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Excerpt from introduction to Torture and Democracy by Darius Rejali (2008, Princeton University Press). Dr. Rejali is professor of political science at Reed College and also author of Torture and Modernity: Self, Society and State in Iran (Westview 1994).
Publisher's note on Torture and Democracy: "This is the most comprehensive, and most comprehensively chilling, study of modern torture yet written. Darius Rejali, one of the world's leading experts on torture, takes the reader from the late nineteenth century to the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, from slavery and the electric chair to electrotorture in American inner cities, and from French and British colonial prison cells and the Spanish-American War to the fields of Vietnam, the wars of the Middle East, and the new democracies of Latin America and Europe."
On March 3, 1991, police pulled over Rodney King and two other passengers in Los Angeles. Most Americans saw how that incident ended. LAPD officers beat King senseless with metal batons. Many will remember that police fractured King's face and legs. How many remember the number of times police fired electric stun weapons at King during the incident? How many can say how much shock passed through his body as he lay on the ground?
From the start, the King incident was about the sudden remarkable visibility of police violence captured, by happenstance, on amateur video. As the Christopher Commission stated, "Whether there even would have been a Los Angeles Police Department investigation without the video is doubtful, since the efforts of King's brother, Paul, to file a complaint were frustrated, and the report of the involved officers was falsified."
Even a careful viewer of the amateur video would not see the police using electroshock. Sergeant Stacey Koon tased Rodney King thrice, twice prior to when the video started running and once in the course of the video. To tase means to use a Tommy A. Swift Electric Rifle (T.A.S.E.R). Tasers fire two darts trailed by long wires. Once the darts catch onto the clothing or body, the operator depresses a button, releasing electric charge from the batteries along the wires to the target. Koon's Taser model possessed two dart cartridges. Koon lodged the first pair of darts on King's back and the second on his upper chest. Each discharge delivered short pulses of 50,000 volts, eight to fifteen pulses per second.
The pain was not trivial. The California Highway Patrol officer said King was "writhing." LAPD officer Timothy Wind stated that King "was shouting incoherently from the pain of the taser." Even Koon, who was nine feet away, declared, "He's groaning like a wounded animal, and I can see the vibrations on him." While Officer Laurence Powell beat King on video, Koon depressed the button a third time, draining whatever charge was left in the batteries. This was not a trivial discharge either. LAPD recruits knew
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