King’s 1991 traffic arrest and beating by four Los Angeles police officers became national news, and subsequently shaped America’s conversation on police brutality.

He was booked into jail for investigation of DUI, and bail was set at $2,500.

Riverside County Sheriff’s spokeswoman Courtney Donowho said no arraignment date has been set.

Read more at the Huffington Post.

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With new technological advancements and the Internet, anyone with a cellphone now can lend a watchful eye on the police.

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Today, things are far different and the tape that so tainted the LAPD has a clear legacy in how officers think about their jobs. Police now work in a YouTube world in which cellphones double as cameras, news helicopters transmit close-up footage of unfolding police pursuits, and surveillance cameras capture arrests or shootings. Police officials are increasingly recording their officers. Compared to the cops who beat King, officers these days hit the streets with a new reality ingrained in their minds: Someone is always watching.

“Early on in their training, I always tell them, ‘I don’t care if you’re in a bathroom taking care of your personal business…. Whatever you do, assume it will be caught on video,’ ” said Sgt. Heather Fungaroli, who supervises recruits at the LAPD’s academy. “We tell them if they’re doing the right thing then they have no reason to worry.”

Read more at LAtimes.com

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The interview will air this Friday at 8 p.m. on CNN and will be live tweeted by both CNN and NewsOne.

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Radar Online is reporting that Rodney King, the victim of the infamous L.A.P.D. beatdown that lead to the L.A. riots, is engaged to one of the jurors who awarded him a $3.8 million dollar settlement.

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Jury deliberations are expected to begin this week in Los Angeles in the trial of former BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) police officer, Johannes Mehserle, who shot and killed 22 year-old Oscar Grant on New Year’s Day 2009 as the victim lay face down on a subway platform in Oakland.

As many of you know –or have seen the Youtube videos taken by camera phones of this brutal and unnecessary shooting– Grant was face down on the ground and in a totally compromised position when Mehserle clearly looks at his gun –not the bright yellow Taser he said he meant to employ—before unlatching the revolver and firing point blank into Grant’s back.

The now resigned officer, who is white and had previous complaints against him for aggression, doesn’t deny shooting the African American Grant but contends it was “an accident.”

This is yet another tragic example of the challenging relationship the African American community has with those sworn to uphold the law. For when it comes to our community, these two words –the law—have many different connotations attached to them and provoke a variety of emotions, both good and bad.

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On one side, the laws of our land have served to oppress us as a people, as was the case with slavery and Jim Crow.

On the other hand, however, the law has also been the tool of choice for providing a framework for ending our enslavement, stopping segregation, and securing our civil rights.

So it’s a pretty unique and mixed relationship… black folks and the law.

Click here to view photos:

Unfortunately, the enforcement of the law has too often been less than equitable when it comes to our community. And there are a number of disturbing issues about the Grant case, even prior to the verdict. The case was moved from Oakland to Los Angeles allegedly because of “pretrial publicity” in the Bay Area, a move that pretty much ensured there would be no African Americans on the 12 member jury which, in fact, turned out to be the case.

And things could get ugly. The media is comparing this to the Rodney King beating because of the blatant aggression of the officer, the sizable protests around the court, and the looming potential for violence and disruption in the event of an unfavorable verdict. Oakland area businesses and authorities are preparing for the worst in case the verdict doesn’t go the way the community believes it should.

But what’s already ugly is that a young man, a son, and a father of a young child is dead, and is not coming back ever again.

As a lawyer, I certainly know that the law should ideally be about facts and evidence and not emotion; that defendants should be innocent until proven guilty; that the rule of law needs to be respected for the sake of order; and that, whatever the verdict, it should be accepted, or at least appealed through the legal process.

That said, I sure hope the law gets this one right.

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Because the rule of law commonly runs into trouble if it ceases to be a two-way street.

By all means, we –as a community– certainly need to respect the law.

But the law should respect us as well.

Stephanie Robinson is President and CEO of The Jamestown Project, a national think tank focused on democracy. She is an author, a Lecturer on Law at the Harvard Law School and former Chief Counsel to the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy. Stephanie reaches 8 to 10 million listeners each week as political commentator for the popular radio venue, The Tom Joyner Morning Show.  Visit her online at www.StephanieRobinsonSpeaks.com

In a most surprising and shocking new twist (not), Rodney King, the victim-turned-celebreality-star, has found yet another way to effectively exploit his famous ordeal.. you know, the small incident where the ^$#! was beaten out of him by some LAPD officers and which catalyzed the infamous L.A. riots… yea, inconsquential matter of no historic significance…

The world never ceases to confound us..

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OPINION: 5 Other Police Victims Obama Should Invite To The White House

President Barack Obama’s “beer summit” with James Crowley and Henry Louis Gates brought a rare opportunity for the nation to focus on the relationship between the police and the Black community. Still, most Black victims of the police are not Harvard professors with connections to the White House. Often times tensions with the police and innocent African Americans do not result in disorderly conduct arrests, but in injury, embarrassment or death. So, if Obama really wants to address the relationship between the Black community and the police, here are five more people he should bring to the White House for a beer.

1.    Rodney King

Rodney King became the face of police brutality during the early nineties and was the symbolic figurehead of the 92 riots in Los Angeles after he was beaten by police in L.A.. By bringing him to the White House, the President can showcase the negative, longstanding effects that police beatings can have on people and help give the nation an understanding of the still present tensions that led to Rodney King’s beating and the riots that followed.

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2. Nicole Bell

Nicole Bell had her fiancée and the father of her children, Sean Bell, killed the night before her wedding day in 2006 in Queens, New York. Police open fired on his vehicle, under the wrong assumption that someone in his car had a gun. Bringing her to the White House would show the country what happens to families when police go too far and show that the government feels some compassion to families who have lost loved ones due to police brutality.

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3. Danny Reyes

In 1998, Danny Reyes and four friends were traveling to a basketball camp in North Carolina from New York, when police pulled them over on the New Jersey turnpike. Reyes accidentally put the car in reverse and the police open fired on the vehicle, shooting Reyes six times and ending his chances of playing basketball on a higher level. Despite the fact the officers were acquitted of all charges, the case brought forth an investigation into racial profiling on U.S. highways. Meeting with Reyes would show the country the devastating consequences that happen to innocent people, when racial profiling and trigger-happy police are combined.

4.   Malika Calhoun

Malika Calhoun was arrested for joy riding in her mother’s car in Seattle when she was 15. Once in a cell, she was viciously beaten by police officers. Having her at the White House would show that police brutality does not just affect men, but women and children as well, and highlight the need to teach police officers restraint.

Watch The Video of Malika Calhoun Getting Beat By Police

5.   Wanda Johnson.

Wanda Johnson’s son, Oscar Grant, was shot in the back, while lying on the floor at a train station by a transit cop in Oakland. The officer who killed him claimed he thought he was using a taser. Meeting with his mother would help remind the country that the U.S. does not support police brutality, but that it does support the victims of it. It would also show that the President understands the frustrations that resulted in the riots and protests that unfolded after Oscar Grant’s killing.

Watch The Video Of Oscar Grant Being Brutalized And Killed

From LotusRoot.com:

Rodney King’s famous line, “Can we all just get along?” still resonates with us today.  On this day, seventeen years ago, approximately 53 lives were lost with as many as 2,000 people injured.  At the time, Los Angeles was home to the largest Korean population outside of Korea.  Koreatown was overtaken by some of the worst scenes of civil unrest in recent history. Amidst the chaos, the Korean community became a prime target of violence as the riots revealed deep-seated racial tensions in one of the most multi-ethnic cities in America.

Click here for the full story.

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Suing police officers is good business for civil rights lawyer John Burris.

Over the past 30 years, the former prosecutor has earned millions of dollars for handling hundreds of police brutality suits, other racially charged cases and high-profile lawsuits.

Burris, 63, helped win a $3.8 million jury verdict for Rodney King over a videotaped beating in 1991 at the hands of Los Angeles police. He defended basketball star Latrell Sprewell against reckless driving charges in 1998. And he obtained a $42,000 settlement for the late rapper Tupac Shakur in a 1991 brutality suit against the Oakland police.

So it came as little surprise in legal circles that Burris was hired by the family of Oscar Grant, the 22-year-old black man gunned down by a white transit police officer as he lay face down on a Bay Area Rapid Transit platform here on New Year’s Day.

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Prosecutors allege that Grant was restrained and about to be handcuffed when BART officer Johannes Mehserle shot him once in the back. Murder charges have been filed against Mehserle; Burris has filed a $25 million claim on behalf of Grant’s family.

Burris said Grant’s death is one of the two most unsettling cases he has handled since graduating from the University of California, Berkeley’s law school in 1976. The other is the lawsuit he filed for the family of Mack “Jody” Woodfox, who was fatally shot in the back while fleeing Oakland police after a traffic stop in July.

“It’s the shooting in the back that causes people to go nuts,” Burris said of the sometimes-violent demonstrations here over Grant’s death. “That’s as bad as it gets.”

Burris’ portfolio and his visibility as a television commentator have helped forge his reputation as an aggressive advocate for Northern California’s black community.

Burris figures he takes about 50 police brutality cases a year. Many are relatively small, such as ex-convicts getting teeth knocked out by police or black women accusing officers of conducting illegal strip searches.

But in 2006, he helped secure $1.3 million in settlements from the city of Oakland after Iraq war protesters accused police of using excessive force to break up a raucous demonstration.

In 2003, Burris won a $10.9 million settlement from Oakland to settle the notorious “Riders” case, in which police allegedly arrested and planted evidence on 119 innocent suspects. It remains the city’s largest settlement.

“Every case begets another case,” he said.

His biggest target, by far, is the Oakland Police Department.

Neither Oakland City Attorney John Russo, whose office routinely fights Burris’ lawsuits, nor Oakland Police Department union president Dom Arotzarena were willing to share their thoughts about Burris.

Burris has sometimes been in trouble with the law himself. In 2005, a federal judge sharply rebuked him for failing to properly investigate a claim before filing one lawsuit.

U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker fined Burris and another lawyer $10,800 for filing a lawsuit after only a single interview with the clients, who accused the police department of wrongly killing a mentally disturbed Oakland resident who stabbed an officer.

Burris defended himself before the judge by pointing to his long track record of filing successful lawsuits.

“Indeed, Burris’ years of experience and success serve to magnify the egregiousness of the conduct at issue in this case,” Walker said in ordering sanctions.

Burris’ clients fired him in 2007, and the judge filed a complaint to the State Bar last year. Burris said he hired a lawyer to write a letter to the state bar, and that officials there “closed the file” without taking any disciplinary action.

It wasn’t the first time Burris got into legal hot water. In 1996, the State Bar suspended him for 30 days for sending misleading solicitations to victims of mass disasters, which he blamed on overzealous underlings. He was also chided at the same time for improperly mixing clients’ money with his own, and the bar found that he “recklessly failed to perform legal services with competence,” according to bar records.

But it was that same year that Burris worked on what would be his proudest case.

Burris said he defended for free a six-year-old boy charged with assault for dumping an infant out of a bassinet and then beating him. Burris convinced a juvenile court referee to put the boy into foster care rather than the criminal system.

Burris said he has kept in contact with his client, who is soon to be released from state care as an 18-year-old.

“He made it,” Burris said.

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