragnet and Adam 12 have portrayed the Los Angeles force as a model of cool, dedicated efficiency. But with 8,300 officers serving an increasingly multiracial population of 3.4 million, the L.A.P.D. has the lowest officer-to-resident ratio of the nation's six largest police departments. To compensate, the L.A.P.D. pioneered the use of SWAT teams, helicopter pursuit and a motorized battering ram, tactics that differ markedly from the community-patrol approach many other cities have adopted.
Another factor is the L.A.P.D.'s unique autonomy. In 1937, responding to a police scandal, the city passed a charter that in effect gave the police chief life tenure. The chief cannot be dismissed by the mayor or the five-member police commission without "cause" -- generally defined as misconduct or willful neglect of duty. This system, argues UCLA sociologist Jack Katz, has led to "a kind of organizational egocentrism." Mayor Tom Bradley, himself a former Los Angeles police officer, has had numerous run-ins with Gates and has requested on at least four occasions that the city charter be amended to allow a mayor to fire the police chief. Though Bradley stopped short of calling for Gates' resignation, he strongly denounced the attack on King. Said the mayor: "I have never seen this kind of intensity, anger and outrage that people have expressed, and I think rightly so."