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Videopro, you forgot to mention another result of the Rodney King riots' disproportionately negative effect on Korean-Americans in Los Angeles. Almost every time my husband and I go to our local gun range, there are a disproportionate number of Asians shooting there, practicing. If/when there's another riot, Koreatown (and other primarily-Asian areas of LA County, like Arcadia or South Pasadena) may be one of the safest and best-protected parts of the city. And that's just counting the law-abiding folks, not these guys ...
You better believe it. People outside that sphere of awareness of what happened during the 1992 riots have no idea how it both shattered the psyche and at the same time provoked the Korean-American community to never EVER let that happen again. There's no doubt in my mind, they will shoot to kill on the first shot next time around. No warning rounds into the air. Not next time. It must be remembered, a number of Korean-American business owners committed suicide in the wake of the 1992 riots as everything they worked a lifetime for vanished in mere hours. The law would NOT be a deterrent to the family and neighbors of these victims.
However, The chief problem is and always will be the FIRE BOMBINGS.
I have 96 uninterrupted hours of video tape of KTLA Channel 5's Los Angeles 24 hour coverage of the riots in my videotape archive. They are a real study in the progression of an urban riot, from the outset to full breakdown of civil order. It starts off with mobs of unruly crowds, looting and shooting to be sure, but it's the FIRES that sweep through and devastate whole communities and areas within cities and leave the victims powerless to defend themselves. The ignition point can be limited, but without a functioning fire department, like happened then, there is no protecting yourself from the rapid progression of the flames, even if you are relatively distant from where they started. Many of the Korean business owners that are idealized in some of the video from the era, shooting at looters, actually resorted, in the end, to abandoning their businesses to arsonist fires.
That's the other part of the story that is often missed in lore of the pistol packing Korean business owner/marksmen.
The third day was the worst. There was NO effective law enforcement and the fire-bombers ran rampant through a large swath of the L.A. Basin area. From Long Beach, to Santa Monica, East L.A., San Bernardino and the San Fernando Valley, entire boulevards and neighborhoods were being torched without an minute of delay on that 3rd day. As the gangs, fires and shootings leapfrogged towards more affluent and previously unaffected areas on the third day, martial law was declared, effective from sunset to sunrise. That day, I will never forget the panicked Westside commuters trying to get out of the Brentwood, Westwood areas trying to beat the sundown curfew, plumes of smoke from the fires getting ever closer. NOBODY wanted be stuck out after dark. Soon, the traffic gridlocked on all the outbound lanes, not moving one inch. Then, traffic laws be damned. Drivers ran head-on into opposing traffic on the wrong side of the street to gain forward progress. I looked over to my right and to my astonishment, cars were driving down the sidewalk, one after another, dodging trashcans and hedges all the way, creating their own extra escape lane. Not a cop car or firetruck anywhere to be found. There was no civil authority to be found that day.
The greatest fear soon became not the armed thugs that ran amok carjacking and looting everything they could lay their hands on. No. It was the fear of having your own home become an exposure that caught fire and burned down as result of a nearby commercial structure fire raging unchecked. Left to it's own devices by an overwhelmed and absent fire department.
Nearby being relative. Blocks away suddenly became 'nearby', when the fires met no resistance.
On that third day, it became clear to residents in the affected areas, they were totally their own and needed to take immediate action to keep the arsonist out of their areas lest they fall victim to what was happening elsewhere. Some areas quickly created impromptu coalitions of neighborhood captains who blocked street entrances with everything they could get their hands on, from bedrooms doors ripped from their hinges to piles of bricks and rubbish hauled out from rear yards. ANYTHING to keep the carloads of roaming and heavily armed arsonists from freely gaining access to their street and throwing a gasoline bomb. THAT was the imperative. We did location shoots where we interviewed intrepid street captains, manning their barricades, ready to go down in defense of the neighborhood. Unlikely personalities too. Amazing what a little FEAR will do to a person's bravery and resourcefulness.
At that time, my girlfriend lived in an apartment house that backed up to Wilshire Blvd. near Crescent Heights Blvd. I was so afraid for her. Wanted to get her out of there but things were far too out of control to risk driving in to get her out, even in that 'Beverly Hills adjacent' area. Later the 3rd night, while I was on the phone with her, the business that backed up to her apartment house, facing on Wilshire Blvd, a Men's Clothing Store, was firebombed. We could hear the glass shatter while I was on the phone with her. The IMMEDIATE fear was the building would catch on fire and her apartment house would imminently be next like so many other places that burned that night.
She put down the phone... and I couldn't get her back onto it to ask what the he*ll was happening. Silence. I was truly fearful at that point. Turns out, she threw down the telephone and made a split second decision to run next door to the clothing store herself and risk whatever comes. She jumped through the shattered plate glass window and put out what was a small but fast growing fire by herself. Later, she said there was no choice whatsoever in her mind. It was either do that, or be forced to escape from her own burning apartment house that would likely catch fire next. It was easy to understand her reasoning. We already had three days of live television as a striking example.
Up and down Western and Vermont Avenues, the fires jumped from one business to the next in rapid order. Once things get beyond a certain point, there is no putting them out and the arsonist know this. They even returned to some locations to fire-bomb them again to ensure the fires reached a critical size.
I guess the lesson from the 1992 Los Angeles riot is this: If a community or neighborhood, beset by a civil riot, where both the fire department and law enforcement has dissolved into ineffectiveness, hopes to get the upper hand, citizens need to be extremely risk tolerant. Be ready to personally take the initiative to control fires as priority in the very earliest stages. Accept that this is done with likely high risk of great personal injury, unthinkable and totally foolish under any other circumstance. This could be an unanticipated, instant, life-changing and hugely hazardous decision in many ways.
Otherwise, the fires WILL win. That is assured.
History as our guide.
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