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It seemed that the videotape would be the key evidence to a guilty verdict against the officers, whose felony assault trial was moved to the predominantly white suburb of Simi Valley, Calif. Instead, on April 29, 1992, a jury with no black members acquitted three of the officers on state charges in the beating; a mistrial was declared for a fourth. Rioting began immediately, starting in Los Angeles. It lasted for three days, killing 55 people, injuring more than 2,000 and setting swaths of Los Angeles aflame, causing $1 billion in damage. Police, seemingly caught off-guard, were quickly outnumbered by rioters and retreated. As the uprising spread to the city's Koreatown area, shop owners armed themselves and engaged in running gun battles with looters. "Through all that he had gone through with his beating and his personal demons, he was never one to not call for reconciliation and for people to overcome and forgive," Rev. Al Sharpton said Sunday. "History will record that it was Rodney King's beating and his actions that made America deal with the excessive misconduct of law enforcement." The Los Angeles Police Department, after the King beating and other scandals, has instituted new policies including community policing that have resulted in crime drops, but continued complaints about racial profiling. Many of the hardest-hit areas in South LA, like King, have struggled. In the area around the Florence and Normandie intersection that was one of the riot's flash points, high school dropout rates are higher than in the rest of the city and incomes remain dramatically lower than in other sections of Los Angeles. In his autobiography, King described his uneasy feelings about the events of his life. "For many years I felt that I had been involuntarily burdened as the victim and resultant universal symbol of police brutality," King wrote. "I wanted no part of it, just wanted to stay home, drink and watch TV. ...The fact that this footage was sent out to be viewed by the entire world certainly didn't help my recovery." "We may be scarred," he wrote, "and we may not be able to forget, but we can keep going, one step at a time, until we get to a better place."
[Associated
Press;
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