In Los Angeles, California, four Los Angeles police officers that had been caught beating an unarmed African American motorist in an amateur video are acquitted of any wrongdoing in the arrest. Hours after the verdicts were announced, outrage and protest turned to violence as the LA riots began. Protestors in south-central Los Angeles blocked freeway traffic and beat motorists, wrecked and looted numerous downtown stores and buildings, and set more than 100 fires.
On March 3, 1991, paroled felon Rodney King led police on a high-speed chase through the streets of Los Angeles County before eventually surrendering. Intoxicated and uncooperative, King resisted arrest and was brutally beaten by police officers Laurence Powell, Theodore Briseno and Timothy Wind. Unbeknownst to the police, a citizen with a personal video camera was filming the arrest, and the 89-second video caught the police beating King with their batons and kicking him long after he was capable of resistance. The video, released to the press, caused outrage around the country and triggered a national debate on police brutality.
Rodney King was released without charges, and on March 15 Sergeant Stacey Koon and officers Powell, Wind, and Briseno were indicted by a Los Angeles grand jury in connection with the beating. All four were charged with assault with a deadly weapon and excessive use of force. Though Koon did not actively participate in the beating, as the commanding officer present at the scene he was charged with aiding and abetting. Powell and Koon were also charged with filing false reports.
Because of the uproar in Los Angeles surrounding the incident, the judge, Stanley Weisberg, was persuaded to move the trial outside Los Angeles County to Simi Valley in Ventura County. On April 29, 1992, the 12-person jury issued its verdicts: not guilty on all counts, except for one assault charge against Powell that ended in a hung jury. The acquittals touched off the LA riots, which grew into the largest U.S. civil disturbances of the 20th century.
Violence first erupted at the intersection of Florence Boulevard and Normandie Avenue in south-central Los Angeles. Traffic was blocked, and rioters beat dozens of motorists, including Reginald Denny, a truck driver who was dragged out of his truck and nearly beaten to death. A news helicopter, hovering over the street, recorded the event. Los Angeles police were slow to respond, and the violence radiated to areas throughout the city. California Governor Pete Wilson deployed the National Guard at the request of Mayor Tom Bradley, and a curfew was declared. By the morning, hundreds of fires were burning across the city, more than a dozen people had been killed, and hundreds were injured.
The unrest continued during the next 24 hours, and Korean shop owners in African American neighborhoods defended their businesses with rifles. On May 1, President George Bush ordered military troops and riot-trained federal officers to Los Angeles and by the end of the next day the city was under control. The three days of disorder killed more than 60 people, injured almost 2,000, led to 7,000 arrests, and caused nearly $1 billion in property damage, including the burnings of more than 3,000 buildings.
Under federal law, the four officers could also be prosecuted for violating Rodney King’s constitutional rights. On April 17, 1993, a federal jury convicted Koon and Powell for violating King’s rights by their unreasonable use of force under color of law. Although Wind and Briseno were acquitted, most civil rights advocates considered the mixed verdict a victory. On August 4, Koon and Powell were sentenced to two and a half years in prison. King died in 2012, of an accidental drowning.
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We’re all going to be “Rooftop Koreans” before this is over.
Why they didn’t all head to the Simi Valley and burn it down is a mystery. Nothing says “sticking it to the man” like burning down your own neighborhood and all the businesses that keep you fed/clothed/etc.
Of course the reason they didn’t head there is because it would have required at least a dozen buses and transfers and quite probably the buses didn’t even run to that section of LA.
I posted this under the “let it burn” article, but its relevant here as well:
My first visit to LA was during the RK riots. It was for a software conference in Irvine; I had to fly out of Toronto to LAX. An announcement came over the airport PA, saying the flight was delayed until after Mayor Tom Bradley’s speech, since LAX might be closed, at least to international travel. At that point I met a relative of Martin Sheen (his half-brother), who was returning from a tour of western Canada on my flight (he did a hypnotism show). He had just arrived and missed the announcement approached me and asked what the announcement was about. The flight eventually left, late, but we sat with each other on the plane, cranked back a few drinks, and though not much more about it. Until we landed….
Himself living in Irvine, had offered me a lift from LAx to Irvine courtesy of his wife who was picking him up, but once the SHTF she was scared to leave the house. “They are rioting in Long Beach, they are rioting everywhere!” she told him by plane phone (remember those days?). We landed into a deserted and shut down LAX and scrambled for over an hour trying to find a cab to take us to Irvine. by the time we got there it was 3AM. He crashed in my hotel room.
The Sunday after the conference, he offered to take me around the town – we went to his yacht club, then to Venice (muscle beach). The entire boardwalk, usually hosting tens of thousands of people on a Sunday afternoon, was completely shut down with national guard troops positioned on every street corner preventing any crowds gathering. It was shocking and surreal. When we then went to visit a friend of his in Beverly Hills, he graciously offered his assessment of the crisis to this naive 20-something Canadian visitor, one that I distinctly remember to this day.
“This is not actually about race” he explained. “There are lots of well educated, accomplished blacks and latinos that I am proud to call friends and neighbors, not just in this community (Beverly Hills) but throughout the greater LA area. But what you are seeing here, what you have witnessed during your visit, is not a result of this verdict, nor of racism. This is actually a cultural war. This is the uncivilized vs. the civilized. Those that are committing the willful destruction of property and inflicting violence on innocents should not be considered fellow citizens, nor should they be considered civilized. They are animals”