OJ Simpson murdered by police before arrest

So, I was watching The People Vs OJ Simpson. There's a moment where he gets out of his famous white Bronco holding a portrait of his children, and the police nearly shoot him because they think it's a gun. While I don't know if it happened that way in real life, it's not unreasonable to imagine a scenario where a nervous LAPD cop fires off, and all the rest follow.

So, the scenario: OJ Simpson, the Juice, is fatally shot to death by LAPD officers live on TV, just two years after the Rodney King murder. What's the reaction and aftermath? I'm thinking at the least, the mother of all wrongful death lawsuits by his estate.
 
More likely he commits suicide IMO. While many African Americans thought he was innocent, I don't think anyone was in the mood for another series of riots.
 
Interesting thought, and could be a place for a second POD. OJ kills himself, and maybe the police panic at the shot and riddle the car with bullets? The idea that he had killed himself would be a very, very hard sell.
 
Interesting thought, and could be a place for a second POD. OJ kills himself, and maybe the police panic at the shot and riddle the car with bullets? The idea that he had killed himself would be a very, very hard sell.
this would be an act of such incompetence...LAPD classic.
 
Such shootings tend to bring out the very best in modern police departments. Officers of all stripes band together in one giant unified hunt for immense quantities of whitewash, with such searches almost always succeeding. No doubt O.J. would have been found to have a rocket launcher and a medium machine gun stashed in his cumberbund, and with a change of venue to Simi (Seamy) Valley, the officers involved would have been found to be fully justified. ((snicker))
 
Except that OJ Simpson, until right before the murders, had been a rather famous celebrity; it'd make the Rodney King case look tame, even if it was just a nervous LAPD officer...
 
Yes. And, let's not forget that they had pre-empted the NBA FINALS so that people could watch OJ's chase, capture, and arrest. This would have been most of the city, state, and nation watching a beloved celebrity massacred by police live on television. Even beyond the truly epic, possibly nationwide riots that could follow, it might have made race a central part of the 1994 elections, which saw the beginning of the republican congressional revolution. I could see it either way: as a Nixonian STOP THESE VIOLENT HOODLUMS backlash, or a push for an end to the runaway violence of police organizations.
 
I could easily see a combination of both happening ITTL: both the law-and-order push AND an attempt to reform police organizations...

And the butterflies might lead to an earlier exposure of a Rampart-like scandal in the LAPD...hell, this might butterfly away Biggie Smalls' and Tupac Shakur's deaths, especially if Suge Knight gets caught up in this...
 
I could easily see a combination of both happening ITTL: both the law-and-order push AND an attempt to reform police organizations...

And the butterflies might lead to an earlier exposure of a Rampart-like scandal in the LAPD...hell, this might butterfly away Biggie Smalls' and Tupac Shakur's deaths, especially if Suge Knight gets caught up in this...
this is what the USA needs.
 
I think it might lead to a number of rampart type of organizations within police departments across the nation. LA has no monopoly on shield style cops
 
This really needs to be a TL...

Hell, this might lead to some police scandals in PDs nationwide being exposed, especially if the riots break out nationwide...

And, if the Republicans botch the response (via saying something dumb about race), this neutralizes the Republican Revolution ITTL...
 
We get a movie similar to JFK debating what actually happened, directed by Spike Lee.

America receives yet another scar regarding racism (black man accused of abusing and murdering his white wife, white cops accused of killing a black celebrity).
 
While it might not make much difference what if the cops that panicked and riddled OJ's Ford Bronco with bullets after he pulled the trigger on himself or accidentally shot the tyres of the still moving vehicle in this scenario were clearly revealed to be non-White (whether Black, Asian, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, etc)?
 
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Los Angeles pictured after the murder of OJ Simpson
 
While it might not make much difference what if the cops that panicked and riddled OJ's Ford Bronco with bullets after he pulled the trigger on himself or accidentally shot the tyres of the still moving vehicle in this scenario were clearly revealed to be non-White (whether Black, Asian, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, etc)?
Doesn't matter. IIRC one of the cops that beat up Rodney King was Hispanic. Didn't mean a damn thing. The feeling was directed at the system, not just the racial characteristics of its agents.

Remember, too, thay while pop culture paints the conflict as just black vs. White vs. Hispanic, there were a lot of other dynamics. Los Angeles (and SoCal generally) at the time is a city that got screwed over by the end of the Cold War, as suddenly all those manufacturing jobs keeping the Cold War going weren't needed anymore. A lof of those jobs being held by minorities, but whites as well.

The Rodney King Riots (and the riots that may erupt in ATL) had a large class component, as the working classes turn against, in the short term, the system and its percieved agents, not just political (of which the police is of course the most visible representative in any society) but economic, as well.

How much is applicable to outside Los Angeles, I do not know. But if the rioting goes on nationwide, governments are going to be faced with not only concerns about police reform and law and order policy, but on how to respond to obvious signs that the "peace dividend" promised by Bush as part of the end of the Cold War has clearly not paid off.
 
And Rodney King was a repeat felon, too (of course, he didn't deserve what happened to him); OJ Simpson, until he was accused of murder, had a far better reputation (domestic abuse charges notwithstanding; not many people knew about that, though, until after Nicole and Ron were murdered)...

Yeah, the Rodney King riots are going to look tame compared to this. For a comparison, imagine the New York Draft Riots of 1863 (which, ironically, targeted African-Americans), only in reverse...
 
And Rodney King was a repeat felon, too (of course, he didn't deserve what happened to him); OJ Simpson, until he was accused of murder, had a far better reputation (domestic abuse charges notwithstanding; not many people knew about that, though, until after Nicole and Ron were murdered)...

Yeah, the Rodney King riots are going to look tame compared to this. For a comparison, imagine the New York Draft Riots of 1863 (which, ironically, targeted African-Americans), only in reverse...
The thing is, IMO depressiblngly this sort of misconduct was not uncommon back then, but there hadn't been real social unrest of this type in LA since 1965. I really think a lot of it is that these two events happened precisely at a time when LA's economic picture was... not that rosy. Any other time and it would have cause widespread outrage, but not to the extent of throwing bricks and such.

Most domestic unrest in America seems largely tied to economic circumstances. It's like how lynchings seemed to spike precisely when there was a relatively bad harvest.
 
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