Opinion: LAPD: How the LAPD has evolved in the 20 years since the Rodney King beating
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On the 20-year anniversary of Rodney King’s beating by Los Angeles police, which was captured by onlooker George Holliday’s Sony Handycam, Joel Rubin, Andrew Blankstein and Scott Gold have written a story detailing just how much video technology has changed the way the LAPD operates. From pedestrians with cellphones that double as video cams to surveillance in patrol cars, big brother is always watching.
‘Early on in their training, I always tell them, ‘I don’t care if you’re in a bathroom taking care of your personal business…. Whatever you do, assume it will be caught on video,’ ‘ said Sgt. Heather Fungaroli, who supervises recruits at the LAPD’s academy. ‘We tell them if they’re doing the right thing then they have no reason to worry.’
But LAPD officers aren’t just motivated to do the right thing for fear that their bad actions will go viral. After the 1992 riots, sparked by the acquittals of officers involved in the King beating, the LAPD’s ethos changed. Op-Ed columnist Jim Newton remarked on this shift in his Jan. 18 column:
For the LAPD, life began to change under the administration of Mayor Richard Riordan, who campaigned on a promise to expand the department and both enlarged and equipped it. Mayor James Hahn built on that success by hiring William J. Bratton as chief. And Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, to his lasting credit, has gone still further, pushing through an increase in trash fees that helped pay for an expansion of the force and defending those gains even as the budget has come under increasing pressure.
Assessing today’s LAPD through the lens of the Olympic Division, Newton continued:
Perhaps more important, it’s a police station where officers and commanders listen to the public rather than preside over it. When an officer shot a young autistic man in the spring of 2010, the community at first recoiled. ‘In the old days,’ Blake acknowledges, the police response would have been to ‘bar the gates, don’t say anything.’ Instead, he met with the family, explained why his officers saw a threat in a hooded, non-responsive man, hands at his waist, reactions hard to discern. Tensions, once strained to breaking, subsided.
Now, we have to work on the younger generation of Angelenos who are like, ‘Rodney who?’ so that history doesn’t repeat itself.
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--Alexandra Le Tellier
