Status Updates From The Riot Within: My Journey...

My heart hurts when I sit down to read this book. Reading this book doesn't feel like it's from 30 years ago, it feels like it could've easily been about yesterday. The only difference is Rodney is alive as so many others who've been victims of police violence are not. Bill Clinton began the militarization of the police shortly after this trial and armed them to the teeth with weapons of war.

The thing that I find so frustrating about these front-page stories is the fact that we're not moving forward, as a race of people, towards a more peaceful path of tolerance and understanding. We're just as close-minded and violent as we were twenty years ago when I was brutally beaten and Tasered by police.

For the first time in my life, I might have caught an inkling of how Powell, Briseno, Wind, and Koon felt that night. Damn.

I looked like all was well, but I was just trying to get my mind off of thinking about booze 24-7. And it worked too. I felt great when I got off the eliptical, but only for an hour or so. Then the evil thoughts started to creep back in

So frightening true, that phrase reflects in 100 words or so how an addiction really works...

I didn’t know what I’d do if another court said the cops were innocent. I honestly felt I might lose my mind if I heard that. It would be like the world telling me I made the whole thing up. Like the video didn’t matter or even exist. Like I didn’t matter or exist, either.

How many bones did they have to break, how many quarts of blood did I have to lose before their fear died down? After forty plus baton blows, after a dozen kicks to the head, neck, and testicles, after not one but two Taser electrocutions, how could they possibly justify continuing to mutilate me because they were still afraid of me?

Word on the street, as early as three days before the veredict, was that if three guys walked, a full-scale riot was inevitable

Interesting...