After Rodney King: Police Use of Force

by Greg Meyer

After Rodney King: What Have We Learned?

by Greg Meyer

The Rodney King civil case was loaded with lessons for federal, state and local officials if only they will stop, look and listen. The King incident will become one of the classic case studies that public administration students consider to learn the consequences of policy making.

The federal civil jury awarded King 3.8 million tax dollars from the Los Angeles city treasury for general damages but not a dime from the involved officers for punitive damages. The jury learned during the punitive damages phase that the roots of the King beating were to be found in poor policy which encouraged Los Angeles police officers who encountered resisting suspects to hit them with metal pipes ("police batons," if one prefers to minimize the impact). Most people are surprised to learn that nearly all the procedures caught on the King video tape were deemed proper by use-of-force experts who testified on both sides of the case, in view of policies sanctioned by municipal leaders more than a decade ago.

Some Los Angeles officials specifically predicted that baton beatings would be the result of taking out of routine use the most- used police tactics, commonly known as "chokeholds." A number of arrested suspects on whom the holds had been used, later died while in police custody during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when society found its streets knee-deep in PCP and cocaine. Some influential people theorized the chokehold (not the drugs) to be the cause of the deaths, and this view prevailed.

The mass media played these in-custody deaths to the hilt. The city leaders wanted the chokehold controversy off the front pages and off the six o'clock news. With encouragement from the media, the holds were banned from routine use. But the policy makers and news editors (in Los Angeles, they appear to be one and the same) hadn't read their Sherlock Holmes: "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data." The stage was set for Rodney King and thousands of less famous resisting suspects to be struck with batons and kicked with boots.

First, those who seek to understand the King incident should make no mistake about Mr. King and what happened the night of March 3, 1991. The undisputed facts as established by three jury trials (two criminal and one civil) are these: King was a drunken paroled robber, briefly out of prison and by his own testimony intent on not going back. He led police on a lengthy chase, driving in excess of 100 miles per hour. He exhibited bizarre behavior, resisted arrest, and pushed away four officers before the video began and before any significant force was used on him. He was not struck while handcuffed, contrary to continuing talk-show blather. He has been arrested several times (twice for violent crimes) since the famous incident. In short, Mr. King was something more than what the media calls "a motorist." Still, he should never have been subjected to the tactics we see on the video.

Those who feel as current City Councilwoman Rita Walters, widely quoted asking for "accountability" and bemoaning the failure of the civil jury to hit the officers with punitive damages, ought to have a frank discussion with the city's policy makers of the early 1980s. Apparently not anticipating a riot, Councilman Robert Farrell declared that it would be more "'cost effective' for the city to settle claims for broken bones of combative suspects who are hit with batons rather than to pay settlements" in chokehold cases (Los Angeles Times, October 7, 1981). Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, stated that "if we don't have the holds, the next level of force . . . is the baton, and it's more dangerous from the maiming standpoint. It poses the specter of billy-club confrontations" (Los Angeles Herald Examiner,August 22, 1981).

Then-Chief of Police Daryl Gates (who was a defendant in the recent civil trial until he was dismissed for lack of evidence), speaking about police batons, told the Police Commission on May 7, 1982 that "if used, these would result in injury in almost every case, a result which does not occur from employment of (choke)holds." Still, on May 12, 1982, the Police Commission (civilians appointed by the mayor to make police policy) put the holds on a par with "deadly force." Now the holds, previously used on several of the eight or nine hundred people arrested by LAPD each day in the 1980s, were only used a few times a month.

When push came to shove in Los Angeles, the civilian overseers of the police department made billy-club confrontations a tactic of first resort. This unfortunate policy and the training that followed created a fundamental change in routine arrest situations that made the baton a tool of aggression instead of merely self-defense. Police Commissioner Reva Tooley told the Los Angeles Times, "The baton seems to provide a new, broad spectrum of control techniques that perhaps could enable officers to control aggressively resisting suspects without resorting to the chokehold," and that the burden will now be on the Police Department to prove that other methods of restraint are more dangerous than the use of the chokeholds (May 12 and 13, 1982).

On January 4, 1984, Gates provided the City Council with information that injuries to suspects had climbed from an average of 3.1 per week prior to the chokehold moratorium, to 23.6 per week afterward. This represents a 661 percent increase. Similarly, injuries to police officers increased 521 percent as post-chokehold confrontations became more violent. The Chief's request to modify the unreasonable policy was ignored. Thus, a huge gap in the police use-of-force continuum was created, and it was not adequately filled.

At a recent nonlethal weapons instructors course in central California, more than seventy percent of the attendees raised their hands when asked if their agencies still use the chokeholds. Around the country, there are dozens of in-custody deaths each year whether or not the chokehold is used. To this day there has been no validation that media-labeled "chokehold deaths" were chokehold related.

Faced with clear evidence of poor policy-making by elected and appointed city officials, how could any of the three King juries hold the officers personally accountable for the ugly results? The wrong people were on trial. If policy makers are not held accountable for their poor judgments, needed improvements will not occur. Many write off the Rodney King incident as an aberration, instead of recognizing it as the inevitable consequence of lousy decision-making at high levels.

Recently there has been media attention focused on in-custody deaths which occurred after violent suspects were "hog tied," a widely used procedure to prevent violent suspects from kicking at officers and others. The phenomenon known as "positional asphyxia," discovered in the late 1980s, is apparently to blame in many unexplained in-custody deaths. The National Institute of Justice and the International Association of Chiefs of Police have just completed a study which estimates that four out of five in- custody deaths are due to positional asphyxia. Most of those deaths, plus most of the remaining twenty percent, appear to be cocaine related. Were the Los Angeles "chokehold death" cases of the late 1970s and early 1980s to be reinvestigated, one would find that most if not all the subjects were "hog tied" and that the deaths were consistent with positional asphyxia and/or drug-induced delirium, not chokeholds. With 17,000 different law enforcement agencies in the country, learning about positional asphyxia and how to prevent it has proven to be a slow, reactive process.

Police officers will continue to have violent confrontations. The public must grow tired of making millionaires out of convicted criminals and others who choose to resist arrest. Many confrontations will not make for pleasant dinner-time viewing regardless of which tactics are used. The public, the courts and the media must insist on a more constitutional, more rational use-of- force policy-making process than Los Angeles experienced in the early 1980s. Giving an officer a metal pipe as a primary tool, then telling the officer to do the job humanely, is schizophrenic. It should not be accepted by the public and the press, or by the political and police leadership. It simply costs too much.

Law enforcement leaders throughout America must adopt humane alternatives. "Policy" includes more than what is written in some thick book. Policy includes choices of tactics, equipment, application and training. Choices can be based on whim or fancy, or they can be based on objective research and findings. Policies should be driven by the numbers and severity of injuries which are known to result from any given tactic. The lack of modern equipment is a major hurdle. David Boyd, the director of the Science and Technology Division of the National Institute of Justice, says, "Police still have the same choices Wyatt Earp had. They can talk a subject into cooperating, they can beat him into submission or they can shoot him. What police need are better alternatives."

The latest rage is "pepper spray." As effective as it is in many cases, its track record on very large, very aggressive, very "high" suspects is not as good as the police need it to be. Available electronic nonlethal weapons (like Tasers and Ultrons) are not standard equipment in most agencies. The federal government, for all its recent efforts to inspire the next generation of high-tech nonlethal weapons, is caught up in figuring out how to provide a more tasteful end to the next Waco tragedy, how to control the next riot, and how to stop the next O.J. Simpson-style car chase. Putting something effective into the hands of the average cop who is trying to control a resisting suspect, ought to be more of a priority. There were no riots after Waco or O.J.

If we can put a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth, why can't we put a man on the ground and take him safely to jail? The Rodney King jury heard these things. Is anyone else listening?

Greg Meyer was an expert witness for the defense during the Rodney King federal civil trial. He is an LAPD lieutenant and a police tactics consultant, trainer and lecturer. He is a member of the Advisory Board of Police magazine, and of the American Society of Law Enforcement Trainers, and his views are his own. This article was published in the Los Angeles Daily Journal, the ASLET Journal, American Police Beat, and elsewhere. He welcomes inquiries on use-of-force issues at (800) 453-5518.

Greg Meyer, Police Tactics Consultant