The Unrest That Led to the LA Riots, Twenty-Five Years On

By Carvell Wallace, The New Yorker

29 April 17

he video of Rodney King—the motorist whose beating by the Los Angeles Police Department, in 1991, would ultimately spark six days of violent unrest—asking “Can we all get along?” is still, twenty-five years later, astonishing to watch. He made the remarks at an impromptu press conference at his lawyer’s office on the third day of the violence, which began on April 29, 1992, after the cops who were caught on camera beating him were acquitted of any wrongdoing. King’s voice is unsteady; he fumbles for the words and appears on the verge of tears. He is overcome. As he speaks, buildings are burning in his name. Cars have been set aflame. More than eleven thousand arrests will be made in less than a week. Two thousand injuries will be reported, and fifty-five people, most of them African-American, will die. King’s question became a meme almost instantly, before most of us knew that word. It was ridiculed as infantile. How would it be possible to get along in a city where the police operate above the law, where African-Americans suffer daily under the lash of a crooked justice system that echoes the brutality of slave catchers and overseers? How can we get along when Korean shop owners are targeted and attacked, their businesses burned, and they stand on rooftops armed with high-calibre weapons in broad daylight as firefights erupt on city streets? How can we get along when Reginald Denny, a white truck driver who was hauling gravel past the corner of Florence and Normandie, was pulled from his cab and beat nearly to death by fists, boots, and a brick hurled with full force, from point-blank range, at his temple? These were the circumstances in Los Angeles in the spring of 1992. Obviously, we could not get along. And yet King’s question is striking today for its endurance as much as for its innocence. It still hangs in the air, still taunts us.

To explore the question with any kind of earnestness demands a careful and human consideration of all that led to the riots. This is the approach taken by the ABC documentary “Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992,” which screened in a few theatres last weekend and has its television première on Friday night. The feature-length film, directed by the “12 Years A Slave” screenwriter and “American Crime” showrunner John Ridley, is one of a slew of documentaries marking the event’s twenty-fifth anniversary. What sets Ridley’s apart is not the power of the archival footage but the interviews that he has done and the time that he takes with them. As the title indicates, Ridley begins a decade before the world heard about Rodney King, chronicling the death of James Mincey, a black motorist who was maced and choked to death in his mother’s driveway after failing to comply with a routine traffic stop for a cracked windshield. Mincey’s death is recalled by his girlfriend. Like all the interviewees in the film, she is shot warmly, close enough for us to see her thinking and feeling, but not so close as to feel invasive.

Mincey’s death by chokehold was a public-relations nightmare for the L.A.P.D., which claimed that he was on PCP before a toxicology report refuted that pretense. Tensions were further exacerbated when Daryl Gates, the police chief at the time, suggested that black people might be more likely to die from a chokehold than “normal people.” Soon after Mincey’s death, chokeholds were banned, and officers used metal batons instead. Gates would remain the chief of police through the beating of Rodney King and the riots.

Ridley also zeroes in on the death of Karen Toshima, a twenty-seven-year-old graphic artist, in Westwood, in February, 1988. Toshima was caught in crossfire during a shootout between rival gangs in the posh neighborhood. The L.A.P.D. responded to the ensuing panic, driven largely by the fear that the gang problem was beginning to affect non-black neighborhoods, by undertaking mass arrests and “enhanced” enforcement. Thousands of new officers were quickly hired, shoddily trained, and sent forth with a singular mission to “bring the hammer down.” In one April weekend that year, one thousand four hundred and fifty-three people were arrested.

That was also the year that N.W.A. recorded “Straight Outta Compton,” addressing police brutality on a record that would go triple platinum, and capturing the feeling of turbulence and trouble in the neighborhoods south of the 10 freeway. While the acquittal of the officers who beat King is remembered as the event that incited the riots, fewer accounts today mention the shooting of Latasha Harlins, which took place less than two weeks after the beating of King came to light. Harlins was a fifteen-year-old in South Central who got into a dispute with a Korean shopkeeper named Soon Ja Du. Du accused Harlins of attempting to steal a carton of orange juice. Security footage showed that the altercation becoming heated, with Du grabbing Harlins, Harlins throwing blows at the fifty-one-year-old Du, and Du then throwing a stool at the child. When Harlins tried to leave, without the orange juice, Du shot her in the back of the head, killing her instantly. Eyewitnesses reported, and the L.A.P.D. later concluded, that Harlins was not trying to steal the orange juice but, rather, had it in her open backpack, with money in her hand to pay for it. Eight months later, Du was found guilty of manslaughter, and the jury recommended the maximum sentence of sixteen years. But the trial judge, Joyce Karlin, instead sentenced her to five years probation, four hundred hours of community service, and a five-hundred-dollar fine. “This is not a time for revenge,” Karlin said in her sentencing remarks. Less than six months later, most of the stores burned during the riots were Korean-owned. Korean business owners formed ad hoc militias; footage presented in “Let It Fall” shows these groups exchanging gunfire in the middle of the streets.

Ridley gives most of the film over to people who were there, letting them tell their stories. Each person who lost someone in the riots maintains a quiet, loving reserve, as though the grief is so permanent that it does not need acknowledgement. Ridley’s camera gives these emotional nuances time to present themselves. He extends this courtesy to the L.A.P.D. as well. We hear the officer who choked James Mincey to death justify his decision as normal police work gone wrong. We hear the commanding lieutenant of the department’s seventy-seventh division, who made the ill-fated decision to retreat from the corner of Seventy-first and Normandie, which allowed the rioting to spread. (Denny was attacked a block south of there shortly afterward.) He says that he felt he did all that he could. We are ready to recognize the humanity of those who were victims of an unequal system; the film’s poise forces us to recognize, as well, the humanity of those who served as executioners. “Let It Fall” maintains a remarkable balance, laying bare how deeply the system was designed to oppress some and privilege others, and still portraying all the players in that system simply as flawed human beings. Ridley tells a story in which there are no winners, just losers of varying degrees, mostly determined by race and class.

Almost no one who is interviewed—from the men who attacked Reginald Denny to the parents of slain children to the officers who killed unarmed citizens—looks back with certainty that they would have done anything differently. And so the story that the film tells feels, rightfully, unresolved. The causes and conditions of the riots in Los Angeles in 1992—appalling racial injustice and a largely white state force rarely held accountable—persist. As does King’s question. But twenty-five years later, it has become less of a question and more of a prayer.