On the afternoon of April 29, 1992, four Los Angeles police officers were acquitted of charges of assault following the March 3, 1991 arrest of taxi driver Rodney King. The brutal beating meted out to King, painfully reminiscent of the worst violence visited upon civil rights activists by southern police forces in the early 1960s, had been captured on videotape, and widely broadcast on news networks worldwide, so the Californian court verdict was understandably met with outrage – though, significantly, not disbelief – in the city’s African-American community, long the victims of discrimination. Interviewed among a group of protestors outside the Simi Valley courthouse on April 29, Boyz N The Hood film director John Singleton warned that the judgement could inflame long-standing tensio...
