Tom Owens, a former Los Angeles Police Department police officer co-wrote Lying Eyes: The Truth Behind the Corruption and Brutality of the LAPD and the Beating of Rodney King.

According to Kirkus reviews, the book is “an inside look at the Rodney King case, the ensuing trials, and the L.A. riots that followed, by the private detective hired by King's attorney to investigate the police officers' conduct and provide security for the beleaguered beating victim. A former L.A. policeman, Owens does not claim to tell ``the Rodney King story,'' but rather, with the help of Hollywood writer Browning, to give ``the factual version.'' In reviewing his own 12 years on the LAPD (he's oddly vague as to dates, when he resigned and why, what he did prior to opening his agency, etc.), he contends that the violence demonstrated by the officers that night in March 1991 is systemic, and that there is a ``code of silence'' that helps ``explain the attitudes of some of the officers'' caught in the act on George.”

One reader of Lying Eyes: The Truth Behind the Corruption and Brutality of the LAPD and the Beating of Rodney King said, “I was generally glued to this book, although the technicalities of the workings of the LAPD left me lost or vacant, at times. I had the rare occasion to work with the author for six weeks during an Army public relations tour in Nicaragua, and his insights into life in the LAPD and life, as a cop, in general, furthered to set the stage for the book. Tom Owens is a well-read, knowledgeable man in workings of life as a private detective and cop. I wouldn't want him investigating me!”

Lying Eyes: The Truth Behind the Corruption and Brutality of the Lapd and the Beating of Rodney King Tom Owens  More Info

Another reader of Lying Eyes: The Truth Behind the Corruption and Brutality of the LAPD and the Beating of Rodney King said, “This book doesn't pull any punches in reporting the facts surrounding the Rodney King case, the incident that led to it, and what happened afterward. As a former LAPD officer and a private investigator, the book's author, Tom Owens gives an objective look at one of the most controversial cases in our nation's history, reporting the facts that he collected.”

The Los Angeles Police Department said of the aftermath of the Rodney King Trial, “Not since the 1965 Watts riots in south-central Los Angeles has the Department been confronted with the magnitude of violence that erupted on April 29, 1992, just hours after a Simi Valley jury acquitted four LAPD officers in the Rodney King trial.

Fifty-two people lost their lives when violent mobs raged through widely separated areas of the City. Rioters pulled motorists from their cars and beat them, attacked police, smashed shop windows, looted gun, and liquor stores of their stock then set them afire.

When it was over, some 2,500 people had been injured and an estimated $1 billion in property had been damaged.”