There was always something hapless about Rodney King.

He entered the nation’s consciousness – and its conscience – as a shambling drunk, an unemployed black construction worker who tried to outrun L.A. police rather than be arrested for drunken driving. The result was a police beating, surreptitiously captured on video, so profoundly vicious that the chief of police himself said it made him sick.

In 1992, when a suburban jury – conspicuously bleached of black jurors – acquitted four white police officers of any crime, the City of Angels went crazy, erupting in one of the worst urban riots in modern American history.