34 Years After Rodney King, Simi Valley Keeps Making Headlines. City Hall Keeps Issuing Statements.
A beating outside the Regal theater. “Hate material” at a mosque. A tirade at a ramen shop. As reported hate crimes climb, residents say Simi Valley’s leaders have offered little more than words.
OPINIONSIMI VALLEY POLITICSCOMMUNITYLA MAYORAL ELECTIONSIMI VALLEY NEWS
Oct 15, 2026
SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — The argument at MoneyKey Ramen was supposed to be about a $100 bill. When workers at the noodle shop in the Town Center said they could not make change, a customer began shouting at staff and diners to “vote red” and threatened to call immigration agents. Then the other diners stood up for the workers.
The video spread across TikTok this week. According to the caption posted with the clip, the woman left before the police arrived; the video and its caption remain the only public record of what happened.
For people who live here, the clip hit a familiar nerve. Thirty-four years after a jury at the county courthouse here acquitted the officers who beat Rodney King, Simi Valley is still making headlines for the same reason. In the past 14 months alone, a Black teenager was beaten outside the Regal theater on Tapo Canyon Road while his attackers shouted racial slurs, and someone left “hate material” at the door of the mosque on Township Avenue. Reported hate crimes in the city nearly doubled last year.
Residents have told the City Council that Simi Valley has a long-standing racism problem, and Mayor Dee Dee Cavanaugh has said she is embarrassed by it. But a review of news coverage and city announcements since 2020 found few lasting efforts by city government to change that. Most of the response has come in the form of statements, and with the mayor’s race less than three weeks away, voters will soon decide whether that is enough.
The Verdict That Still Defines Simi Valley
In April 1992, a jury at the Ventura County courthouse in Simi Valley acquitted the four Los Angeles police officers charged in the videotaped beating of Rodney King on nearly every count. Within hours, riots erupted across Los Angeles.
A judge, not the city, moved the trial here, and the jurors came from across the county rather than just Simi Valley. That distinction never stuck. Twenty-five years later, Pat Havens, Simi Valley’s official historian, told The Los Angeles Times that when her husband visited Brazil, a child there learned he was from Simi Valley and said, “Rodney King.” It was, she said, “the only thing they knew about it.”
The verdict turned the city into a symbol, and what has kept it one is what has happened since.
Eight Headlines, One Pattern
Most of these incidents involved only a few people, and in several, neighbors and bystanders pushed back. Still, each left a mark. In 2016, the police said the man stabbed near the mosque on Erringer Road had been targeted because of how he looked and his connection to the mosque. In 2020, the “Dear Simi Valley” video, in which residents described racism they had faced in the city, drew more than 10,000 views.
The state’s numbers point the same way. Simi Valley police recorded nine hate crimes in 2025, up from five the year before, according to the California Department of Justice’s annual reports for 2025 and 2024. That was the second-highest count in Ventura County, behind the city of Ventura. Reported hate crimes nearly doubled countywide that year, even as they fell 3.4 percent statewide. The numbers are small and can swing from year to year, but together with the headlines, they keep the city’s name tied to racism and religious hatred.
‘I Thought I Was Going to Die’
On the night of Aug. 1, 2025, Michael Robinson, then 18, was getting food with friends at Regal Plaza when a group of teenagers chased him and beat him while shouting racial slurs, according to the police and video shared widely online. Mr. Robinson said they pushed his head into a trash can and kept hitting him in the back of the head, leaving him with a concussion and a chipped tooth. “Honestly, I thought I was going to die,” he told Fox 11. One of the teens arrested was the son of a Simi Valley police officer; the officer was kept off the case.
At first, the police cited four teens for misdemeanor battery and released them, and angry residents packed the next City Council meeting. “Racism is ever present and especially present in the town of Simi Valley,” one speaker said. Weeks later, the police asked prosecutors to consider hate-crime charges.
Prosecutors charged five teens, three of them with hate crimes. By November 2025, those three had been sentenced to 240 to 270 days, mostly in a locked juvenile facility. One of them also admitted to making a criminal threat in a similar incident that May.
Mr. Robinson said he spoke out so it would not happen to anyone else. “I forgive [the attackers], but there are consequences to your actions,” he told KTLA.
Mayor Dee Dee Cavanaugh Says She’s Embarrassed. What Has She Done About It?
The city’s response to the attack followed a familiar script. At the first council meeting afterward, Ms. Cavanaugh called the video “shocking, senseless and deeply disturbing.” One speaker, Giavanna Pitts of Moorpark College’s Black Student Union, asked for more: a community meeting, an independent investigation and restorative support for Black youth.
Two weeks later, a council meeting drew dozens of residents who said officials had done little. “Simi Valley deserves more than platitudes,” said Avery Estelle, president of Simi Valley High School’s Black Student Union.
That night, the mayor spoke plainly about the problem. “I’m embarrassed that we have racism in Simi Valley,” she said, adding that she did not want the city to be known as racist. She said she was working with Black Student Union chapters at Simi Valley High School and Moorpark College, as well as churches and volunteers, to make the city safer. Around the same time, council members met with Mr. Robinson’s family.
Fourteen months later, that embarrassment has not led to any action the public can see. According to city announcements and news coverage reviewed for this article, the city has announced no new program, event or commission to bring residents of different backgrounds together. No public response to Ms. Pitts’s requests could be found, and nothing has been reported about the outreach the mayor described.
In September, Ms. Cavanaugh gave the city’s annual State of the City address. The city’s written summary highlighted falling crime, a new film office, about 1,000 jobs coming to the city and a possible new hockey team, but it did not mention racism, the Robinson attack or any effort to unite residents.
Ms. Cavanaugh is on the Nov. 3 ballot, seeking election as mayor, which could mean two more years of failed leadership in addressing racism and repairing Simi Valley’s reputation.
Two Efforts, No Public Results
The mayor’s response fits a longer record. After the 2020 protests, then-Mayor Keith Mashburn helped form One Simi, a group of eight community leaders meant to ease racial divisions. No later work by the group could be found in news coverage.
In 2021, the city announced a diversity task force made up only of city department heads. Its first job was to review whether city services reached residents of all races equally. A local activist, Leanna Brand, asked why residents were left out: “wouldn’t you bring in community members right from the beginning?” Five years later, no public record could be found showing that the task force produced any findings. Samantha Argabrite, who led it, is now the city manager.
No city board or commission focused on human relations or hate incidents could be found. Instead, the main way to report a hate incident is a countywide reporting line, Ventura County Versus Hate, which residents can reach by dialing 211.
The city does host a heritage event, but it began before the mayor’s remarks: the city-run Cultural Arts Center held its first Hispanic Heritage Festival in 2024 and scheduled its third for late September. A multicultural festival, organized by the city’s Youth Council and the center in 2021, was held online and does not appear to have returned.
How Other Cities Faced Their Past
Other cities have gone further. In 2020, the Glendale City Council voted unanimously to apologize for the city’s history as a “sundown town,” a place where Black people were warned not to be out after dark. Glendale was the first California city to take that step, and its council also committed to a study of the city’s racial past and a review of bias in city hiring, housing and policing.
Pasadena has a Human Relations Commission that has taken up hate crimes at its meetings, with updates from the police. Other cities focus on bringing people together. Temecula hosts a free CultureFest to celebrate cultural diversity. Santa Clarita runs a free monthly series called Celebrate, with each night featuring a different culture’s music, dance and food. Families can collect stamps in a “passport” at each event for a chance to win prizes.
Not every effort lasts. In 2023, the Huntington Beach City Council voted 4-3 to shut down the city’s human relations committee, after one councilman argued that it duplicated county work and created a false picture of the city.
A Choice on Nov. 3
Thirty-four years after the King verdict, the pattern in Simi Valley is hard to miss. The incidents change, from a beating outside a movie theater to a tirade at a noodle shop, but the cycle rarely does. The news spreads, residents fill the council chambers, city leaders issue statements, and attention fades until the next time.
Other cities have shown that the cycle can be broken, sometimes with steps that cost little. Simi Valley has tried a community leaders’ group and a staff task force, but neither left a public record of results.
Residents have made clear what they want. At that same August 2025 meeting, Kevin Cosney, who grew up in Simi Valley, said racism was a national problem, not just a local one. Then he added a warning: “If you don’t uproot it here, we’ll continue to fill these council chambers until real change happens.”
On Nov. 3, voters will choose a mayor and three City Council members. Whoever wins will inherit the same reputation and the same choice: treat racism as a problem to solve, or as a headline to wait out.
At MoneyKey Ramen this week, the people who spoke up were the other diners. For residents still living with a 34-year-old headline, the question is whether City Hall will finally do the same.
The Simi Valley Ledger is an Official Publication of The Freedom Project © 2026
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