LA 92 (riots) National Geographic.

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May 13, 2002
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#4
I watched this yesterday, at least I assume it's the same one. There is also a lot of unseen footage, from what I could tell mainly from private footage from the LA police (they sent out their own cameramen).

Brought up a lot of old emotions. I think many forget just how angry most of the country was already leading up to this, not only with Rodney King but other incidents like the Korean lady getting off for shooting the teenage black girl in the back on video, then for the verdict...It was crazy. And that clip of John Singleton, minutes after the verdict where he says we're sitting on a bomb and it's about to explode was right on the money, meanwhile we get to see the internal video that Daryl Gates made for the LA police not to expect riots and nothing will happen, and he goes off to a fundraiser, just goes to show how utterly unprepared the police were and what pieces of shit they all were from the top down.

There were numerous powerful images I totally forgotten about. One, the pastor who was standing over the badly beaten Latino worker Fidel Lopez, protecting him from further carnage, that was powerful and rough to see.


Hard to see how a progressive movement full of legit outrage turned into something so inhumane (in places), from the koreans getting their stores destroyed and the fireman refusing to put out their fires to another powerful image of an elderly blackman who's store was also burnt down and he's yelling his heart out to the young black man standing near by asking why, why burn down his store when it's black owned why destroy his life when he tried to make it. Lots of emotional footage like that made it difficult to watch at times. You just feel so bad for some of these people who had nothing to do with anything.

Sidenote, It's why I always thought Ice Cube Predator was such a sick album. He captured so much of the anger everyone was feeling at the time that no one else really was able to do at the time. The LA riots was really inevitable, it was bound to happen with how bad things got. So many lessons can be learned from this but above all, classism. We saw how it wasn't just about the black community, we saw the city and state completely neglect poor areas and purposely let it burn to the ground. Black, white, brown and asian, it didn't matter what color you were when the flames engulfed the entire block.
 
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Props: GTS and GTS