Rodney King, whose videotaped beating by police ultimately led to the 1992 Los Angeles riots, was found dead at the bottom of his pool on Sunday, police said.

Mr. King's fiancée found him at his home in Rialto, Calif., a city about 50 miles east of Los Angeles in San Bernardino County. Police are treating his death as a drowning and said there are no signs of foul play. He was 47.

In 1991, a video showing members of the Los Angeles Police Department beating Mr. King after a freeway chase rocketed across the world, stoking national tensions over race and police brutality. Three of the officers were white and one was Hispanic; Mr. King was black.

The four officers, who struck Mr. King with their batons more than 50 times, were charged with excessive force. A year later, after a jury acquitted three of the officers and failed to reach a verdict on the fourth, widespread riots broke out in South Los Angeles, leaving more than 50 people dead, some 2,500 injured and an estimated $1 billion in property damage. "Can we all get along?" Mr. King told television cameras during the riots. "Can we stop making it horrible for the older people and the kids? It's not right. It's not going to change anything." The nation watched for several days on television, and the riots became a flashpoint in race relations in the U.S.

Mr. King later won a civil suit against the city of Los Angeles for $3.8 million, but lost another one against the police officers for $15 million. Two of the officers later were convicted on federal assault-related charges for the incident and each sentenced to 30 months in prison.

The Los Angeles Times recently reported that Mr. King had spent all of his settlement money and was unemployed, sometimes working as a freelance concrete pourer. In the years after his beating, Mr. King wrote in a memoir, he battled alcohol and drug addiction and had several run-ins with police. He leaves three daughters and two grandchildren.

In April, HarperCollins Publishers Inc. released Mr. King's memoir, "The Riot Within: My Journey from Rebellion to Redemption." HarperCollins is a subsidiary of News Corp., publisher of this newspaper.On his book tour, he spoke about the beating and life as a black man in the U.S. "To get blamed and picked on and bullied on as a race of people, it just loses me. I get lost in my own country sometimes," he said during an appearance in April at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. "I know we have come a little ways but…we still have a long, long ways to go."

Police-community relations have improved in Los Angeles since the 1992 riots, and crime has dropped sharply. A study released in April by Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles found 69% of respondents thought a lot or some progress had been made in the city's race relations since the riots. Seven in 10 gave the LAPD a good or excellent rating.

A 2009 Harvard University study on the LAPD found similar improvements, with 51% of respondents saying that LAPD officers always or most of the time treat all racial and ethnic groups fairly, up from 39% in 2005. But the LAPD received the lowest marks from black respondents, of which 23% said the LAPD "almost never" treated all races the same. "We found a spectrum of opinion, but not a divided city," the report said. "The city's African-American communities, often the least satisfied with the Department today, are also the most hopeful about its continued improvement."

Indeed, in an April report marking the 20th anniversary of the riots, the LAPD said it had become far more diverse. In 1992, 60% of its officers were white. Today, whites make up just 35% of the 9,900 sworn officers, the report said.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, a civil-rights activist, said in a statement, "Rodney King was a symbol of civil rights and he represented the anti-police brutality and anti-racial profiling movement of our time. It was his beating that made America focus on the presence of profiling and police misconduct."

Police said they received a 911 call from Mr. King's fiancée at 5:25 a.m. Sunday. When authorities arrived at his home, he was unresponsive at the bottom of his pool. He was pronounced dead at an area hospital at 6:11 a.m. The San Bernardino Coroner's Department will conduct an autopsy, police said.

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video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIlQpNNhtRQ