Summary: Riots in Los Angeles. How the Koreans Saved Los Angeles Los Angeles: From Hollywood to South Central

In the spring of 1992, a real apocalypse broke out in respectable Los Angeles. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans committed a large-scale pogrom in the city, expressing in this way a protest against discrimination against the black population.

In the fine days of May 1992, the sky over Los Angeles was clouded with the smoke of raging fires - thousands of buildings and cars were blazing like that. Spontaneous clashes arose in the streets, accompanied by the sound of broken glass, shooting and the screams of people.

These stoned and drugged rioters, taking rifles, fired at everything that moves, simultaneously destroying shops and offices along the way. Someone tried to protect their property, and someone fled in a panic, leaving everything at the mercy of the raging crowd.

The next day, riots spread to San Francisco.

Over a hundred stores were looted there. As prominent Democratic Party spokesman Willie Brown told the San Francisco Examiner, “For the first time in American history, most demonstrations, and much of the violence and crime, especially looting, were multiracial, involving everyone—black, white, people from Asia and Latin America.

About a year before the Los Angeles riots, four white city police officers were brought to trial for beating African-American Rodney King. He, being at the wheel of a car, drove through a red light and did not obey the order of the police to stop. After a short chase, he was stopped, but when he tried to arrest him, he resisted, for which he was severely beaten. The police were forced to use a stun gun, but when this method did not calm the violator, the security forces switched to more decisive actions and simply began to beat King, they beat him with truncheons and kicked him.

It was later revealed that King's blood contained traces of alcohol and marijuana, although this did not relieve the police of responsibility. The entire scene was filmed by an amateur photographer.

On April 29, 1992, the jury - all whites - found the police defendants not guilty of exceeding the limits of necessary defense. Later, a federal court granted King's claim against the city police department, King received about four million dollars in compensation from him. However, in late April, news of the acquittal provoked a reaction the likes of which the country had not seen in decades. African American protests quickly escalated into riots and attacks on other ethnic minorities.

The riots continued for six days. 55 people died, 2300 were injured; the damage caused was estimated at one billion dollars. As the investigation showed, if the police had promptly stopped the first sorties of lone vandals and gangs of hooligans, mass unrest and robberies would probably have been avoided, and the governor of California would not have needed to call in the National Guard for help. But the police authorities, in the absence of their boss, who was on a business trip, seemed to have fallen into a stupor and did not give the order to advance to hundreds of policemen who were on standby - for fear that decisive action would only worsen the situation.

Despite the fact that the unrest in Las Angeles had a pronounced racial character, its main victims were not whites, but immigrants from South Korea, primarily small entrepreneurs. Their property, which was at the epicenter of the clashes, accounted for half of the damage caused by the riots; more than 2,000 Korean shops and consumer services enterprises were destroyed. Many Korean immigrants who served in the military in their home countries donned old military uniforms and went out with rifles and pistols to defend their businesses, disobeying the order of the inactive police not to use weapons. They were inspired by the city's Korean radio station, which reported that American citizens, under the Second Amendment to the Constitution, have the right to protect their lives and property with weapons.

At first, the expert community concluded that the main reason for the unrest in Los Angeles was the poor economic situation of the protesters. Today, however, many sociologists have abandoned this view. So, in terms of purely socio-economic indicators: average income, unemployment rate (about twenty percent), the quality of district schools (the last place in the city) - the situation in this area, where many Hispanics have settled since that time, has changed little. It is interesting, however, that crime statistics have improved dramatically.

This was mainly due to the successful fight by the police against the instigators of the riots - criminal gangs that terrorized the local population with impunity twenty years ago.

The police today are much more concerned about the safety of local residents, for which they have earned their gratitude: seventy percent of Los Angeles residents give a positive assessment to law enforcement officers. The ethnic composition of the police department has also changed, which has increased the credibility of the citizens. If in 1992 there were 1800 Hispanics in the police force, now there are two and a half times more of them. In his latest book, Revolt at Heart, Rodney King, whose beating sparked the riot, writes that over the years, many police officers have tried to make amends for his colleagues and help him overcome his alcohol and drug addiction.

“It took two decades to smooth out the negative attitude of the local population towards us, and this process is far from complete,” said Charles Beck, the current chief of the Los Angeles police department, who was a sergeant twenty years ago. And one of the locals, an African-American and the owner of a barbershop, said in an interview:

“The police are no longer an occupying army…

Alcohol and drugs greatly fueled the passions of the participants in the Los Angeles unrest. Since then, the number of liquor stores in the area has decreased by twenty percent, but the presence of department stores has increased by half.

The uprisings in southern California, sociologists say, left a deep imprint in the memory of Americans. The CBS television corporation's interview with Rodney King on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the events in Los Angeles caused a great resonance. He was asked what he thought about the sensational story of Trayvon Martin, a black teenager who was killed in Florida by a white police patrol. “When I heard Martin’s cries for help on the recording, I remembered that I was screaming just like he did at the time,” King replied. And at the demonstrations in the city of Sanford, where Martin was killed, the words were heard in the air during the riot in Los Angeles: "Without justice, there is no civil peace."

People of all ages and nationalities with some devilish frenzy robbed supermarkets, carrying armfuls of everything that fell under their hands. The most enterprising ones filled trunks and car interiors with household appliances, electronics, spare parts, weapons, perfumes, and food.

At first, the police did not interfere in the looting of the city: several thousand law enforcement officers were simply powerless to stop the rampant elements. Even passenger airliners did not dare to approach the huge metropolis plunged into chaos, flying around the seething city.

This is not the first such incident in Los Angeles. In August 1965, in Watts, a suburb of Los Angeles, six days of rioting killed 34 people, injured more than a thousand, and caused $40 million worth of property damage.

With all the differences, both events have the same roots: the protest of the black population against discrimination by the authorities and the police. Los Angeles, which found itself in the middle of the 20th century on the path of the mass exodus of the colored population of the United States from the disadvantaged south to the free north, became perhaps the most "African-American" city in the country.

So, if in 1940 about 63 thousand representatives of the black diaspora lived in Los Angeles, by 1970 its number exceeded 760 thousand people. A spark was enough to ignite this huge mass of indignant people.

At the turn of the 1980-90s, the southern part of the center of Los Angeles (South Central Los Angeles), where the bulk of the black population lived, was most affected by the economic crisis, it was here that the highest unemployment rate was recorded. As a result - a high level of crime and regular police raids.

Representatives of the African American community were convinced that the arrest and use of force by the police of the city is guided solely by racial grounds.

According to eyewitnesses, what is happening is more like a civil war and all this is literally a stone's throw from the dream factory - Hollywood and the fashionable Beverly Hills district. Calls for an uprising of the "colored" against the rule of the "whites" sounded more and more actively on the streets, the most aggressively inclined through a megaphone urged the crowd to go "to Hollywood and Beverly Hills to rob the rich."

But one of the first to suffer was not a snickering bourgeois, but 33-year-old trucker Reginald Denny. A crowd of rioters pulled him out of the cab and beat him almost half to death - he could neither walk nor speak. The police at this time only circled over the scene of the incident, and broadcast everything live on TV. They were ordered not to interfere.

On the morning of May 1, at the request of California Governor Pete Wilson, special vehicles with guards left for the city, but only 1,700 police officers had to cope with the riot before they arrived. On the evening of the same day, President George W. Bush addressed the people, reassuring everyone and assuring that justice would prevail.

Only on the fourth day of unrest reinforcements entered the city: about 10,000 guards, 1,950 sheriffs and their deputies, 3,300 military and marines, 7,300 police officers and 1,000 FBI agents. Mass raids and arrests began, the 15 most active rebels were destroyed by the forces of law and order. The uprising was put down.

The US Department of Justice has launched a federal investigation into the beating of Rodney King. Later, the federal authorities of the United States against the police were charged with violating civil rights. The process lasted a week, after which a verdict was handed down, according to which all four police officers involved in the beating of Rodney King were fired from the ranks of the Los Angeles police.

According to the results of the six-day Los Angeles riot, according to official figures, 55 people were killed, more than 2,000 were injured, over 5,500 buildings were burned down and damaged, which amounted to a total damage of more than $ 1 billion. Insurance companies rated this damage as the fifth-worst natural disaster in US history. The arrests were the largest in the history of the state - more than 11 thousand people, including 5 thousand African Americans and 5.5 thousand Hispanics. The total number of participants in the uprising was approaching a million people.
Curiously, Rodney King received a $3.8 million settlement from the LAPD. With some of these funds, he opened the Alta-Pazz Recording Company label, where he began to record rap. Subsequently, King did not settle down, and still had problems with American justice.

Armed with machine guns and grenade launchers, National Guard soldiers hold a line on Crenshaw blvd. in South Central L.A.
Los Angeles has undergone several days of rioting due to the acquittal of the LAPD officers who beat Rodney King.
Hundreds of businesses were burned to the ground and over 55 people have been killed. National Guardsmenpatrol near Martin Luther King Blvd. and Vermont Avenue as a mini-mart burns in Los Angeles on May 1, 1992.

Sources:
www.svoboda.org/a/24564723.html
news.rambler.ru/world/37351353/?utm_cont ent=rnews&utm_medium=read_more&utm_sourc e=copylink

This is a copy of the article located at

According to rumors, the first stones were thrown on the afternoon of April 29, when the four police officers who beat Rodney King and the judges who acquitted them left the courthouse. Immediately after that, thousands of people took to the streets of Los Angeles. A few hours later, the riot spread throughout the city and very soon the situation began to resemble a civil war. The police abandoned the main areas of clashes, yielding the streets to the rebellious poor.

Beating of Rodney King by the police

Systematic arson of capitalist enterprises began. In total, more than 5,500 buildings burned down. People fired at police officers and at police and journalistic helicopters. 17 government buildings were destroyed. The premises of the Los Angeles Times were also attacked and partially looted. A huge cloud of smoke from the fires covered the city.

Flights departing from Los Angeles International Airport were canceled and arriving planes were forced to change course due to smoke and sniper fire. Following the cultural capital of the nation, spontaneous uprisings spread to several dozen cities in the United States.

This riot was the only such violent episode of civil unrest in the United States in the 20th century, leaving the urban unrest of the sixties far behind, both because of its sheer destructiveness and because the April-May 1992 riots were multi-racial uprisings of the poor.

As Willie Brown, prominent Democratic Representative in the California State Legislature, told the San Francisco Examiner: all blacks, whites, Asians and Hispanics."

At the very beginning of the riots, the police were outnumbered and quickly retreated. The troops did not appear until the troops began to wane. Some rioters with megaphones tried to turn the performance into a war against the rich. "We should burn their neighborhoods, not ours.

We have to go to Hollywood and Beverly Hills,” one man shouted through a bullhorn (London Independent, May 2, 1992). CELEBRATE AS IF IT'S 1999 IN THE YARD...

The rebellion began among blacks, but soon spread to the Latin neighborhoods of South and Central Los Angeles and Pico Union, and then to the unemployed whites in the area from Hollywood in the north to Long Beach in the south and Venice in the west. East Los Angeles was spared only because of the mass concentration of forces of order there. Everyone went outside. There was an unprecedented sense of togetherness.

Before setting fire to stores, people took fire hoses to protect their homes from the spreading fires. The old people were evacuated, it was a family affair. Cars full of people showed up at the knitting factory, loaded up and drove away. Massive looting continued for two days. The police were nowhere to be seen. Consumer goods were redistributed, otherwise some people would not have got anything.

As for the beating of truck driver Reginald Denny, the men who attacked him shortly before defended a fifteen-year-old boy from police beating him. This, of course, was not reported in the media. In an article dated the first of May, Harry Cleaver wrote: "The remarkable thing about the dynamics of the uprising was the defeat of the means of mediation.

When the verdict was announced on the evening of Wednesday, April 29, all self-respecting "community leaders" in Los Angeles, including the black police chief Major Bradley, tried to prevent a clash by channeling people's outrage into a controlled channel. Meetings were organized in churches where impassioned pleas were mixed with equally passionate indignant speeches designed to provide a helpless, purifying outlet for emotions.

At the largest such gathering, broadcast on local television, a desperate mayor went too far, pleading for complete inaction. Just as good trade unions working with employers make it their main task to make agreements and keep the peace among the workers, community leaders see it as their main goal to maintain order.

Fortunately, they didn't succeed. The May Day edition of The New York Times, a newspaper that considers itself a spokesman for the U.S. ruling class, noted with dismay that "in some neighborhoods a street party atmosphere prevails, blacks, whites, Hispanics and Asians united in a carnival of plunder.

As countless policemen watched in silence, people of all ages, men and women, some with small children in their arms, entered and left the supermarkets, large bags in their hands and armfuls of shoes, bottles, radios, vegetables, wigs, auto parts and weapons. Some patiently waited in line, waiting for their time to come." The liberal-entrepreneurial humor magazine Spy wrote that people

large car park, specially opened doors for the disabled. An anarchist one-day newspaper in Minneapolis that borrowed its design from USA Today and was called "LA Today (Tomorrow... The World)" ("Today Los Angeles, Tomorrow... The World") wrote: They're celebrating in Los Angeles..." An eyewitness in Los Angeles exclaimed, "These people don't look like robbers. They're like quiz winners."

In the robberies, this proletarian "short-term suppression of market relations", Harry Cleaver even noted the emergence of "new laws (!) of distribution and a new type of impecunious social order, when huge wealth is transferred from the entrepreneurs to the have-nots. In this direct appropriation, however, we must see the political content behind the arson: the demand to destroy the institutions of exploitation...

The disruption of the trading networks of capitalist society is a blow to its circulatory system. "The image of these riots, as well as riots in general, created by the opponents of such uprisings, is completely false. Riots are usually presented as a chain of senseless clashes, when the rebels rush at each other like hungry sharks.

In fact, crimes against people practically disappeared as soon as previously divided proletarians of different colors and nationalities united in mass collective violence, "proletarian shopping" and a celebration of destruction. During the riots, there were far fewer rapes and group hooliganism than on ordinary days when the "forces of order" dominate.

After the uprising, young people who were previously unable to walk down the neighboring street because it was under the control of a hostile group can now do so. One Los Angeles resident told us that after the riots, as a woman, she feels safer on the street. Welfare-receiving mothers of many children from four districts have banded together to fight against impending cuts in benefits.

When these women picket the welfare offices, the ruling class knows they have over a hundred thousand rioters behind them. Conservatives estimate that this is the number of poor people in and around Los Angeles who have acquired the collective experience of arson, robbery and clashes with the police, the experience of the intelligent use of collective violence as a weapon of political struggle.

The number of participants in the uprising, obviously, was still approaching a six-figure figure. This can be judged at least by the fact that more than 11 thousand people were arrested (5,000 blacks, 5,500 Hispanics and 600 whites). The vast majority of the rebels and robbers managed to get away unpunished. The significance of the Los Angeles uprising is perhaps best measured by comparison with the San Francisco riot, the second largest riot in the country (or maybe third if you count the armed clashes in Las Vegas). If the San Francisco riot had happened on its own, independent of the events in Los Angeles, it would have been the largest in California since the sixties.

On April 30, more than a hundred stores were looted in San Francisco in the central Market Street area. Many expensive shops in the financial center of the city were defeated, the rebels invaded the lair of the wealthy Nob Hill and beat up a fair amount of luxury cars. In one of the luxury hotels, a group of young people chanting "Death to the rich!" broke all the windows.

As in the campaign against the Gulf War, East Bay demonstrators marched down Highway 80 and closed the bridge, creating traffic jams in which hundreds of thousands of vehicles were stuck. It was a commendable tactical use of the automotive urbanism spawned by capitalism as a weapon against capital. Events in Los Angeles resonated along the coast and elsewhere in the United States.

Despite the few and atypical racist incidents, the riots were for the most part a series of positive events in their essence, purely anti-police uprisings, which led to the fact that in the areas where they occurred, the market relations broke down for a while and the totalitarian reality of modern America cracked. These riots were an explosive return of class warfare to the United States on a scale larger than the heroic uprisings of 1965-1971.

These riots were more racially mixed than the urban uprisings of previous decades, and were further confirmation of the ongoing war between the social classes.

The wave of poor riots was a decisive blow to the triumphant propaganda of the ruling classes that followed the fall of their main imperialist enemy, the Soviet Union, and the defeat of former US allies Panama and Iraq. This propaganda claimed that humanity as an animal species had reached the "end of history" and that democracy and the market were the inevitable outcome of human evolution. SECTS, LIES AND VIDEOS...

Radio and newspaper reports during the riots clearly show how our enemy, the media, was stumped by the suddenness and magnitude of the riots. But most disorienting and terrifying to these lackeys of the ruling class was the multi-racial nature of the rebellion.

In reportage filming, people of all skin colors were always present on the streets. For fifty years, one of the foundations of capitalist ideology in the United States has been the massive and determined denial that our society is a class society. The uprising, at least for a short time, destroyed the results of half a century of introduction of democratic ideology.

The government-bashing media succeeded in capturing the beating of white truck driver Reginald Denny, and this highly atypical incident was replayed hundreds of times over and over to denigrate the uprising as a race riot. Danny's rescue by a few blacks wasn't televised that often. Near the end of the uprising, the people who had rescued Denny, either naively or foolishly, accepted rewards for his rescue from local businesses.

This allowed the bourgeoisie to appropriate ownership of such humanitarian acts and to present the unrest solely as an episode of mass psychosis or a pogrom. This swift and insidious upheaval by the wealthy and the media is understandable, since it came from a region specialized in exporting spectacle and airplay to the rest of the world. The bourgeois media described the looting and burning of Korean stores as "racially motivated".

Unfortunately, many businesses were left untouched simply because they were owned or operated by blacks, or because they predominantly employed blacks, as in the case of McDonald's. However, on the other hand, it was a manifestation of the class war, which took the form of a racial uprising, in which the workers and the poor, who turned out to be mostly black, opposed the shopkeepers, who were mostly Korean.

The United States is a monstrously racist society. Fifty years of total mass disinformation has destroyed the class consciousness of the poor and successfully divided the working class along the lines of race. That is why some participants in the riot expressed their hatred for the constant robbery of the poor in racial terms. The media buried the analysis of the causes of the uprising under a pile of superficial remarks about racism in the United States.

By limiting the riots to the issue of racial relations between "whites" as such and "blacks" as such, the media tried to hide the multiracial nature of the riots and present them as the exclusive expression of "black crime". White workers and the poor, no matter how poor and how they are exploited, and no matter how they resisted the police and trade relations, are united in this propaganda scheme with rich whites only on the basis of skin color.

It must be emphasized here that we are not liberals or racists: we do not pity the looted or burned enterprises, the owners of whatever race and nationality they belonged to, but the fact that the participants in the unrest chose some targets and left others untouched, mistakenly looking at their oppressors with race point of view.

The uprisings of April-May 1992, like the riots that have taken place over the past ten years, clearly demonstrated that the most realistic, practical and immediate way that can help the working class and the poor to overcome the 5 racism and racial division that is rooted in people 5 can be found in a violent struggle against our common enemies - the police, the entrepreneurs, the rich and the market economy.

On May 2, 5,000 Los Angeles police officers, 1,950 sheriffs and their deputies, 2,300 patrol officers, 9,975 National Guardsmen, 3,300 military and marines in armored cars, and 1,000 FBI agents and border guards entered the city to restore order and secure shops. Hundreds of people were injured. Most of those who died during the clashes were killed precisely during the suppression of the uprising and were not participants in the riots.

Those killed were mostly bystanders who became victims of the police. So, in Compton, two natives of Samoa were killed during arrest, when they were already dutifully on their knees. The police also tried in every possible way to end the truce between the various gangs. They wanted the working class of Central and South Los Angeles to start shooting at each other.

The Maoid "Revolutionary Worker" wrote that an old woman said to young people, nodding at the police: "You need to stop killing each other and start killing these fuckers." More than 11,000 people were arrested in Los Angeles. These were the largest mass arrests in the history of the United States. Insurance companies, assessing the damage caused by the uprising in Los Angeles, called it the fifth largest natural disaster in US history.

In the most radical and consistent episodes of class warfare, there have always been and always will be instances of the thoughtless use of violence.

The recent riots also involved not angels, but living people of flesh and blood, with all the vices and limitations imposed on them by horrendous poverty and exploitation, reflecting the everyday violence of this fucking society with all its horrors and hoaxes. We must support all participants in the riots, regardless of what they are accused of and what we consider fair and unfair.

None of them can count on a fair trial, but even if they could, we must nevertheless adhere to a strategy of unconditional support for all hostages taken by the state during the May Day events.

About the clashes of 1965, I already, now the story of the next major pogroms in Los Angeles, which occurred in 1992, and again it all started with law-breaking blacks who love to fight lawlessness against themselves everywhere.

US military (05/01/1992)

On March 3, 1991, African-Americans Rodney King, Byrant Allen and Freddie Helms ran away from a police patrol at a speed of 115 mph for 8 miles, but were still stopped. Tim Singer - one of the cops - ordered the passengers to get out of the car and lie face down on the ground. During the arrest, the driver King, already on probation, introduced himself very eccentrically and at some point began to put his hand into his belt, but was stopped by officer Melanie Singer - she pointed a gun at him and ordered him to lie on the ground too. The officer approached King, and without taking away her gun, she was preparing to put on handcuffs. At this point, Los Angeles Police Department Sgt. Stacey Kuhn ordered Melanie Singer to sheath her gun because, according to the training, police officers should not approach a detainee with a gun drawn.

Kuhn then ordered the rest of the officers—Lawrence Powell, Timothy Wind, Theodore Briseno, and Rolando Solano—to handcuff King. As soon as the police tried to do this, King began to actively resist - he jumped to his feet and hit Briseno in the chest. Then Sergeant Kun applied a stun gun to King, filling him up, thus, only the second time. However, he began to rise again, lunging towards Powell, who hit him with a club. At this time, the Argentinean George Holliday, who lived near the place where the events unfolded, began to record what was happening on a video camera. Four officers began to beat King with batons for a minute and a half, inflicting 56 blows during this time, which led to a fracture of the facial bone, a broken leg and multiple bruises.

As a result, four officers were charged with excessive violence by the Los Angeles District Attorney. The first judge in the case was replaced, and the second judge changed the venue and composition of the jury. Simi Valley, in neighboring Ventura County, was chosen as the new site of consideration. The court consisted of the inhabitants of this district. The jury consisted of 10 whites, 1 Hispanic, and 1 Asian. Terry White was the prosecutor.

On April 29, 1992, the jury acquitted the three police officers, except for Powell. On the same day, people who disagreed with the verdict began to hold demonstrations that turned into a riot. The blacks started the riots first, but then the Latin neighborhoods of Los Angeles in the southern and central regions of the city picked up the wave. 400 people tried to storm the police headquarters. The next day, riots spread to San Francisco, where looting also began. For the first time, most of the demonstrations were multiracial in nature, involving everyone - blacks, Hispanics and Asians (Korean shopkeepers were among the main victims). Кстати в основных событиях принимал участие и ниггер Тупак Шакур, известный кому-то своими текстами.

Isn't it Will Smith?

The first to suffer was 33-year-old trucker Reginald Denny - a crowd of rioters pulled him out of the cab and beat him half to death. On TV at that time there was a live broadcast of the beating ( video taken from a helicopter). The policemen were ordered to leave this zone, and in general they did nothing for the first days.

Reginald Denny

As a result, Denny lost his speech and the ability to walk, and this did not stop him from shaking hands with his offender at one show, who was identified by a tattoo on his shoulder, filmed by reporters. By the way, this attacker was given a very lenient sentence, and he was not charged with a hate crime at all.

On the morning of May 1, at the request of the 36th Governor of California, Pete Wilson, hummers with guardsmen were already on their way to help, but they had to get there only by Saturday, so 1,700 employees of various law enforcement agencies were the first to come to the aid of the police. On the evening of the same day, President George W. Bush addressed the people, assuring them that justice would prevail.

The city was suspended the movement of buses and intercity trains, was closed "Los Angeles International Airport", which disrupted air traffic over the country. Sports competitions and concerts were postponed to later days. Following the cultural capital of the nation, the uprisings spread to several dozen more US cities.

On the fourth day of the riots, reinforcements did enter the city: about 10,000 guards, 1,950 sheriffs and their deputies, 3,300 military and marines, 7,300 police officers and 1,000 FBI agents. Mass arrests began, 15 rioters were killed by the police. The Justice Department has announced its intention to launch a federal investigation into the Rodney King beating. And some protesters called on the crowd through a megaphone to go to Hollywood and Beverly Hills to rob the rich.

On May 3, Mayor Tom Bradley told the public that the city was practically back under government control. The next day, the curfew was lifted, however, the Federal troops remained in the city until May 9, and the National Guard until the 14th.

Mayor Tom Bradley and Police Chief Daryl Gates during a press conference on the riots

Thus, during the six days of the Los Angeles riot, according to official figures, 55 people died, more than 2,000 were injured, more than 5,500 buildings were burned down and damaged, which amounted to a total damage of $ 1,000,0000,000. Insurance companies called the damage the fifth-worst natural disaster in US history. But the largest mass arrests were the first in the history of the country - there were more than 11,000 (5,000 blacks, 5,500 Hispanics and 600 whites). The total number of participants in the uprising, according to some estimates, approached a six-figure figure. As for Rodney King, who received terms in the future, he was paid compensation of 3,800,000 dollars from Los Angeles. With some of the money, he opened the label "Alta-Pazz Recording Company", where he began to record rap. And April 29 has since been known in the United States as "Rodney King Day".

Plan
Introduction
1 Causes of riots
2 Detention of Rodney King
3 Police trial
4 Riots
Bibliography

Introduction

The Los Angeles Riot is a mass riot that took place in Los Angeles from April 29 to May 4, 1992, resulting in the death of 53 people and causing damage in the amount of 1 billion US dollars.

The riots began on April 29, the day a jury acquitted four white police officers who beat African-American Rodney King for stubbornly resisting arrest for speeding on March 3, 1991. After the verdict, thousands of black Americans, mostly men, took to the streets of Los Angeles and staged demonstrations, some of which turned into riots and pogroms, in which criminal elements participated. The crimes committed during the six days of riots were racially motivated.

Since then, April 29 has been known as "Rodney King Day" in the United States. To investigate the actions and operational activities of representatives of the Los Angeles Police Department during the arrest of Rodney King by Mayor Tom Bradley, the Christopher Commission was created.

1. Causes of riots

Several circumstances and facts from the early 1990s can be cited as the causes of the riots. Among them:

· Extremely high unemployment in South Central Los Angeles, caused by the economic crisis;

· the public's firm belief that the LAPD selects people on a national basis and uses excessive force when making arrests;

beating of an African American Rodney King by white police officers;

· particular annoyance of the African-American population of Los Angeles over the verdict passed on a Korean-American woman who shot and killed 15-year-old African-American girl Latasha Harlins on March 16, 1991 in her own store. Despite the fact that the jury considered Soon Ya Du (Soon Ja Du) guilty of premeditated murder, the judge issued a lenient sentence - 5 years of probation.

2 Detention Of Rodney King

On March 3, 1991, after an 8-mile chase, a police patrol stopped Rodney King's car, in which, in addition to King, there were two more African Americans - Byrant Allen (Byrant Allen) and Freddie Helms (Freddie Helms). The first five police officers to be at the scene were Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, Theodore Briseno and Rolando Solano. Patrolman Tim Singer ordered King and two of his passengers to get out of the car and lie face down on the ground. The passengers obeyed the order and were arrested, while King remained in the car. When he finally left the cabin, he began to behave rather eccentrically: he giggled, stamped his feet on the ground and pointed at a police helicopter circling over the place of detention. Then he began to put his hand in his belt, which led patrol officer Melanie Singer to believe that King was going to get a gun. Then Melanie Singer took out her gun and pointed it at King, ordering him to lie down on the ground. King complied. The officer walked up to King, holding her gun away from him, preparing to handcuff him. At this point, Los Angeles Police Department Sgt. Stacey Kuhn ordered Melanie Singer to sheath her gun because, according to the training, police officers should not approach a detainee with a pistol out of a holster. Sergeant Kuhn decided that Melanie Singer's actions posed a threat to the safety of King, Kuhn herself, and the rest of the officers. Kuhn then ordered the other four police department officers - Powell, Windu, Briceno and Solano - to handcuff King. As soon as the police tried to do this, King began to actively resist - he jumped to his feet, throwing Powell and Briceno off his back. Next, King hit Briseno in the chest. Seeing this, Kun ordered all the officers to step back. Officers later confirmed that King acted as if he were under the influence of phencyclidine, a synthetic narcotic drug developed as an anesthetic for veterinary medicine, however, the results of a toxicological examination showed that there was no phencyclidine in King's blood. Sergeant Kuhn then used a stun gun on King. King groaned and immediately fell to the ground, but then got back on his feet. Then Kun fired her stun gun again, and King fell again. However, he began to rise again, lunging towards Powell, who hit him with a baton, knocking King to the ground. At this time, what was happening began to record on a video camera a citizen of Argentina, George Holliday, who lived near the intersection near which King was beaten (the recording begins from the moment when King makes an attack towards Powell). Holliday later made the video available to the media.

Powell and three other officers took turns beating King with batons for a minute and a half.

King at the time was on parole on robbery charges and had already been charged with assault, battery and robbery. Therefore, as he later explained in court his unwillingness to obey the demands of the patrol, he was afraid of returning to prison.

In total, the police hit King 56 times with batons. He was hospitalized with a fractured facial bone, a broken leg, multiple bruises and lacerations.

3. The trial of the police

The Los Angeles District Attorney charged four officers with excessive violence. The first judge in the case was replaced, and the second judge changed the venue and jury, citing media claims that the jury needed to be challenged. Simi Valley, in neighboring Ventura County, was chosen as the new site of consideration. The court consisted of the inhabitants of this district. The racial composition of the jury was as follows: 10 whites, 1 Hispanic and 1 Asian. The prosecutor was Terry White, an African American.

Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley said:

"The jury's verdict won't hide from us what we saw on that videotape. The people who beat Rodney King don't deserve to wear LAPD uniforms. "

4. Riots

Demonstrations to acquit police juries quickly turned into a riot. Systematic arsons of buildings began - more than 5,500 buildings burned down. People shot at the police and journalists. Several government buildings were vandalized, and the Los Angeles Times newspaper was attacked.

Planes were canceled from the Los Angeles airport, as the city was shrouded in thick smoke.

The blacks were the first to start the riots, but then they spread to the Latin neighborhoods of Los Angeles in the southern and central districts of the city. Large police forces were concentrated in the eastern part of the city, and therefore the uprising did not reach it. 400 people tried to storm the police headquarters. The riots in Los Angeles continued for another 2 days.

The next day, riots spread to San Francisco. Over a hundred stores were looted there. As Willie Brown, a prominent Democratic Party representative in the California State Legislature, told the San Francisco Examiner: “For the first time in American history, most demonstrations, and most of the violence and multiracial in nature, everyone was involved - blacks, whites, people from Asia and Latin America"

On May 2, 7,300 police officers, 1,950 sheriffs, 9,975 National Guardsmen, 3,300 military and 1,000 FBI agents entered Los Angeles. The police killed 15 people and hundreds were injured. More than 12 thousand people were arrested. http://www.tourprom.ru/country/USA/Los-Andgeles/: "In 1992, mass riots took place in Los Angeles, the largest since the 1960s, provoked by the trial of four white police officers convicted of beating an African American , but acquitted in court. In the riots, the accumulated national hostility found a way out: the main victims of the crowd were Korean shopkeepers. In total, 55 people were killed and 2 thousand injured. After six days of unrest, army units were introduced into the city, more than 10 thousand arrests were made. " http://tool2000.sibinfo.net/news_izvestia.php?id=738&f=1: "Ten thousand national guardsmen, 8 thousand police officers, three and a half thousand military personnel, as well as dozens of FBI agents and border guards - such forces were needed by the American authorities in 1992 to quell the riots in Los Angeles in four days."

Bibliography:

1. Kommersant-Money - Guardians of arbitrariness

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_riots_of_1992 - English Wikipedia

4. JURIST - The Rodney King Beating Trials

5. US News and World Report: May 23, 1993, The Untold Story of the LA Riot

6. Cannon, Official Negligence, pp. 27

7. Cannon, Official Negligence, pp. 28

8. Cannon, Official Negligence, pp ?

9. "Prosecution Rests Case in Rodney King Beating Trial" The Washington Post, March 16, 1993

10. Cannon, Official Negligence, pp 31

11. Koon v. United States 518 U.S. 81 (1996)

12. The Arrest Record of Rodney King

13. Cannon, Official Negligence, pp 205

14. NY Times: April 30, 1992, THE POLICE VERDICT; Los Angeles Policemen Acquitted in Taped Beating

15. Max Enger "The Battle of Los Angeles: Class and Race Protest"

Hell in the city of angels

In the fine days of May 1992, the sky over Los Angeles was clouded with the smoke of raging fires - thousands of buildings and cars blazed like that. Spontaneous clashes arose in the streets, accompanied by the sound of broken glass, shooting and the screams of people.

By race

Representatives of the African American community were convinced that the arrest and use of force by the police of the city is guided solely by racial grounds. Of particular outrage among the black population of Los Angeles was the sentence of a Korean-American woman who, on March 16, 1991, shot a 15-year-old black girl in her own store. Despite the fact that the jury found Sun Ya Du guilty of premeditated murder, the judge gave her an extremely lenient sentence of 5 years of probation.

However, the drop that overwhelmed the patience of the black population of Los Angeles was the verdict of the court against four police officers who severely beat the black American Rodney King. Three of them escaped any punishment altogether.

On March 3, 1991, after an 8-mile chase, a police patrol stopped Rodney King's car with three other African Americans in it. Police officer Stacey Kuhn ordered four assistants - Powell, Windu, Briseno and Solano to handcuff King. However, the latter put up quite aggressive resistance to law enforcement officers, in particular, hitting one of them in the chest. The police were forced to use a stun gun, but when this method did not calm the violator, the security forces switched to more decisive actions and simply began to beat King with batons and legs.

It was later revealed that King's blood contained traces of alcohol and marijuana, although this did not relieve the police of responsibility. All this action was captured on camera by an Argentinean George Holliday who lived nearby. The footage of the incident subsequently spread throughout the American media.

Color bacchanalia

Already on the evening of April 29, after the acquittal, thousands of angry crowds of "blacks", and with them "Latinos" poured into the streets of Los Angeles. Stones flew, gunshots rang out, fires flared up. The rioters set fire to 17 government buildings.

According to eyewitnesses, what is happening is more like a civil war, and all this is literally a stone's throw from the dream factory - Hollywood and the fashionable Beverly Hills area. Calls for an uprising of the "colored" against the rule of the "whites" sounded more and more actively on the streets, the most aggressively inclined through a megaphone urged the crowd to go "to Hollywood and Beverly Hills to rob the rich."

A lot went to Korean Americans, especially store owners: it was revenge for an unfair court decision in the case of the murder of a black girl by a Korean woman.

Very quickly, the riot swept the African American and Latin neighborhoods of south and central Los Angeles, the authorities managed to keep the east of the city. The movement of public transport was suspended in the city, and rail and air traffic was also disrupted. Sports and cultural events were postponed to a later date. Following the city of dreams, the uprisings spread to several dozen more US cities.

The next day, riots spread to San Francisco. Over a hundred stores were looted there. As prominent Democratic Party spokesman Willie Brown told the San Francisco Examiner, “For the first time in American history, most demonstrations, and much of the violence and crime, especially looting, were multiracial, involving everyone—black, white, people from Asia and Latin America.

denouement

Curiously, Rodney King received a $3.8 million settlement from the LAPD. With some of these funds, he opened the Alta-Pazz Recording Company label, where he began to record rap. Subsequently, King did not settle down, and still had problems with American justice.