Just after midnight on March 3, 1991, Black motorist Rodney King was pulled over by four members of the Los Angeles Police Department. King was on parole and had led police on a high-speed chase through Los Angeles earlier that evening. When officers eventually stopped him, King was violently kicked and beaten with batons for almost 15 minutes. Some twelve cops looked on, observing and commenting on the beating—yet did nothing to stop it.  

Filmed by George Holliday from his apartment near the scene of the incident, the footage of the beating appeared on local television. It subsequently made it to national news and ultimately led to charges against the police. Fast-forward a year: in April 1992, a jury acquitted three of the officers of all charges relating to assault with a deadly weapon and excessive use of force. The verdict stunned the public and led to widespread outrage in LA that quickly spilled over to the rest of the country. Violent protests ensued, followed by days of civil unrest, resulting in thousands of injuries and more than 50 people dead.

The videotaping of Rodney King's beating marked the beginning of the documentation of American police brutality, but the only progress to date can be found in those megapixels. Police brutality has long plagued Black Americans, and little has changed in the last three decades. King, who died in 2012 at the age of 47, was far from the exception. His injuries resulted in 11 broken bones and teeth, along with skull fractures and permanent brain damage—ailments that plagued him for the rest of his life. For some victims of police brutality, the outcome is fatal. 

King did not provoke the police; he wasn’t violent when the LAPD officers pulled him over—nor did he ask to become a symbol of police brutality. “I never went to school to be ‘Rodney King,’” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2012. His family didn’t even call him Rodney; since childhood, the construction worker had gone by his middle name: Glen. He never asked for a legacy to be thrust upon him.   

So we ask again: What has changed in the more than 30 years since King’s attack? Cameras are smaller. It’s easier than ever for people to record their surroundings with the simple press of a button. Footage of police violence like what King experienced is so widespread that we can’t help but wonder whether we’ve learned anything at all.

In July 2014, New York Police Department Officer Daniel Pantaleo pinned Eric Garner to the ground on suspicion of selling cigarettes illegally. Garner stated “I can’t breathe” over 10 times before he died. The NYPD fired Pantaleo, and Garner’s family received a $5.9 million settlement out of court. Less than two months later, Michael Brown was fatally shot by Missouri police officer Darren Wilson—no matter that Brown held his hands up and pleaded “Don’t shoot” during the foot chase that led to his killing. A grand jury opted not to indict Wilson. In March 2020, Kentucky resident Breonna Taylor was shot to death eight times while she slept in her Louisville, Kentucky, apartment during a police drug raid. Her boyfriend fired a warning shot, claiming he hadn’t heard the police knocking at their door. Taylor was an unlucky bystander—another innocent victim of police brutality against Black Americans. Officers Brett Hankison, Myles Cosgrove, and Jonathan Mattingly were acquitted, though Hankison was fired for carelessly firing into the residence. Taylor’s family received a $12 million settlement—but still, their daughter was dead. And not three months later, Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin subdued George Floyd with a knee to the neck for nine minutes. Floyd died, and again protests erupted nationwide. Chauvin was found guilty of murder and issued with a 22-year sentence; the three other officers involved in Floyd’s killing were convicted of violating the victim’s civil rights. Floyd’s family settled a $27 million wrongful death suit with the city of Minneapolis. It would seem bringing full video proof to the atrocities of police violence against African Americans in 1991, would have changed things ten, and twenty, and thirty years later, but Rodney King’s beating was just the beginning.

A Few Good Men (1992) is covered in pinks and purples, blues and greens—cooler tones alongside the words PROUD, GOOD, and BLACK stacked one on top of the other. A black-and-white newspaper photograph of Martin Luther King Junior sits atop the faux brick paneling in the upper-right-hand corner; other photographs of Black men are interspersed throughout the work and covered in layers of paint, revealing that even those who are inherently “good” risk can fall into the hands of police predators.  

Crips and Bloods (1993) conveys Lovelace’s graffiti-esque recommendation that gang violence end. The red, white, and blue stars and stripes on the right side representing the American flag play up the reality of gang violence in America. A smudged image of a Black girl amid the red stripes conveys the idea of being stifled by her reality. The white chalk text in the upper right reads, “He ain’t my mother fucking uncle (Uncle Sam)” highlights social injustice, while green dollar bills floating in the center suggest the lure of money for gang members. The work encourages “Black on Black love” in that Crips, Bloods, and other gangs are home to members who are more similar than they might think: young American men who have their whole lives ahead of them, and who ought to stand in solidarity as they fight against civil injustice instead of each other. 

Lovelace died at 60 in his native Cleveland in 2021. His legacy remains. For the length of his career, the artist’s paintings served as visual documentations of life not only in his hometown, but in inner cities across the United States—including Los Angeles in the wake of the 1992 Rodney King riots. The artist continually examined racial discourse and economic tensions, offering a unifying, community-oriented take on living in a place where violence can break out at any given moment. And while police brutality continues to plague Black Americans, people like Lovelace have given voice to the suffering inflicted by systemic racism. These people include, as in the case of Rodney King, any person with a camera who is willing to hit the record button to document and confront police injustice.