wasn’t he on PCP or something a bit stronger than just ALCOHOL whenever he was pulled over and beaten?
Or was that just something the officers claimed to justify the beating?
Rodney King drowns for an unknown reason, but the media uses the occasion to regurgitate the infamous beating of 20 years ago. Unfortunately, the media, and young people learn nothing from the way the media portrays the event. All we see are the cops beating up King, but we’re not given any background to know why. The fact is, King provoked the entire sordid affair by failing to yield to a cop in the first place. Instead, he caused a pursuit that ended badly for him, and others. I don’t particularly care for cops, but they don’t start beating on everyone they stop for a traffic violation.
The media does nothing to tell young people how to stop a minor incident from escalating in the first place, or for that matter what King did to provoke the incident. Cops don’t want to be beat up, and they don’t want to die, so any aggressive act by a citizen could quickly result in a more aggressive response by the cop, or cops. Instead, I watched some idiot on TV lamenting how the beating affected King for life, as though he was innocent before the beating. Even in the video, it was clear King was not submissive, but still trying to get up. Perhaps the cops were to aggressive or violent in their response, but the fact remains, King created the problem by his own actions.