The Rodney King effect: 30 years after riots, how far has LA come?
John Thomas grew up in South Los Angeles – then called South Central. The son of a single mother, one of six kids, he says he never had a positive encounter with a police officer until he became one. Just like other African American youths, he was stopped often without provocation and with no explanation.
On April 29, 1992, he was working undercover in the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) narcotics division when they saw on TV that a jury had acquitted four white LA police officers for severely beating a Black motorist, Rodney King, a year earlier.
His supervisor sent him home, not expecting any trouble, but the young officer knew he would be called back. This was a unique case. In a time before cellphone cameras, a citizen had caught the sustained beating on a hand-held video camera, on March 3, 1991. The grainy footage was aired on TV stations around the world and used as evidence at the trial. This was not a Black man’s word against that of white officers. Anything other than “guilty” was going to be explosive.
And so it proved. The news ignited days of looting, fires, and deaths – a generational precursor to the civil unrest and outrage over the police killing of George Floyd.
The violence started in South Central and quickly spread north to Koreatown, where shop owners fired guns to defend their businesses. Resentment had been festering among Black locals over numerous Korean-owned liquor stores in South Central, which profited from the Black community with no reinvestment. Just after Mr. King was beaten, a Korean American liquor store owner shot and killed a 15-year-old African American girl, Latasha Harlins, from behind as she was leaving the store after an altercation over a $1.79 bottle of orange juice. The owner was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, but ended up getting probation – an injustice still fresh in the minds of rioters.
So many fires were set that thick smoke forced Los
