RODNEY KING: GOOD RIDDANCE! (2)

Greg Doyle, ‘The Gadfly’, is a former police officer who is a prolific writer on faith. His father Jerry and I worked together on the Riverside Sheriff’s Department way back when, and his brother Jeff is the force behind PACOVILLA Corrections blog.

When Greg was an Upland police officer, he had some first-hand experiences with Rodney King. Greg offers us a true picture of Rodney and castigates the media for using him as a foil to fuel the flames of racial hatred.

RODNEY KING WAS SIMPLY A MEDIA DUPE
By Greg ‘The Gadfly’ Doyle

PACOVILLA Corrections blog
June 18, 2012

Shortly after Mr. King won his lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles, he moved to Upland and lived for a few years in a house adjacent to our police department employee parking lot. He was not a good neighbor. Mr. King was involved in some domestic violence incidents and destroyed property inside a local liquor store. I would contend that Mr. King lived most of his adult life as if what had happened to him on that infamous traffic stop was just one more excuse to pursue lawlessness. His arrests continued for a number of years in Pomona, Moreno Valley, and Fontana as did his substance abuse. His antics in Upland and Rialto showed little change in behavior after his “life-changing” experience. The big lottery win in the courts was quickly surrendered to attorneys or squandered, and his notoriety within the media gained him little personal advantage except as a poster child for militant blame-layers who believe all cops are racists and brutal thugs.

What the media still refuses to admit in the matter of Mr. King was that the majority of their reporting and perpetual regurgitation of the infamous videotape inflamed a specific minority group, which led to the riots in 1992, wide-spread looting and lawlessness in its wake, and death, injury, and property destruction. Media reporting ignored Mr. King’s parole status at the time (and later so did the CDCR.) Political correctness was king in this incident. The officers involved were tried and found guilty of abuse in the media long before any court proceeding took place. The media stirred the police abuse pot with a racism stick to the boiling point. In the opinion of the press, the video-taped incident appeared to be overwhelming proof that White cops beat helpless Black men as a matter of Department policy. Media focus intentionally ignored Mr. King’s behavior. It was as if every illegal thing Mr. King had done leading up to his attempted detention had nothing to do with the use of force employed by the police. A jury acquitted the officers of wrong-doing. Then all hell broke loose.

In my estimation Rodney King was simply a media dupe. The press got their story, militant leaders and activists grabbed whatever attention and power they could, and Mr. King became irrelevant. Once he served his purpose, Mr. King was discarded and friendless. He fell back into familiar patterns of behavior that had always drawn the attention of the police. I am not surprised that he was found dead in a pool. He had been drowning in a pool of his poor decision-making and life choices long before he met LAPD on that fateful day. Very little seems to have changed in hindsight.

I hope he made peace with God before his passing.