The landmark series premieres on Wednesday 9 October at 8.30pm with a focus on the Riverina region of New South Wales. Through it all, Rodney King was just a man trying to find his way in the world. Over 50 of Reeds supporters and extended family rallied outside of the courthouse July 17, wearing T-shirts and carrying picket signs reading I Stand with Rodney Reed and calling for his freedom. SBS acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of Country and their connections and continuous care for the skies, lands and waterways throughout Australia. They say things to try to push us, but we know that they are trying to divide us and make us do something that will cause bloodshed. With few opportunities for formal employment, even within the lowest levels of the service sector, young Black men began to form groups commonly referred to as gangs to claim and guard territory, protect themselves, and keep neighborhoods safe from outsiders. Local authorities had other ideas in mind. .Where's Rodney? For the past five years, hes lived in a caravan parked on the outskirts of town, but hes determined to leave alcohol behind and find himself a more stable living situation. [11], A second season of the show was filmed in Queensland and Victoria, and aired on 28 November 2017.[12]. While he wasn't the first Black man to be a victim of police brutality, his beating was one of the first to be captured on video and broadcast nationwide. Reeds crime was that he, a Black man, was romantically involved with a white woman in a small conservative Texas town, where tributes to the Confederacy still sit on the grounds of the courthouse where Reed was tried. In November 1989, he was arrested for assault and robbery and sentenced to two years in prison. When the rebellion started at Florence and Normandie, graffiti in Watts already announced the truce agreed to the day before. The series sheds light on the struggles and aspirations of residents in public housing areas around Western Sydney; areas which have been commonly associated with high unemployment, drug use and problems with the law. Presiding State District Judge J.D. Yet in the Watts section of the city, where in 1965 stores had burned, helicopters had hovered, and police and National Guardsmen had killed dozens of Black residents, in 1992 warring Crip and Blood gangs understood the rebellion not as a moment of wanton destruction, but as an opportunity to transform themselves and their community. Bogard and other organizers took the rebellion as an opportunity to push the city for a massive investment in health care, education, and employment, and they called for residents themselves to have a say in how it was apportioned. Because the judge abandoned his duty to be a neutral, independent fact finder, the CCA should reject the trial courts copy-and-pasted order, the Innocence Project declared in a strongly worded press release. In 1972, the year black youth gangs started making headlines in the Los Angeles Times, the citys Commission on Human Relations sponsored a day-long seminar at the LA Convention Center for gang members from South Central and the segregated Black city of Compton. In May and June, only four people were killed, down from twenty-two during the same period in 1991. So let me just say, of course what those officers . By Kylie Stevens For Daily Mail Australia, Published: 09:29 GMT, 27 August 2019 | Updated: 13:33 GMT, 27 August 2019. Three top executives, including chief financial officer Bill Wafford, chief merchant officer Michelle Wlazlo and chief human resources officer Brynn Evanson each received a $1 million payout. Reed is African American, and Stites was white. What Happened to Rodney Stuckey's NBA Career? Witnessing the scene from his balcony, Holliday decided to start recording. Magistrate Leanne Robinson adjourned that hearing until later this year. has since battled addiction to both heroin and ice,Mount Druitt Local Court heard. Fennell did 10 years in a state prison beginning in 2008, for raping and kidnapping a woman who had called the police for help. But since sustaining injuries when he came off his bike, hes been forced to stay put. They then change their executives pay packages to make up for it. However, Stites was engaged to a white cop. we decided to sit in at W. T. Grant Department store, three blocks away from Hemming Park at the corner of Adams Street and Main Street. The Los Angeles Communities are demanding that they are policed and patrolled by individuals who live in the community and the commanding officers be ten-year residents of the community in which they serve, their proposal explained, putting forward residency requirements as a straightforward step to improve police-community relations. The top executives pledged that they will alter the way they operate and focus on their employees to ensure that everyone is treated fairly. I am more optimistic than ever, she continued. Struggle Street is an Australian documentary series that first aired on SBS One on 6 May 2015. Fennells best friend at the time of the crime, Bastrop Sheriffs Officer Curtis Davis, has now revealed that Fennell gave an inconsistent account of where he was on the night of the murder. [citation needed], Western Sydney locals are contemplating legal action against the producers to seek damages for defamation. For most of the video, King would be on the ground. Langley will hold closing arguments mid-August. You can take a walk, water your grass. While the government thought that the sentence wasn't severe enough and appealed, according to the Los Angeles Times,after a series of back and forths, the original sentence of 30 months was upheld. For most of his adult life, hes struggled to find permanent housing, battling with mental health and alcohol issues. Martha Esparza, a nurse who worked at the jail ward, would later testify that King was "calm and cooperative," while the officers who brought him in were bragging and joking about the number of times King had been hit. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that then-CEO of AT&T Randall Stephenson received roughly $32 million in compensation last year, while about 20,000 AT&T workers lost their jobs. Crime, collective mistrust, and exhaustive policing ultimately prevailed. As King exited the vehicle, Officer Koon claimed that he had "felt threatened, but felt enough confidence in his officers to take care of the situation." 'She has been struggling with drugs since the age of 13. Arrest and deportation became yet another tactic government authorities used to manage the violence resulting from unequal socioeconomic conditions and racial oppression. Many thousands of eyes are watching. Magazines, Digital Instead, the State has hidden evidence pointing to Reeds innocence for more than two decades. The Crips and Bloods also no longer wished to be policed by a gang of outsiders. The True Story Of What Happened To Rodney King, myth started by Dr. Hamilton Wright in 1910, felt threatened, but felt enough confidence in his officers to take care of the situation, $1 million for every strike by the officers, and the impact his case had on civil rights. After surviving a troubled childhood during which she was moved between various homes, and overcoming an ice addiction in her earlier teen years, Kahlia is determined to put her past behind her and start afresh as she awaits the birth of her first child. Common theory is that he just got burnt out or real life got in the way. Yet as the 1992 rebellion raged and the city burned, members of the Crips and the Bloods in Watts set out to bring the internal warfare to an end, and to face a common external enemysystemic racism, embodied most immediately by the policeas a united front. During the Rodney King Riots, 25 African-Americans, 16 Latinos, eight whites, two Asians, one Algerian, and one person from India were killed. The police chase after King had ended in front of an apartment building, waking one of the tenants with the sound of helicopters at 1:00 AM. By the time Ronald Reagan officially launched the War on Drugs in 1984, gang members carried Uzis, MAC-10 submachine guns, and semiautomatic rifles to enforce contracts in the underground economy. With the settlement, King was able to buy a home for his mother, as well as one for himself. The Struggle Goes On. This flies in the face of reason given that the very same people led their companies off a cliff to financial ruin, causing thousands of workers to lose their jobs and be thrown into one of the worst job markets since the Great Depression. They were having a casual, consensual relationship when she was killed in 1996. Chapter 9 August 27, 1960Ax Handle Saturday "There is no medicine to cure hatred." . Boeing also spent over $11 billion to buyback stock. Those who struck the truce understood that its success depended on whether the drug and black-market opportunities that lured people into gangs could be replaced with jobs in the formal economy. The uprising was a reaction to systematic injustice rather than a direct response to police violence. More police are patrolling because they cannot believe that Bloods and Crips are hangin together, a twenty-six-year-old named Kenneth, who had been a gang member since his teenage years, assumed. According to The Guardian, King started drinking at an early age and had various encounters with law enforcement before the notorious 1991 assault. We will clean up our community from graffiti and trash and prove to media, police and everyone else that we are not outcast just out to do wrong, a flyer promoting one of the new initiatives proclaimed. As the drought stretches on relentlessly, their farm is on its knees. King was found unconscious in a swimming pool Sunday and was later pronounced dead. Here are the people youll meet on season 3 of Struggle Street. People learned to comply with officers during routine encountersto keep both hands on the steering wheel, to answer questions politelyin order to stay alive. However, according to Human Rights Watch, in reporting the incident on his car radio, Powell claimed, "I haven't beaten anyone this bad in a long time.". Rodney King himself would speak out publicly on the third day of the riots, proclaiming what would become an iconic statement: "People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? And with the expansion of gangs has come the expansion of violence and killing. Doctors gave King several stitches, noting in his medical records that he suffered from a broken cheekbone and broken right ankle. . The board at Whiting filed for Chapter 11 in April and the board of directors approved a $6.4 million bonus for CEO Brad Holly. On April 26, 1992, a dozen Grape Street Crips, led by two Amer-I-Can participants, twenty-five-year-old Daude Sherrills and his twenty-three-year-old brother Aqeela, drove the two miles south from the Jordan Downs housing project to Imperial Courts, where their PJ Crips rivals lived. STEPHEN Don't just stick to the Malbec! Struggle Street: With Deanna Cooney, David Field. The Reed family and the thousands of supporters across the country want Rodney to finally be free. In 1992, the reported number of gang-related homicides in LA County peaked at 803, representing a 77 percent increase over the 1988 figure. Prison Policy Initiative reveals that Black people make up 40% of the incarcerated population, but only 13% of the general United States population; and Black families, regardless of individual involvement with the criminal-legal system, lose their loved ones to prisons and jails at higher rates than their white counterparts. According to PPI, 62.9% of Black people in the U.S. have an immediate family member incarcerated. Fennell recently finished doing 10 years in prison for the kidnapping and rape of a woman he had stopped for a traffic violation. This notation also bears racist undertones, echoing the work of Dr. Samuel Cartwright, who, in 1851, wrote of enslaved people being "insensible to pain when subjected to punishment.". We have continued publishing articles on workers.org, along with a weekly PDF of what would have been the printed version. Magazines, America on Fire: The Untold Story of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s, 40 Ways to Build a More Equitable America, Or create a free account to access more articles, Los Angeles Had a Chance to Build a Better City After the Rodney King Violence in 1992. That year, one of the original organizers of the armistice said, I think this community is more hopeless now that it was before, even if violence never returned to the disastrous earlier levels. We are coming together because we are Black, said a twenty-three-year-old who identified himself simply as Anthony. We are tired of being divided. The truce meant members would no longer have to live under the constant fear of getting shot, or with the belief that it was necessary to shoot someone themselves. What we saw last night and the night before in Los Angeles, is not about civil rights, the president told the nation. Names appeared in the database multiple times, leading to a distortion of the gang problem. Part of the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday & Metro Media Group. 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