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

• Author: Siegel, Fred

by Lou Cannon, New York: Times Books, 698 pages, $35.00

A decade ago, an African-American teenager named Tawana Brawley captured national attention by claiming she had been raped by a gang of whites, including a prosecutor and law enforcement officers. The story turned out to be a hoax, reversing the KKK myth of a virtuous white woman defiled by black men.

In a classic example of what used to be called racist and is now called multicultural thinking, the truth or falsity of Brawley's claims was beside the point for some. As the famed left-wing lawyer William Kunstler explained, "It makes no difference anymore whether the attack on Tawana really happened. It doesn't disguise the fact that a lot of young black women are treated the way she said she was treated."

But it made a big difference to Stephen Pagones, the young assistant district attorney falsely accused of taking part in the rape. He is suing the Rev. Al Sharpton, who helped broadcast Brawley's allegations, for libel. To this day Sharpton insists, a la Kunstler, that the facts about a particular individual are unimportant. Sharpton also insists he believes Brawley - that's the defense he's using in the libel case.

The same pernicious displacement of individual accountability by group identity stands behind the disastrous policies that helped detonate the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Lou Cannon's book Official Negligence will be read by many as a revisionist account of the Rodney King affair and the L.A. riots. Parts of the book, particularly the story of how Police Chief Daryl Gates left his post at the onset of the riots, are familiar. But the bulk of the book's painstaking 600 pages of main text is devoted to a detailed account of the Rodney King trials that will force readers to revise their old assumptions about the case.

Still, the book offers much more than a provocative take on the King episode. For Cannon, a longtime Los Angeles correspondent for The Washington Post, a respect for the individual and a respect for the evidence go hand in hand. Official Negligence, which deserves the widest possible readership, is a small monument to the ideal of objectivity on the topic of race, where empiricism has long since given way to tribal versions of truth.

Media coverage of the Rodney King case depicted an incident in which a group of racist cops had beaten an innocent black man without provocation and joked about what they had done. For many journalists, the story - or at least the...