Rodney King Incident Analysis

The 1991 Rodney King incident was not simply several police officers beating an African American male after a police pursuit. The incident was precipitated by many events that lead to it. There were several social, economic, and political issues that contributed to it. During that time period, the United States was going through a recession in the early 1990’s (Slaying the Dragon of Debt, n.d.). Many states and communities were reducing budgets and government agencies were being forced to do more with less. In California voters passed Proposition 13 which rolled back taxes to 1976 levels (What is Proposition 13, n.d.). This create budget shortfalls and budgetary cuts for many government agencies including the police without much warning or time to prepare. When police agencies re forced to cut their budget, one is to have less officers on the street and another is to eliminate discretionary expenditures such as training. Eliminating training is an effective choice in that it does

The social problems of the day included the high homicide rate, the increase in gangs, and the increase in crack cocaine which helped fuel the other problems. There were also racial tensions in the attitudes of police officers (Cronkhite, 2013). The social, political, and economic problems were all related and shared cause and effect relationships. The police department was understaffed because of a shrinking budget that was related to the passage of Proposition 13. Proposition 13 was passed partly due to the attitude of the people. The political climate had started to change in America at the time. In 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected President and later instituted large tax cuts. Reagan led the way for less government and less taxation for citizens. The political tide in America was changing from liberal to very conservative with the belief that less government is