Riot Remembered: What the Violence Taught Me

What do I remember about the L.A. Riots?

My memory of the time is divided in four almost distinct areas.

First, my wife and I were going though some personal tumult, which was living large and loud in my head and was coloring everything in my life at that time.

In those years we were living in Frogtown and I was the full time parent, and working from home. We took the kids to school, and the other parents hanging about were hysterical and their kids were terrified, so Mrs. O’Roscoe and I did the only reasonable thing.

We took the kids to Disneyland.

The place was nearly empty. I found the fear in some people’s faces amusing. I talked to more than one family that came to L.A. for a vacation and had been planning the trip for a while. They had heard about the riots and were either confident that the riots weren’t near Anaheim or were in fear that the riots were going to find them in Adventureland. 

Some were feeling guilty that they were too cheap to give up the deposits on the trip and were awaiting death in California.

We had a very nice Disney visit. We were there by late morning and we closed the place down. The day was good for our family and it was good for the kids. The ones that remember the day say that our going to Disneyland, and the conversations with out-of-towners there, put the riots in a certain perspective. They said that when they returned to school, they felt pity for the classmates that were afraid.

We drove back to Los Angeles on the I-5, where we could see fires, helicopters and police parading around through unoccupied spaces. The only two things I was worrying about were if we were going to be caught up in the citywide curfew nonsense at 2 a.m.--and if the marriage would survive.

I hope most people at the time had been following the Rodney King police brutality hearing. I hope most people heard the bullshit in the testimony of the officers, and were outraged at the acquittal of those officers.

While I don’t approve of violence as a way to settle problems, I understood the frustration and immense anger that many felt in our city.

Had I been younger, I would have been out there angry and protesting. I think if a couple of the O’Roscoe kids had been a bit older, they would have been out there as well being vocal and trying to understand the anger at the injustice.

I learned a few things about my country from the riots.

I remember the Watts Riots in the 1965 on TV--seeing the smoke in the distance. I personally witnessed the spark that began the East L.A. riots about 5 years later.

What I most remember about those two events was the brutality and cruelty of the police and other law enforcement agencies.

There were 32 civilian deaths more than 1,000 injuries recorded in the Watts Riots. Police officers killed three demonstrators (including L.A. Times reporter Rubén Salazar) during so-called Chicano Moratorium, a protest held in East L.A. to raise awareness about the disproportionately high number of Latinos being killed in Vietnam.

In the L.A. riots of 20 years ago, 53 people were brutally killed. This time, not as many by the police. Why not?

[ed. note - A report by the Professor Pam Oliver of the The University of Wisconsin Madison's Sociology Department states that, of the 53 killed in the 1992 L.A. Riots, 11 died at the hands of the police or national guard.]

What I am about to say isn’t a comfort to any of the families of those people who died, so when you feel compelled to comment, don’t weigh your ideas in that direction.

I think the reason there wasn’t the degree of police murder and violence in the riots of 20 years ago and there were in the riots decades before is that the people were armed, well armed, heavily armed.

The police were afraid.

The second amendment to the Constitution includes the right to bear arms and form a militia. This doesn’t mean the right to shoot bunnies, or the right to create mobs or clans--but it does mean the right of the people to defend itself against the government.

This important American principle was shown in all its ugliness here 20 years ago.

In Frogtown I saw fools driving along on Riverside with guns in their hands.   One neighbor who kept appearing on his porch periodically with his shotgun.  All very sad.

Am I defending them? I don’t think I am.

Am I defending the fools who were looting, who were taking advantage of the violence to rob and steal? The murderers of their own neighbors?

No I am not.

I am defending those unknown people who 20 years ago were not killed or beaten by the police. The ones not shot down by the National Guard.

I am defending those good law enforcement officers that eventually contained the violence 20 years ago.

I am commenting on how the culture changed between those riots. How this late in our history, we are still learning and benefiting from the thinking of the founding fathers. I am commenting on how here in Los Angeles we, in a first hand way, can learn from these riots. How we can learn from the Chinatown riots, and other ways too numerous, what it means to be an American, and what this experiment in Democracy is all about.

Those are my perspectives on the riots 20 years ago, what are yours?