Rodney King
Rodney King refers to the 1991 police beating of African American Rodney King in Los Angeles, videotaped by a bystander, and the subsequent 1992 acquittal of the officers that sparked the Los Angeles riots. In these source contexts it functions as a cultural-historical reference point for debates about racialized video evidence, police violence, and the ambiguous/unreliable nature of visual testimony, as well as for comparing the speed of state response to civil unrest versus disasters.