Tom Bradley is the former mayor of Los Angeles. In his monologue, he describes working with his staff to draft separate messages to deliver depending on the outcome of Rodney King’s Simi Valley trial. He and his staff created a message to deliver in the event of a not guilty verdict, though they doubted they’d need it. The not guilty message voiced Bradley’s outrage, while at the same time urging the public to refrain from responding to the unjust verdict with violence. Bradley acknowledges the disingenuousness of this message, given how obvious it must have been to anyone who saw the video of King’s brutal beating that a not guilty verdict was a grave miscarriage of justice.