Rodney King

22 Pages 5412 Words

ion of Osborne Street and Foothill Boulevard. Within seconds, three Los Angeles police cars and a police helicopter arrived at the scene. Officers Laurence Powell and Timothy Wind were in one car. Theodore Briseno and Rolando Solano were in the second car, and Sergeant Stacey Koon in the third.

Tim Singer ordered the occupants of the Hyundai to leave the vehicle and lie face down on the ground. Allen and Helms complied, but King remained in the car. Melanie Singer again shouted at King to get out, which he did. Singer described King as "smiling" as he stood by his car and waved at the police helicopter overhead. As Singer ordered King to get his hands where she could see them, King--according to Singer's testimony--"grabbed his right buttock with his right hand and he shook it at me." King finally complied with Singer's order to lie on the ground. As she drew close to King with her gun drawn to make the arrest, Sergeant Koon shouted, "Stand back. Stand back. We'll handle this." Koon would later say he intervened because he thought the use of guns was "a lousy tactic" that would probably result either in the death of King or the CHP officers.

King's bizarre behavior and his "spaced-out" look led Koon to suspect that King was "dusted"--a user of the drug most feared by police departments, PCP. Police believed that the drug made individuals impervious to pain and gave them almost superhuman strength. King's "buffed out" look added to his apprehensions. He concluded that King was probably an ex-con who developed his muscles working out on prison weights. (Although Koon's suspicions about the PCP would later prove unfounded, he was right about King being an ex-con. Earlier that winter, King had been paroled after serving time for robbing a convenience store and assaulting the clerk.) Koon grew even more concerned after King successfully repelled a swarming maneuver by his officers and--more remarkably--managed to ri...