Chemerinsky wrong about Rodney King

Erwin Chemerinsky may be a fine lawyer – he's one of "the smart guys" on Hugh Hewitt's show – but he seems to be a weak historian. At best.

The L.A. Times today unquestioningly quotes Erwin Chemerinsky as follows:

“I see a tremendous difference in response,” said Duke University law professor Erwin Chemerinsky. “Chief Parks and Chief Gates refused to admit or recognize the problems. Chief Parks never admitted that there was a Rampart scandal. He said that it was ‘ginned up’…. Chief Gates always blamed the Rodney King beating on Rodney King.

Chemerinsky is just flatly wrong. From “Official Negligence,” by Lou Cannon:

The shock was shared by Chief Gates, who had returned from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles around midnight on March 4, after participating in a conference on violence sponsored by the Bush administration. The chief’s security aide told him about the incident when he picked him up at the airport, but Gates was not prepared for what he saw when he watched the tape the following morning. Staring at the screen in disbelief, he played the tape twenty-five times. “To see my officers engaged in what appeared to be excessive force, to see them beat a man with their batons fifty-six times, to see a sergeant on the scene who did nothing to seize control, was something I never dreamed I would witness,” Gates wrote later. “It was a very, very extreme use of force — extreme for any police department in America. But for the LAPD, considered by many to be perhaps the finest, most professional police department in the world, it was more than extreme. It was impossible.”

Of course, getting it wrong seems to have been the thing to do, at the time.

Here is a representative quote from Cannon, a longtime Washington Post reporter, about the first few seconds of video (edited out by most stations) showing King violently resisting:

[I]t explains why the jurors in Simi Valley, who were from a very pro-police, conservative community, ruled the way they did. They thought that the media hadn’t told them the full story, and lo and behold, we hadn’t.

Right. And the media’s lack of explanation of the whole picture helped spark the riots, as Cannon explains in his book.