LA Riots and today's kids

sgip

sgip

Well-known member
Was a complete unknown to Soylent Blue, my High School aged kid, that 25 years ago Los Angeles blew up. No one today is teaching anything about this kind of stuff even though it's shaped culture - pop and real - so dramatically since. Newspapers aren't read any longer and it seems as though if it's not Kardashian related or instagrammable, it's just not news. 

Made SB watch the NatGeo documentary "LA 92" to get an idea what was happening then. Strongly recommend it for the quality and scope of work.

The documentary brought back lots of very vivid memories for me. By the way, where were you in 1992?
 
1992 I just completed my 1 year operation "Desert Storm" and was enroute to The Gulf of Columbia Operation Drug Enforcement via USS DENVER LPD-9. When I saw the news onboard, Los Angeles then was like a war zone all over again. It reminded me of the war zone so much that I had to do a double take and realized that it was Los Angles, California and not the desert Saudi Arabia.
 
I was in my dormitory in the middle of Indiana, all eyes glued to the images on the small tube tvs most rooms had.  I remember there were reports of "sympathetic" riots in other cities for a night or 2, and we speculated on how fall society might fall, and whether we should prepare to bug out to the corn fields.  I have a lot of memories from that time period.  Bugle Boy Jeans, LA Gear shoes, Vanilla Ice, MC Hammer and Bel Biv Devoe, talk shows were exploding with sordidness, my 286 PC clone had 256 colors I think, but the HP dot matrix printer was of course B/W. 
 
I was sitting on my parents balcony in Palos Verdes with my black assistant who couldn't return to her home in d hood, drinking a beer and watching the city burn from the Hollywood sign to Long Beach. It was surreal.
 
I drove to the highest spot I could find in RSM and looked West. Smoke from a dozen or so spot fires were curling up into the sky.

The next day I went out to buy my first gun.

There's a scene in "LA 92" reminding me of those fires and the gripping fear that blanketed in the Southland at that time.

My .02c
 
I was working night shift in Labor and Delivery. LDRPs were new at the time and the patients kept the tvs on thru the whole delivery. We all watched the fires on tv between pushes during a delivery.
 
I was up in hills above Brea with some friends watching LA burn. It was an amazing sight and I could smell the smoke from North OC. Some of the things going through my mind were: why were the rioters burning and looting in their own neighborhoods when it would make more sense for them to go do harm to white neighborhoods (although since all my white friends were strapped in those days so its probably a good thing the rioters stayed in their neighborhood), judging by what was happening to the Korean businesses and to the motorists at Florence & Normandie, forget 911 as you cannot count on the authorities to save you when the shit really hits the fan (white motorists actually stopped their cars just to be dragged out and attacked when they could have easily hit the rioters with their cars and kept driving), and how the heck can one guy carry a large sofa over his head and sprint down La Cienega out of a Fedco store. Some of my more insane and heavily armed friends actually hoped the riots would come to OC so they could get some "action."
 
Happiness said:
Some of the things going through my mind were: why were the rioters burning and looting in their own neighborhoods when it would make more sense for them to go do harm to white neighborhoods (although since all my white friends were strapped in those days so its probably a good thing the rioters stayed in their neighborhood), judging by what was happening to the Korean businesses and to the motorists at Florence & Normandie, forget 911 as you cannot count on the authorities to save you when the shit really hits the fan (white motorists actually stopped their cars just to be dragged out and attacked when they could have easily hit the rioters with their cars and kept driving)
Click to expand...

That's exactly why they didn't go to nicer neighborhoods, that's where the cops are, excerpt from Wiki:
...
Korean Americans noted the law enforcement's abandonment of Koreatown, contrasting it with official defense lines for places like white neighborhoods of Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. Subsequently, they organized their own armed security teams composed of store owners, who defended their livelihoods from assault by the mobs.
...

Craziness to see how they're able to destroy their own neighborhood. 


Happiness said:
how the heck can one guy carry a large sofa over his head and sprint down La Cienega out of a Fedco store.
Click to expand...

And large tv's (heavy tube tv's back in those days), never seen people move large items so darn fast, faster than any moving companies ever
 
Cops in my area choked off all the entry points to PV.  Super defensible. There are only a few main streets that head into the hill. Cops sat on each one all day and all night checking cars and IDs.  Same in all the beach cities, MB, HB, and RB.  Had friends in Venice and that area burned but nothing in the rich beach areas.
 
"LA 92" Spent a good amount of time on the build up, including the Latasha Harlins case. Just like Brock Turner in NorCal, Harlin's judge was a prime example of judiciary tone deafness.

SGIP
 
I was at UCLA at the time and we actually got National guards patrolling the street of Westwood in the hummers way before any other areas.  Besides the news on TV and hummers rolling down on the street, things are pretty much normal here at Westwood. 

2 years later I got a job working in Compton and I can still see plenty of burn down/closed down stores and aftermath of riots on the way to/from work.  Through out the 4 years I've worked in the Compton, majority of these close down stores were never open again. 
 
Soylent Green Is People said:
"LA 92" Spent a good amount of time on the build up, including the Latasha Harlins case. Just like Brock Turner in NorCal, Harlin's judge was a prime example of judiciary tone deafness.

SGIP
Click to expand...
Judge Karlin, who received national outrage for giving Soon Ja Du probation for killing Latasha Harlins, got reelected to the bench shortly after the riots. Moral of the story: if you're pissed about a judge, you should vote instead of riot.
 
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