Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots changed Los Angeles and the LAPD.

• Author: Shuger, Scott

By Lou Cannon Times Books, $30

Want to bring a pleasant evening with friends to a screeching halt? Say the following sentence: "I think the cops on the Rodney King tape got a raw deal." One way or another, that party is over. But this is one of the principal theses of Lou Cannon's book. (His upbringing in the newspaper cult of objectivity keeps him from saying it in so many words, though.) Cannon's development of this politically incorrect thought is exceptionally well-reported and fair-minded.

Reporting and fairness and Rodney King--three concepts that throughout the whole literally bloody saga in L.A. rarely made a joint appearance. While the topic was hot, we had no shortage of "coverage," but little in the way of explanation. Now that it's stone cold, we are finally in a position to get past the short-comings of journalism to the strengths of history. For the most part, Cannon, best known as a Washington Post political reporter and biographer of Reagan but who also once headed up the Post's L.A. bureau, has, with this book, done precisely that.

And history, as Edward Gibbon observed, is mostly crime,folly, and misfortune. In the case of L.A. in the early 1990s, the crime was soaring, the folly was that the LAPD higher-ups, personified by Chief Daryl Gates, believed they could still fight it the same way they had in the good old "Dragnet" days, and the misfortune (before, and particularly during the riots) fell on the well-intentioned cops in the field and especially on the law-abiding citizens they were sworn to "protect and serve." The police problem in L.A., expertly limned by Cannon, boiled down to this: The LAPD was a primarily white-male force that had long prided itself on no-questions-asked aggressive ("proactive" became the modern euphemism) tactics in a place that had become, almost without the cops noticing it, the most multi-cultural, socially complicated city in the country. The department was still trying to master the city, which now more than ever needed a public servant. There were plenty of warning signs long before the King tape: the numerous dubious shootings of black and Latino, suspects, a long-simmering dispute about the LAPD's use of a submission choke-hold that was implicated in the deaths of at least a dozen black men, and the millions spent by the city to settle excessive force lawsuits brought by citizens against the cops.

As Cannons narrative makes clear, there was no silver bullet solution to all this, but...