Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Rodney King Riots

WYTS: Los Angeles Rams. Original post here.

You can probably do yourself a favor and just watch the LA 92 documentary released by National Geographic, made entirely out of footage and news reports from the event. If you ever need primary sources, this is a good trove of them. But if you want my inferior version of these events, read on. This is the 1992 Rodney King Riots.

When we last left Los Angeles, the LAPD were turning a blindeye to US servicemen beating the shit out of Mexican teenagers in1943. Now let’s see how the next fifty years of racial harmony unfolded… okay, redlining, urban decay, increasing police violence... The post-WWII prosperity is not including many minority groups. There’s a bitter realization in LA’s African American community that they’ll never be accepted as full citizens… now it's 1965, in the heavily Black neighborhood of Watts… August 11th to August 16th... oh, one of the largest riots in American history. Oh dear...

Only days after the 1965 Voting Rights Act was signed into law, a Black man, Marquette Frye, was pulled over by the LAPD for drunk driving. So many of these tales start with small interactions and escalate, don't they? (Free idea for a research project: the 20th century correlation with car ownership, police interactions, and urban riots.) The LAPD fought with Frye’s mother, and his brother. The cops beat Frye over the head, the whole family were arrested, and everybody on the street saw it happen. And boom, five days of chaos: 34 dead, thousands injured, thousands arrested. MLK arrived on the scene a few days afterwards, calling it “the beginning of a stirring of those people in our society who have been by passed by the progress of the past decade.”

After Watts, King became more vocal about his “Northern strategy”, to focus not on merely negative rights in the Jim Crow South, i.e. freedom from segregation, freedom from violence, but on positive rights, your freedom to have economic opportunities, or seek housing, education, etc. LA was a perfect exactly example of those kinds of dreams deferred. Black people had moved here in great numbers, around 450,000 in LA County (it would be twice that in 1991), and received only squalor and abuse. That was the strategy King was employing when he was murdered in 1968. As for LA, the Watts Uprising shocked the city to its core. The rest of the nation would follow quickly with wave after wave of urban riots, nearly all of them generated bypolice misconduct.

LA could relax. They already had their turn. At least it could not happen again.

A different, unrelated King, Rodney, was a few months old when the Watts Rebellion began. He grew up in Altadena, just outside LA. King was not a man of God, nor an inspirational figure. He never finished high school, then spent a year in prison for robbing and assaulting a Korean store owner. He had three daughters with three separate women, two divorces. Just after midnight, in the early hours of March 3rd, 1991, Rodney King was speeding on the highway while intoxicated when the California Highway Patrol flashed their lights for him to pull over. Still under parole, King did not want a DUI which would return him to prison. Instead, he sped away in a failed chase, reaching speeds of 117 miles per hour, until getting caught. He was not a model citizen, but also... not somebody who deserved what happened next.

After Rodney King was subdued, the two Highway Patrol officers were waved away by LAPD cops, who claimed control of the scene. King was tasered but continued to try to get up and flee. Five police officers: Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, Theodore Briseno and Rolando Solano, then swarmed around King and beat him horribly with batons, with viscous blows and some extra kicks to the side. This went on for over a minute. You can see in the footage the officers putting their weight into every blow.

Rodney King was arrested, then taken to the hospital for his numerous injuries including a concussion, a black eye, and a horribly fractured skull. Even with this medical report, there was still nothing special about what had happened. This was just another incident amongst thousands that had occurred over the decades in LA. Nothing about King’s life was particularly significant so far. “I haven’t beaten anyone this bad in a long time.”, said one of the cops, with a mixture of pride and maybe some ability to feel shame. I don't need to quote the other overtly racist comments. It was all business as usual in LA.

From 1978 to 1992, Los Angeles’ police was run by Daryl Gates, the Frank Rizzo of the West. He helped found D.A.R.E., a bizarre problem popular that peaked in the 1990s that thought the way to fight the drug war was to introduce seven-year-olds to the concept of black tar heroin. There are claims he helped found the first SWAT teams, but Gates himself denied that. However, really what he is known for is running the LAPD during what I’ll call its nadir of race relations. He expanded the force, really innovated in terms of turning cops into a more military organization, but also a more violent one. The Gates era of the LAPD involved vast illegal sweeps of gang members whenever they were inconvenient, such as during the 1984 Olympics, probably habeas corpus violations here. Gates was also a media horndog, making smug claims that he could rescue hostages out of Iran, or that African American vein structure made them more likely to die during a chokehold. The department simply had gotten reckless with their misconduct, feeling invincible, and the man in charge was proud of his work.

However, what happened to Rodney King was caught on video. A nearby person, George Holliday, caught the whole thing on his home camcorder, the footage saved onto a Sony Video8 cassette tape. (This is 8mm, not VHS - but the difference does not really matter anymore since all this technology is Flintstonian-levels of ancient.) Within a few days, Holliday had given the tape to his local TV station. And after that, the entire world would see what had happened to Rodney King. They'd see what had been happening in LA for decades.

King was ultimately not tried for anything. The LA district attorney knew after this, they’d never be able to get a conviction for even reckless driving. Instead, focus turned towards the arresting police. Chief Gates was immediately targeted by the media and angry protestors demanded his resignation. Instead, he ranted “I didn’t invest 42 years of my life to go down the tubes over an incident that I had nothing to do with!”, the buck did not stop there. We’ll see how long he holds out for. It is also at this point that Gates basically stops talking with the African American Mayor of LA, Tom Bradley. They hated each other long before this.

Meanwhile, on March 16th, 1991, an unrelated but also very important incident occurred. A 15-year-old Black teenager, Latasha Harlins, was killed by a Korean shop owner, Soon Ja Du, in a suspected shoplifting incident. (1989's Do the Right Thing, minus some details here or there, predicted all of this. It's eerie.) There had been a lot of tension between Black and Korean communities in LA: remember why Rodney King was in jail in the first place. Koreans were the merchant class in poor neighborhoods and treated their Black customers with contempt and suspicion. For Harlins' killing, Du was convicted of Manslaughter on November 15th, 1991. However, to the shock of everybody, Judge Joyce Karlin only gave Du a sentence of five years probation, 400 hours of community service, and a $500 fine. A man in Glendale a week earlier had got gotten a harsher sentence for kicking a dog.

Back to Rodney King's case, four of the assaulting officers were tried in court. This trial was not held in LA, but in a distant suburb thanks to a change in venue. This was Simi Valley, CA, home to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, and doesn't that just tell you everything? The jury was nearly entirely white. The historical parallels to Jim Crow lynching cases feel unavoidable. On April 29th, 1992, the jury acquitted the four officers of every charge, with just one left undecided. But that didn't really matter, all the cops were getting away with it. To the cynical people of Los Angeles, the result was a bitter reminder that there was no justice.

With the one-two punch of the Latasha Harlins and Rodney King cases, the justice system had made a clear statement about who mattered in America and who did not.

There was probably no way to safely handle such a bad decision with tensions as high as they were. But Chief Gates' force seemed completely unprepared on the 29th for any disturbances. Once the verdict was read at 3:15 PM in the afternoon, the city howled with rage. Protests began instantly, some in Simi Valley outside the courthouse, most were in LA itself, there were even protestors outside the White House. Between the chanting and organized protests, there was also violence. At Tom's Liquor at the corner of Florence Ave and Normandie Ave in South Central, rioting began around 6 PM. This was the first big disturbance and quickly became one of the most iconic. A white trucker was pulled out of his cab and beaten bloody on the street. Furious young men began tossing rocks and bottles at cars, shattering windows. The LAPD had no way to deal with the situation in terms of optics - they had caused all this after all - but it seems neither Gates or Mayor Bradley or even President Bush had a plan for what might happen if the jury returned the wrong verdict. There were no cops in the area of the rioting as the sun began to set.

Where was Gates at this point? At a political fundraiser in Brentwood. He was fighting political change that might give City Hall more power to control him and his police force. His HQ at the Parker Center was under siege by rioters, but he needed to hobnob and sip champagne. Great dude. If Gates were still alive, he'd be in the Cabinet right now.

With the apparent success of riots on the 29th, the next day saw even worse violence. Unrest spread as far north as Hollywood, as far south as the Harbor Area, a distance of about 40 miles. You could stand up on a peak and see fires all across LA County. Particularly badly hit was Koreatown, as brutal random vengeance wrecked retribution for the Latasha Harlins case. As police focused on wealthier and whiter areas, Korean business owners took to their rooftops with weapons, taking on all comers. Half the property damage of the riots were on Korean property, making this event an Anti-Korean pogrom.

As the riots wore on, heavy military response came from dozens of armed forces, everything from the National Guard to the Union Pacific train cops to Marine veterans who had just gotten home from the Gulf War. They all traveled to LA to retake control of the city. By the time the uprising was quelled on May 3rd, the 1992 riot might have been the largest in American history that can we verify. The NYC Draft Riots are sometimes counted as bigger, but the records are much muddier. In 1992, 54 people were killed, mostly unsolved homicides. 12,200 people had been arrested. Total damages were too great to calculate, it was guessed at a nice round billion dollars.

Just as the last terrible LA Riot was punctuated by an important statement by a man named King, so was this one. Rodney King, who stayed private and out of the public discourse through all of this, made a short statement on May 1st: "Can we all get along? Can we get along?" It was a desperate plea for the city to find a way to come back together. To somehow be a community again, agnostic of politics and race.

Chief Darryl Gates resigned from the police in June 1992. He went on to be a radio host, briefly, and a video game character, also briefly, in the unfathomably tone deaf PC game, Police Quest IV: Open Season. President Bush opened a DOJ investigation on Rodney King's assailants, leading to a civil rights case. That did finally get two of the cops, Koon and Powell, a couple years of jail time. That was a very lenient sentence, due to Judge John Davies siding with the defense's version of events. The other two got to go home immediately. King was awarded $3.8 million in a civil suit against the City of LA. He struggled with substance abuse and legal troubles for the remainder of his life. He drowned in a swimming pool in 2012 while under the influence of narcotics, tragically.

Nobody in the justice system was particularly apologetic about the various miscarriages of justice. For example, Judge Karlin complained to the media about needing to make "politically correct verdicts”. She could be on the Supreme Court with that attitude.

In 1994, an abusive ex-husband named OJ Simpson murdered his ex-wife, Nicole, and her friend, Ron Goldman. Simpson, being a famous Black actor in the Naked Gun movies, was able to spin his destructive behavior as a replay of the LAPD's racism. He got his trial moved to a friendlier, Blacker courtroom in Downtown LA, an ironic counter to the Rodney King venue change. When Simpson was acquitted, it became a kind of symbolic revenge for the failures of the Simi Valley trial. You might remember this case for being parodied in half the episodes of Seinfeld. Also, I'm to understand Simpson might have played sports at some point...

Racial tensions in the US continued to simmer for decades, as the necessary reforms were not completed. Policing only became more aggressive, while poverty-stricken urban neighborhood continued to decay until the 2000s when cities rebounded in uneven fashion. LA remained a notorious gang-ridden and police-ridden area of violence and mayhem, but also was a cultural capital all through the 90s, seemingly both dismal and extremely cool at the same time. One rioter looting a store in the 1992 Riot Footage yelled out "gangsta!", predicting the dominant wave of Black culture that would last 20 years or more. Black and Korean tensions quieted in LA after this riot, but there was violence between the two groups in 2015 in Baltimore during the Freddie Gray Riot. LA did not disintegrate like Detroit had in 1967, at least.

Meanwhile, stuffy white politicians would continue to think the only answer to any problem was being "tough on crime" even after 1992, proving they have no ability to understand cause & effect. Therefore, the wave of police brutality cases of the 2010s was the inevitable result. In 2020, another Black man was caught on video in Minneapolis being brutalized by the police. But we've already told that story.