25 years after LA riots, frictions remain

LOS ANGELES — Late in the afternoon of April 29, 1992, the looting began in south Los Angeles, quickly escalating as motorists were dragged from their cars and vehicles set alight.

In the downtown area a few kilometers away, an angry crowd began to build at the city police headquarters and, as day turned to night, protesters attacked uniformed officers and blocked traffic.

The fuse had been lit by the acquittal earlier in the day of four white police officers filmed beating black motorist Rodney King with wooden batons.

For six days, America’s second city was engulfed in a fireball of rage in front of the world’s news cameras as decades of pent-up anger exploded into some of the worst riots in US history. More than 50 people died and 2,000 were wounded.

The not-guilty verdict for use of excessive force was a breaking point in relations between the city’s African American communities and the Los Angeles Police Department, opening fissures which for many have never healed.

A documentary, Let It Fall, which opened theatrically in Los Angeles and New York on Friday, is among a number of films timed to mark the 25th anniversary of the riots.

Written and directed by John Ridley, who won an Oscar for his screenplay of 12 Years a Slave, it offers firsthand testimony from black, white, Asian, and Hispanic Angelinos of all classes caught up in the violence.

After several lawsuits, King ended up with $3.8 million in damages. But he was dogged by depression and in 2012 was found dead in a swimming pool after taking a cocktail of alcohol and drugs. He was 47.

The films serve as a reminder that, a quarter cen- tury after the riots, relations between law enforcement officers and ethnic minorities remain hugely divisive issues across the United States.

The documentary LA Burning ends on images of the 2014-2015 Ferguson riots which followed the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager killed by white policemen, and unrest in Baltimore after the 2015 death in police custody of 25-year-old Freddie Gray.

“There are still issues. They’re complicated, they’re beyond race,” Ridley said.