How Did Rodney King Improve Police Brutality

Travon Felton
April 9, 2017
Professor Calebotta
English 1A
Essay 4 Prompt 11 The Rodney King Riots was one of the biggest talked about event in U.S history. This riot started when a man named Rodney King was pull over and was severely beaten by several police officers. Someone recorded a video of that incident and it was broadcasted worldwide. This video became a wide spread around Los Angeles and it caused a massive riot in the city that it became very violent. Eventually, the rioting stopped when the army was called in to control the situation. Many years later, there are still several cases of police misconduct happening in America. On March 2, 1991, Rodney King, an African-American man, was pulled over because he was speeding. King

In a viewpoint by Nicole Flatow titled “History Indicates Varied Results in Improving Police Brutality in America,” She believes that there has been little reforms regarding police brutality. Nicole argues for years, America has barely made any effort on improving the use of force by police officers. For example, victims such as Rodney King and Amadou Diallo, led to some reforms, but did not solve the violence of police brutality. With the beating of Rodney King that was captured on camera, it sparked massive outrage that led to a riot when the police officers received no charges. Because of the riots, it created a momentum for a reform of the police. “One of the most significant reforms that did come out of the commission was ending the policy of lifetime terms for police chiefs.” (Rodney King, 1991, Los Angeles) This led to a police chief named Daryl Gates to resign and made serving for a lifetime over. In another case of police misconduct, Amadou Diallo was shot by police because they thought that his wallet was a gun. Just like the Rodney King case, the officers that were involved were also not charged. After a lot of protest, the only changes that were instituted were “adding more minority officers to the special Street Crimes unit whose officer had shot Diallo and requiring all officers in the unit to wear uniforms.” (Amadou Diallo, 1999, New York City) However, these reforms didn’t solve the problem at all. According to data statistics, this tragedy happened because of the law called Stop-and-frisk. The police were overusing this tactic to aggressively made police stops. Data shows that stop-and-frisk was getting extremely worse and the number of police stops that was being conducted is due to racial profiling. After a successful campaign, new legislations were introduce that will have an inspector to oversee NYPD and would allow citizens to sue the