LA 92 (Rodney King riot documentary)

Cafe Society
1

I watched this on Netflix a few days ago and it was really great. It’s contemporary news accounts/footage woven together to tell the story of the riots from the background to the aftermath. There’s no narrator and only a handful of explanatory text. It’s mostly just powerful video telling a powerful story. A few things that stuck out to me:

The cops really beat the hell out of King. It was minutes worth of them taking their billy clubs and swinging them like bats. That’s such a personal level of violence that it’s hard to imagine me doing to anyone. It, to me, seems qualitatively different than what we see today. Most of the incidents that see protests today are mistakes or disputed situations. I can’t recall one where a group of cops just whaled on a suspect.

I didn’t know about the Korean shopkeeper shooting the black teenager and getting off with basically no punishment. The 5 second story is that the shopkeep thought the black teen was shoplifting, they struggled over her backpack, then as the black teen was walking out of the store the shop keep shot her in the back of the head. Ultimately she was convicted of manslaughter but the judge sentenced her to probation and a fine. That was a ridiculous travesty of justice.

They really were able to capture the abject hatred of the LAPD by the citizens of LA, especially minority citizens. It must have been bad for so many people to be so viscerally angry. The chief police effectively threatening the city council if the council failed to support the department was appalling. It’s amazing that a public servant could act in that manner (and more on this later). After that nonsense I was ready to riot when the cops were let off.

Then the riot started with all of its brutality. Random white and asian people were being pulled out of cars and beaten or murdered. Watching a prostrate guy take a brick to the head and seeing the offender laugh is something that sticks with you. So does watching another spray paint a guy lying unconscious in the street. I can’t imagine what that was like watching it live on the news if you were a white person in the area. I’ll admit that my visceral reaction flipped from burning anger at the LAPD to wishing the cops would lock up these animals and throw away the key. I’m firmly convinced that the chief of the LAPD purposely delayed their response to get this effect.

The most emotionally intense part of it all was watching the confrontations between the shop owners and the looters. There was a tiny Korean grandma blocking the broken window of her shop yelling at the looters to get out. There was the elderly couple crying and yelling at the black man rolling away a laundry bin from a dry cleaners (seriously, who loots a dry cleaners?). But the one that sticks out the most to me was a black man berating the crowd. “I came from the ghetto just like you”. “This was my way out”. “I’m just trying to make it” etc. I can’t imagine rising up out of the ghetto and beating all the racism only to have it all taken away by your own people.

It was a great documentary and I’d recommend it to anyone.

2

I was thinking about this just the other day. I grew up in Central LA. I got married in LA May 2, 1992, during the riots. Half my guests didn’t come, many of them because they were unable to get there. Travel was severely restricted and the flights were cancelled.

I remember huge clouds of black smoke. I remember the National Guard convoys on the streets and the freeways. I remember watching the news, and watching all those things you mention as they happened, seeing places I knew, seeing the destruction, hearing the helicopters. I remember the hotel I stayed at before the ceremony being one of the mustering points for LEOs from all over the state. Coming down to the lobby, and seeing them all, was surreal.

If you haven’t been through something like that, and watched the city you grew up in, being burned and destroyed, I’m not sure you can fully understand what it’s really like. The world is mad, and nothing makes sense. I always felt that the Red Hot Chili Peppers song “Under the Bridge” was about those riots. It doesn’t matter if it is or not. Whenever I hear it, it takes me straight back.

That’s a partial from the lyrics.

I don’t think that the police purposefully did not respond. I think they were overwhelmed. Large sections of a city of millions were completely beyond the rule of law.

The only explanation for why you might need an assault rifle that I have ever felt any understanding of is Bone’s. In this thread, he talks about the riots being a formative event. I can testify that order broke down. I can understand wanting to have a weapon that would help in that situation.