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The headlight of the police helicopter illuminates the street on Lake View Terrace in Los Angeles, California.
You can see a white car and three policemen beating a man.
A fourth is apparently watching, he is leading the operation.
Other officials are in the background.
It is shortly after midnight on March 3, 1991. A local resident is filming the scene with his new camcorder.
Before 1991, the Internet was still in its infancy.
The filmmaker, a plumber named George Holliday, brought his video to the local TV station KTLA.
The film was soon shown worldwide on CNN, where the editorial staff had been concerned with the end of the Gulf War a few days earlier.
Holliday's recording shocked the audience: the police officers beat their victim around 50 times.
The man was lying on the street, trying to get up.
In the end, he was handcuffed.
Beaten up for speeding: Rodney King (1965–2012)
Source: Getty Images
The man's name was Rodney King, he was a construction worker and African American.
It was the weekend and King had been watching basketball with friends and drinking beer.
After the party, he got in his car and drove off, very quickly.
A police patrol noticed that.
She chased the Hyundai at up to 180 kilometers per hour.
After about twelve kilometers, King stopped.
The rest can be seen on the video.
King resisted the arrest, it was later said to justify.
The batons were made of metal.
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The Los Angeles Police Department previously had a bad reputation in poorer neighborhoods, where many African Americans and Latinos lived.
Allegedly to fight gangs, the so-called Operation Hammer has been running for years, during which tens of thousands of young people from black and immigrant families were checked, searched and arrested.
The three beating policemen and operations manager Stacey Koon came to court.
A guilty verdict seemed certain - after all, there was the video.
The then US President George HW Bush commented: “It was unheard of”.
Instead, the verdict on April 29, 1992 was: acquittal.
Los Angeles exploded.
The violent protests lasted for several days, shops were looted, and the National Guard and the military moved out.
More than 50 people were killed in the "Los Angeles Riots" and thousands were injured.
After the police officers' unexpected acquittal in April 1992, serious riots broke out in Los Angeles
Source: picture alliance / Andrew Taylor
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The racism in the verdict could not be overlooked: At the request of the defense, the trial had been moved to the white and conservative suburb of Simi Valley.
Almost all of the jurors were white.
The defense claimed the video did not tell the full story.
The first few seconds of King's supposedly aggressive behavior were missing.
Years later, one of the jurors said on ABC television: The behavior of the police officers on the video had given a bad impression, but it was not illegal.
"I couldn't find them guilty because in my eyes they were doing what they should be doing."
Even today, most police officers in the United States get away with impunity in cases of police violence and fatal use of firearms.
The criminologist and former police officer Philip Stinson has dealt with the frequent impunity in his book "Criminology Explains Police Violence" (2020).
Police officers are authorized to use “force necessary to arrest,” he explains.
It is often difficult to prove where the line of "necessary" violence is being crossed.
In addition, the police were reluctant to testify against each other.
In 1993, the Rodney King case saw a second trial that involved violating King's civil rights.
Here Operations Manager Koon and one of the police officers were sentenced to 30 months in prison.
A court also awarded King $ 3.8 million in redress.
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One of the police-friendly witnesses in this compensation litigation was an expert named Greg Meyer.
He took the view that the police "did not use excessive force".
Meyer, a court-approved expert, has a new trial on his calendar in 2021: According to newspaper reports, he will testify for one of the police officers who were there when the African-American George Floyd died in Minneapolis in May 2020.
A white policeman had his knee pressed down on the floor of Floyd's neck for several minutes.
The video of Floyd's death caused horror around the world.
Rodney King was 47 years old.
In June 2012, he was found dead in his swimming pool.
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