The miniseries opened with a sequence that telegraphed that context. The first shot was a clip from the videotaped beating of Rodney King on March 3, 1991. It then segued into a series of depictions of the riots that happened the following year, after the officers responsible for King's beating were acquitted of all but one count in state court (the jury hung on that charge).
In this Aug. 29, 1995, file photo, O.J. Simpson, second from left, is surrounded by his attorneys, clockwise from left, Ken Spaulding, back towards camera, Gerald Uelmen, Robert Shapiro and Johnnie Cochran Jr., as they discuss their plans for arguing the admissibility of the tapes of retired Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman in Los Angeles.
Those images were painful to watch — I covered the federal trial of those officers, as well as the riots and Simpson's murder trial — but the series smartly grasped the intersection of those tortuous and sometimes terrifying events.
For many, the videotape of the King beating was overdue vindication, proof at last that they had been telling the truth when they accused LAPD officers of brutality, especially in their treatment of black male suspects. Indeed, the most shocking aspect of the tape may not even have been the torrent of blows inflicted on King but rather the fact that none of the 19 LAPD officers who witnessed the incident bothered to report anything wrong until after the video surfaced.