Commander Zero reminded us yesterday that this is Rooftop Korean Anniversary time.
His linked story, however, is large amounts of ahistoric twaddle.
Whoever wrote that tripe has no idea what went down, and clearly wasn’t alive nor living in L.A. at the time. I was.
During the interim between the Rodney King incident, and the Rodney King Verdict, a female Korean liquor store clerk in South Central was getting walloped for stopping a teenage black girl from shoplifting, so as the black girl (the 1991 exemplar of Trayvon Martin Syndrome: "Play Stupid games: Win Stupid Prizes") left the store with (or without) a stolen orange juice bottle, the store owner capped her with her gat – in the back. Deader than canned tuna, right there.
And then got a pass from the L.A. County court (probation, fine, community service. No prison time). C'est la guerre.
Koreans had taken over many of the markets in South Central L.A. over decades, after the previous owners (generally Jewish) had been burned out of the ‘hood in the Watts Riots of ’65. The lack of any supermarkets in that aftermath, for those long decades, made South Central (exactly as today) a “food desert”, where absent a long drive to less diverse regions of the city, only corner liquor stores had the handy necessities of life, like milk, eggs, bread, etc., and being the Diversity, the locals, either lacking the wherewithal and desire to run their own markets, or more likely, knowing that they’d be robbed and shoplifted blind by their own co-Diversity beans, resented the outsiders. Plus ça change...
The shooting above didn’t add anything to their fund of ill will.
So come the Rodney King Free Shoes and Televisions Festival, old scores got settled. Not least of which with Korean shopkeepers in the ‘hood.
In one memorable bit of local color, the Koreans, many former military veterans of South Korea’s National Service rules, took to the roofs of their stores.
LAPD, all aflutter, bypassed rioting Diversity beans of all colors in their haste to disarm the Koreans doing what LAPD would not do. (And no, LAPD wasn’t “stretched too thin”, they were deployed to the central bus yards, and there waited and watched the riots for three days, because Chief Knucklehead Wannabe Gates and Mayor Egging The Riots On Bradley weren’t on speaking terms. The rank and file was largely furious, but management’s plan was to do absolutely nothing, mainly to punish the citizenry at large for daring to indict police officers for beating the hell out of anyone they felt deserved it. Anybody above the rank of Sgt. in LAPD from then on was and is now, a complete gutless douchebadge.)
So when confronted by LAPD on the point, the Koreans handed over their rifles, and LAPD did what they did best in the riots: they beat feet and hid again.
Whereupon the Koreans, being no dummies, waited until the black-and-whites drove off leaving skidmarks, went to their trunks, pulled out their second set of arms, returned to their rooftops, and prevented many a mob from doing to their stores what happened to thousands of others.
On seeing one approaching group seeking cheap goods, the rooftop Koreans present scattered a number of rounds into the pavement ahead of the melee, and the crowd quickly decided to go loot and burn on another street, while still several hundred yards short of their objective.
That’s how it works in a riot: people tend not to go all in just for the fun of looting and arson, if it’s going to become a life-and-death proposition.
There were no complaints, and no arrests, AFAIK, of any rooftop Koreans for the duration. IDK whether they ever got the original set of confiscated rifles back, but knowing the LAPD and D.A., it’s doubtful.
And the whole kerfluffle could have been nipped in the bud, when videographer George Halliday showed up at the Foothill Division station with his homeshot video of the original incident the next day, suggesting that the LAPD might want to pass it along to their Internal Affairs folks for further investigation. Whereupon the desk sergeant in L.A.'s Finest "suggested" to Halliday that he ought to get the hell out of the station rapidly, before he got himself arrested, so he took it over to KTLA-TV instead. The rest is history.
The moral of the story:
32 comments:
Gang warfare... The cops just happen to have the Kings writ. But they're still a gang...
And sadly today when you attempt to defend yourself from the Grasshoppers they will scream for the "Police" to protect them and disarm you for their second attempt. The police will not be around to "Protect" you and yours from this plague of Gimmie Dat's, bet on that friends.
City police are the worst as they are very political and thus the story of the mayor and the chief not working together and the average Joes suffered more than needed. I have a friendly relationship with my local Sherriff but even so I know that a steady paycheck-healthcare and such trump nice guy feelings.
Pay attention to history folks, they disarmed the Roof Top Koreans the first time. Maybe they thought it too dangerous to do it a second time? Who knows.
The moral I notice is have a second set (maybe more) of defensive "tools" hidden away for use when (not if) your robbed by the boys in blue (now a days I notice uniforms are SS Black...) Second lesson might be a cache of restarting materials and food might be a wise investment while Wal-Mart is *still* open?
I hope your plan B has included trusted friends who will take you in if your place is burnt out. Ecclesiastes' 4:12 Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.
And the food riots begin when?
Shortly after the EBT cards stop working, by most estimates.
Fascinating read, truly.
On a not-unrelated note: I don't know what all the fallout from the pandemic and shutdown will be, but if social media is any indication (always a big "if"), I suspect some of it will be a general loss of respect for LEO, given how so many of them have so readily enforced even the most draconian orders of power-hungry state and local officials. The next time there's a Black Lives Matter protest aimed at the cops, I suspect a lot of people who had defended them will just sit it out.
I remember the National Guard showing up with a M2 in the back of a 6x6.
@Aesop, given the meat-supply chain kerfuffle with the big chains (who are not "grocers" but distribution points) and the rising cost thereof, that may be a shorter window on those EBT cards than some think. Local grocers drawing upon local stock/butchering operations will provide better. But the big-box chains are really just centralized traffic management hubs, moving product from point A to point D, need or record-of-demand be damned.
A Trump-eted order to run the processing plants may get things moving just a bit faster than B-24's started rolling off the Willow Run assembly line.
When the beef, pork, and chicken shelves look like the TP aisle did 6 weeks ago & hamburger of any kind is $20/lb. that EBT doesn't go far. An extra freezer looks better right now than Latonya Lumumba's 72" TV and new car amp with super-woofer. Ants & grasshoppers.
I was there for the original in '65 - sporty times then too.
"LAW ENFORCEMENT" not "peace officer". They have shown that by and large they will enforce the laws. They will rightly claim that they don't make the laws, nor are they in a position to judge the law. The other branches do that. Frankly we don't WANT them to do those things.
We don't get to vote for our cops but we do vote for our 'lawmakers'. Funny that they've adopted that word to describe themselves, no? Kinda tells you what they think is important. So vote. And if there are no good candidates, run yourself. School board is the traditional place to start. Local elections do make a difference.
nick
Thanks for the history lesson, not just another meme. Imagine if it had been a different ethnic group.....
I had been at a conference at LA Air Force Station just 2 weeks before the riot. Some of the footage I saw on TV looked awfully similar to my route from my hotel to LA AFS.(of course to a non-native, a lot of that terrain looks very similar so I could be mistaken)
A white guy in an blue uniform (even if non-LE) would have had a rather sporty time of it I think.
I got my education at a state college with evening classes. During the day if you let the parking meter run out by 5 minutes you could count on a ticket. In contrast when I was headed to the satelite lots to drive home at 11pm there wasn't a badge to be found in that zip code. It's much more profitable and safe to extract payment from the law-abiding than it is to actually prevent crime. A fella could get hurt like that. Thanks for your cervix, piggies.
Thought experiment: A police officer pulls up behind you on the road. Is your instinctive response "oh good a cop is here, we're safe", or "oh shit here comes a BS ticket"?
Thought experiment 2: You've just survived a violent defensive encounter where an attacker trying to hurt/kill/take your stuff lies dead at your feet from your CCW pistol. Are you overjoyed at surviving or worried about what the cops will do to you once they arrive?
I read somewhere and it rings true that cops protect criminals more than the law-abiding. Absent a police presence the normal treatment for criminals is summary execution and disposal in a ditch.
That all being said, my rural sherriff's office is polite, courteous, and takes their duty to protect and serve very seriously. The sheriff is also directly beholden to the voters, can and has been replaced in local elections, and I can knock on every single door that has a vote in one day's efficient work. Recall also the slew of Virginia sheriffs who vowed to resist gun control with deputized militia. Local, local, local as WRSA reminds us.
I was building scenery in downtown Hollywood for the RODNEY KING riots, not the LA riots like the article said...
We were in crunch time, trying to finish a project before the boat literally left the dock. We had radios on in the shop and heard the coverage of the rioting coming up La Brea toward us. Our boss had us put every tool back in the crib in its place (which I later figured out was to make the insurance claim easier), had the paint department board up and paint over our windows, and generally secure the shop. As the rioting got closer, he cut us loose. We armed ourselves with whatever chunks of metal and wood felt right, and decided to caravan home on surface streets rather than get stuck on a freeway. We drove past a strip mall on Western Ave that had hundreds of people milling around. By the time we got home and turned on the TV, they were showing pictures of those storefronts being looted and burned. I missed getting stuck in that by 20 minutes.
We also watched helicopter footage of Reginald Denny getting his brains kicked out, and it was clear to my roommate and me that he'd been driving an entertainment industry production truck (they're all set up pretty similarly) or grip truck. That hit home too. Later that night we watched the fires burning from the porch and smoke was blowing in thru our front door. A G17 and 35 rounds did NOT feel like enough.
Next day we went in to work. I remember how surreal it was, driving past Fredricks of Hollywood and seeing just smoking rubble where buildings were the day before. I had my G17 on the seat under a T shirt. No WAY was I going down like Denny. At work, everyone kind of sheepishly was showing each other what was in the top drawer of the toolbox, or on top of your tool bag (guns) thinking that it was maybe overreaction, since the day was beautiful. Then the rioting and looting started back up, and the boss sent us home for the duration.
When we finally returned to work, driving past NG standing on street corners with slung rifles and still smoking rubble along the route was even more surreal.
FWIW, they did try to burn down our shop. The FD was still responding to calls at the time and put out the dumpster fire before it could catch the building on fire. One of my co-workers ended up shooting at looters to protect his grandma's house in the middle of the night, and my other roommate was hospitalized after getting beat up as the victim of racial violence. I bought a shotgun and started down the path of filling the safe with 'tools'. Later, before the Northridge trial, I said "F this" to LA and headed to San Diego, where I was pretty sure there wouldn't be any rioting. That trial didn't result in as much damage...
Funny thing is, some people clearly saw it coming. A small auto sales lot on my route home cleared out all their inventory before the riots. I though he'd gone out of business when I saw it a day or two before the verdict. Turns out, he and a bunch of auto dealers all got their stock out of LA. I had no clue. I wasn't paying attention to that sort of thing at the time (and I was working 6/10s most weeks with additional time on Sunday, and we'd just gone to 6/12s to try to finish the project.)
Moral of the story, it can happen, and if you aren't paying attention or are unlucky, it can really hurt you. But, there are steps you can take to deal with it too.
nick
Aesop,
Thank you very much for that bit of detailed history on the Rooftop Koreans Rodney King Riots.
Although I find it very upsetting and infuriating to think that the LAPD went to confiscate the arms of the Koreans who were protecting their lives and their businesses, and then afterwards left the area to leave them defenseless in the face of the rioters who were reasonably likely at that point to through mob violence burn their businesses to the ground and to also quite possibly murder the any and all of the Koreans.
Your story clearly shows that one needs to have more than one set of self-defense arms, in more than one location.
Getting a visit from the armed police confiscating any firearms they can discover due to the "emergency" ahead of needing them, and then later after the police have left needing them when finding yourself confronted by a mob of people bent on taking everything you have and killing you and yours is not something I suspect everyone thinks of. But now we know what can happen, because it has happened in the past...
Thanks Aesop. I remember vividly watching the events that night; forget it was today.
I read in the LA Times in the 1990s that, unlike Hispanics who arrived here with only perhaps a few hundred dollars, the average Korean arrived with $50,000. I suspect that the average Korean, like immigrants from some other countries, obtained much of this money from loans from relatives.
Unlike so many Hispanics, Koreans coming here generally had a decent education. They did not have to clean toilet bowls or mow grass for a living. Either because of a cultural tradition or because of what they believed were cultural barriers, they wanted to work for themselves in small businesses, instead of working for large companies. In my one trip to South Korea in the late '80s, I recall small grocery shops not much bigger than my living room where the proprietor would sit at the sidewalk waiting for a customer to enter.
Mom and Pop Markets, dry cleaners, and donut shops, in particular, were taken over by Koreans in Southern California in the late 80s and early 90s. (I used to joke and to challenge people to find a donut shop in Southern California that wasn't run by Koreans.) What these businesses had in common was that they required long hours and inconvenient hours, or both, and it didn't cost a great deal to buy these businesses. It was common for a Mom and Pop Market run by Koreans to have the family's living quarters on the second floor. The store would be open 16 hours a day and mom, pop, and the kids would take turns handling customers.
No one with much choice would have chosen South Central for a location for doing businesses. Too many businesses had been burned out in the Watts Riots, and the drug epidemic was in high gear. Putting up with the clientele who served as customers was not something most normal people wanted to do, so Korean immigrants, as the new kids on the block, filled the void.
As was said, prices in these stores were higher than at the mainstream supermarket chains. For good reason, most of these supermarket chains refused to re-build in South Central. "Once burned, twice shy"--literally.
Yes the shooting of the black teenager was the Trayvon Martin case of the day. I found the granting of probation to the shooter to be a puzzlement, but then, I have never studied the case in detail. All I can say is that, after looking at the milieu in which the shopkeeper had to function each day, and the kind of people coming in and out of the store who served as her customer base, the judge figured that a normal person can only take so much crap each day.
One can focus on the anger at South Koreans all they want, or the anger at the LAPD both before and after the Rodney King verdict, but that still does not explain/justify the indiscriminate looting and burning of all sorts of businesses in South Central, some of which were black-owned.
Of course, all of the looters were not black. Hispanics joined in huge numbers. Clearly, what began as a political protest evolved in an hour or so into an indiscriminate effort by the dregs of society to loot, rob, and commit mayhem in the affected areas and well beyond. It wasn't really a protest. It was merely an opportunity.
A fellow I worked with told me how he watched a black fellow wearing a new, ill-fitting, mis-matched suit and mis-matched shoes being interviewed on TV. The reporter asked him how he felt about what happened with the Rodney King situation. He responded, "I really don't know, to tell you the truth. I don't watch sports much."
I worked with a couple of black guys who made really good money but they told me they both went and looted when the riots went down...Its in their nature to take whatever they can and the attitude of you can't protect it then you don't deserve to have it...They are not fit for a civil society...
Junior Termite is a Recon Marine, stationed in Okinawa.
He has been on lock down for over 2 weeks. Because COVID-19.
He has N95 masks sent to him via his mother. He is not allowed to wear then, to go to chow hall. Because other Marines don't have them, and "we are in this to gather."
OK, I get it.
I flew for Task Force 160, when it meant something. You can now go Fuck Your Selves.
The Termite
My point wasn't to excuse anything.
It was that anarchy is its own reward.
The LAPD f**ked with the law when they decided that curbside justice was in-bounds.
Again when they refused to look into it.
Hood Rat f**ked with the law when she decided orange juice was free that day.
The store clerk f**ked with the law when she decided back-shooting over shoplifting was justified.
The court f**ked with the law when they handed out a wrist slap for what was nearer to second-degree murder.
The jury in the RK trial, in a town that was 50% cop families, f**ked with the law when they let everyone off for an epic beatdown.
The rioters f**ked with the law when they decided rage = free tennis shoes and TV sets.
Then LAPD f**ked with the law when they decided to ignore rioters, but punish shop owners trying to protect their livelihoods.
So much fail, so few killed for it who should have been.
Ah yes, the police are ever keen to enforce laws, except when dindu nuffins are out in force breaking those laws with impunity.
Aesop,
"The jury in the RK trial, in a town that was 50% cop families, f**ked with the law when they let everyone off for an epic beatdown."
1.) Simi Valley definitely did not have 50% cop families,2 while there certainly were many cop families living there at the time.
2.) The jury at the trial was drawn from a jury pool composed of the entire county, not one drawn from Simi Valley.
The LAPD had incurred the enmity of the people living in South Central. As you will recall, the crack epidemic was still in high season. South Central was soaked with drugs through and through and the crime rate was off the board. The LAPD took aggressive measures to control the situation and South Central resented it.
Those outside that area just figured that "this is how these people are." Distance was the best protection from their behavior, and white people put as much distance between them and South Central as their pocketbooks could afford.
Rodney King led a high speed chase on freeways, and even through residential neighborhoods at speeds up to 70 mph. While he was beaten unmercifully, the reaction of many was that the cops had just had enough from people of his element and they snapped after he was told time after time to stay down on the ground but would not do so. Like the Korean shopkeeper, many people looked at what happened and decided that a normal cop can only take so much. A person of normal sensibility can only take so effing much.
So, now we get to the Mexican participants in the incident. Can somebody mansplain to the rest of us why so many Mexicans--a large percentage of which were wearing shirts whose backsides were still moist with Rio Grande water--decided to participate in the looting, turning it into the Rodney King International Festival? A huge number of them hadn't been here long enough to have developed a grievance against the cops, much less against the diverse storeowners and shopkeepers they plundered.
Times change, and much of the time it is because people change. Compton, for example, is a Hispanic-majority city now because of illegal immigration. (Back around 2006 I actually tried to figure out whether my son was safer with the 101st Airborne in Iraq than he would be if he was a young black man in Compton. I gave up because I didn't have the population estimate for 18 to 26 year-old males in Compton.) Hispanic immigration has pushed blacks out of some areas they dominated in the 1990s, and the crime rate, while still high by standards elsewhere, has been reduced.
As long as the EBT card use is uninterrupted, as long as the LA Housing Authority keeps providing subsidized housing, and as long as Section 8 payments to landlords keep coming, we are unlikely to see a Rodney King II type of riot in the near future, even considering the current pandemic.
If all of that fails, anyone who lives within a few miles of South LA (the LA City Council changed the name to South LA, so, voila!, no more problems in South Central) is probably going to need more than a Glock.
The LAPD f**ked with the law when they decided that curbside justice was in-bounds.
Massad Ayoob believed that the root cause of this failure was the LAPD cheaping out on training, specifically an abbreviated baton course which didn't include the methods necessary to subdue someone like King. So they had 3 choices: the normal one would be to shoot him until he stopped fighting, after which there would have been no bad repercussions, let him go, which is not what they're paid to do, or the "compassionate" course as some have described of beating him until he surrendered or couldn't continue fighting.
The jury you denounce saw the entire footage that had been taken of the event, not the clips of the end which were not much more honest than the editing of Zimmerman's words which left out the dispatcher asking him what race Martin was. The second jury knew what would happen again if they didn't find the police guilty.
A lot of ugly things are required if we're to enjoy both our diversity and our civilization.
Ok, the "Rodney King Free Shoes and Televisions Festival" cracked me up. A classic.
"Shortly after the EBT cards stop working, by most estimates." There was a book a few decades back titled "the Great Reckoning" that had a chapter on this very situation called "when the music stops" if I recall.
I'd add "can't find anything to buy with EBT, even if they 'work'" to not working as well.
We can quibble about cop families, but Simi Valley is overwhelmingly populated by LAPD, LAFD, LASO, and LA city and County employees, all paid well enough not to live in the city and county they work for. So is most of the rest of the Eastern end of Ventura County.
The original jury was a bunch of fucktards, and I've seen the entire video as well, multiple times. Like many others, that verdict was proof that "jury of your peers" always consists of "the twelve people too stupid to get out of jury duty". The CHP should have simply shot King as they'd originally intended. I left them out of the general cock-up because they deferred to the LAPD, making everything else possible.
And the LAPD "cheaping out on training" has been since ever. The root problem is that they've always been badged thugs, except for a brief period from the late '50s to the early 70s, and famously corrupt prior to that, and frequently since. Diversity hiring has a price too.
The RK incident was just the first time anyone had documented it on videotape.
Everyone, citywide, pretty much realized "if they think can do this to him, with everyone watching, the police are the problem in this city, not the solution".
Afterwards, "white flight" had more to do with TPTB than with school bussing issues.
I'll leave California when you pry it from my cold dead fingers, but I wouldn't live in L.A. for half of Bill Gates' bank account, unless they give INS carte blanche, and an earthquake there kills 5M people first. Those two things would be a good start.
And yes, the rioters were just about equally black, hispanic, and white, in almost 33% divisions, based on subsequent arrests and prosecutions, and raw TV footage.
And the migra community has pushed the black community out of South Central in large part, though not entirely. It's mainly Mexican cartel gangs rumbling with black gangs.
Yes, by William Rees Moggs
Aesop,
Sorry, but the figures from even the acutely politically correct LA Times tell a different story: "A RAND Corp. computer analysis of charges filed in local courts in the peak days of the riots found that 51% of the defendants were Latino and 36% were black." https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-06-18-me-734-story.html "But Petersilia [who directs RAND’s Criminal Justice Research Program] offered another theory for the high proportion of Latino arrests. It is possible, she said, that police may have steered away from arresting black men for fear of provoking confrontations."
That latter situation is exactly what happened at the very beginning of the riots. The LAPD pulled back to give the rioters "space," just as that clueless, feckless mayor of Baltimore did a few years ago. A few dead looters and arsonists that first night would have meant that there would have been no second night.
While a person can crunch the numbers ad nauseum, and point out how arrests for curfew violations are far different from arson and looting, etc., etc., etc., the simple fact is the Rodney King riots were minority shit shows no matter how the incident is analyzed--and it wasn't made up of "almost 33% divisions."
When Hurricane Katrina hit, one of the guys at the office pointed out the prominent photo that the LA Times ran that showed two white guys coming out of a store with loot. He asked me to guess how many thousand photos the LA Times had to cull in order to find a white guy involved in looting in New Orleans (in order to make looting seem to be "ecumenical.") I responded something to the effect of "plenty." Of all the video I have ever seen regarding Katrina, I never, ever saw one looter who was white.
I am reminded of the phrase "the usual suspects." You can be sure that if this pandemic takes a massive, downward turn in the next few months, that there will be a replay of the early 90s, and the same people (or their kids now) will be the perps involved. And if not this pandemic, then the next major societal catastrophe will see the same behavior.
The TV cameras told a slightly different story, and there is just as much "white trash" in L.A. as there is anywhere else.
Arrests during the riots were a total joke, BTW.
Maybe we watched different riots on TV.
Check out this long video of TV footage and find as many white guys as you can (and cops don't count): https://youtu.be/YqA1Qj2MAu0
At some point, you're probably going to begin to feel as if you're playing "Where's Waldo."
1) I had seven local channels, live.
2) I also had the local emerg. freqs running on scanner 24/7.
3) Only while doing a first aid station in the basement of the First AME Church in South Central was finding a white guy like playing "Where's Waldo". The locals had the wits to put us in the basement, lest, like Fallujah, we find ourselves decorating a bridge somewhere handy with our own body parts.
As I noted, BTDT and got the t-shirt.
What's archived on YouTube nearly 30 years later is a pale imitation of the actual experience.
But if there was a searchable database of any and every local station's A- and B-roll footage, for everywhere, it would be a treasure trove of primary-source history.
IIRC about a year later, after studying every available foot of tv coverage, the LAPD went out and arrested everyone they could identify looting or otherwise breaking the law during the riots. All at once, so as not to panic or allow people to fade away.
I had a conversation with one of our hispanic shop guys after we came back to work, about the looting. He was horrified by his friend who filled a whole car with boxes of looted COOKIES. Said friend didn't even LIKE the cookies, they were just what he could get his hands on. There was a lot of hispanic looting and burning too. The shops I passed on my way home on Western were looted and burned by a primarily hispanic crowd.
My buddy who was shooting at looters was hispanic, and the neighborhood was hispanic.
Most of the stupidest sh!t was blacks though. There was footage of people with sofas on top of their cars. People were stealing POTTED PLANTS. And the guys stomping Reginald Denny were black, as were the guys that beat my roommate and his ex-wife.
I don't recall seeing mobs of whites looting or burning or beating anyone at the time, nor did I hear any stories about it. It's not un-possible, but I didn't see or hear about it. And yeah, we did have some white scumbags working for us, so if it happened, they were smarter than the brown and black guys who were bragging about it.
In any case, it's not something I want to go thru again, under any circumstances.
nick
Aesop:
When LA put out a request for assistance in convicting the Rodney King cops the first time, quite a few of the experts, such as Ayoob, decided that was a good thing. Until they saw the full tape and recordings of the incident. (TV never showed the full tape to the public) ALL of them quit and offered to assist the defendants. The second (federal) trial was a joke, as the jury members admitted they simply voted to avoid another riot.
DA Gil Garcetti, the father of current LA Mayor Eric Garcetti, committed legal malpractice when he moved the O.J. Simpson trial out of Santa Monica to downtown LA and its minority jury pool. The alleged reason was the small size of the Santa Monica courthouse. (For some odd reason, that didn't stop the civil trial being held there later. Go figure.)
Many said at the time that Garcetti made the move because it would make it easier for him to appear at press conferences, an opportunity he didn't want to give up.
While this might be true, given a politician's usual inclinations, I am highly suspicious that the more important reason was different. One lawyer said to me in defending Garcetti's decision, that if O.J. had been convicted in Santa Monica, blacks would have burned LA down again. My response to him was "Let it burn!"
No one ever talks about the other dude in the car with King, the night he got gacked up & decided to got a few rounds with the corrupt LAPD piggies.
The reason he didn't get a beat down? He obeyed the basic commands and got out of 5he car, hands above the head, down on the ground.
King had a different plan of action.
Which resulted with two wildly different outcomes.
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