Rodney King’s beating incited calls for police reform. 30 years later, LA poll shows work remains to be done.
Thirty years after white police officers were caught on video beating a Black motorist named Rodney King, Los Angeles residents cite persistent racism in law enforcement as a big problem more than people in other cities.
Rogue cops are more likely to be held accountable since then, an exclusive USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll of Los Angeles found. But a majority of Angelenos say the LAPD still uses force when it’s not necessary, and a third of those surveyed call the department largely racist.
Surveys this summer in Detroit and Milwaukee, part of a series called CityView, found mixed views of law enforcement. The Los Angeles Police Department received the harshest ratings for its treatment of citizens. The polls, sponsored by USA TODAY and the Suffolk University Political Research Center, explore attitudes toward policing and community in American cities.
Cellphone and body camera videos that show police violence against unarmed Blacks fueled the Black Lives Matter movement and helped make Eric Garner, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others household names.
Rodney King was in some ways the first. On March 3, 1991, before cellphones and their cameras were ubiquitous, a Los Angeles plumber who had gotten a Sony camcorder a month earlier heard noise outside his San Fernando Valley home. From his balcony, he filmed the brutal scene of four police officers kicking, hitting and tasing King more than 50 times.
George Holliday, who shot the grainy video, died two weeks ago at age 61 of complications from COVID-19. King, who won $3.8 million in damages from the city, struggled for years with drug and alcohol abuse. He drowned in his backyard swimming pool in 2012.
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Los Angeles residents are twice as likely to give the police department the lowest rating of “poor” (20%) than the highest rating of “excellent” (10%). Twenty-nine percent call the LAPD “good” and 38% “fair.”
Those assessments divide along racial lines: 53% of white people and 54% of Hispanics rate the police department as fair or poor; that is the view of 80% of Black people and 69% of Asian Americans.
Juanita Sumby, 44, a lifelong Angeleno, says racially charged misbehavior by police hasn’t changed over the years, but awareness of it has. “It’s always been this way,” she says. “The fact that people have cellphones, I think, kind of brought it to light.”
She can recall that day three decades ago when she saw the shocking video of King’s beating.
“I just remember them playing the tape in cycles on the news, watching him being beat up by these police officers,” says Sumby, who is Black. “I have a brother, and my uncles and my grandfather, all Black men, I think it was just painful for them to watch as well – very traumatic – because I think they’ve all experienced similar behavior from LAPD. It just hit home.”