LA 92

"Tripper" (tripe46) 07/24/2017 at 13:21 • Filed to: None

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My wife and I partied like we did in our early 20's on Saturday. So we slept until dinner on Sunday lol, and then vegged out on TV for the rest of the night. We watched “How It’s Made” mostly, but then we watched “LA 92". You might guess that it’s a documentary about the riots surrounding the Rodney King trial, and you’d be right.

It was super heavy, parts of it were tough to watch but it was really well done. I was impressed by the amount of footage they have from ground zero. It is amazing how quickly everything unfolded. Anyway it’s worth a watch, humans are fucked up.

CalzoneGolem > Tripper 07/24/2017 at 13:23

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Tripper > CalzoneGolem 07/24/2017 at 13:25

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This song is literally the only knowledge I had about the riots until we covered it in detail in college haha.

CalzoneGolem > Tripper 07/24/2017 at 13:28

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I remember it being on the news but I was 12 at the time so I didn’t really absorb it much.

fintail > Tripper 07/24/2017 at 13:32

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I wonder how much worse it would be today, and how some things wouldn’t change.

Tripper > CalzoneGolem 07/24/2017 at 13:33

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I was 7, the only thing I remember from that era of the news is Peter Jennings.

Tripper > fintail 07/24/2017 at 13:34

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Even though I didn’t want to, I found myself thinking that pretty much the whole time watching it.

fintail > Tripper 07/24/2017 at 13:43

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I suspect firearms proliferation would make it a bit messier.

I am also curious about the 115 mph 1988 Hyundai Excel, and if some of the legal and praetorian people involved in this are still looking over their shoulders from time to time.

jvirgs drives a Subaru > Tripper 07/24/2017 at 13:52

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Where did you find it? I’d like to watch it.

crowmolly > Tripper 07/24/2017 at 13:58

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If it’s the same one I watched, it’s both intriguing and sickening at the same time.

Did it have the news helicopter pilot? That’s one of the parts that really pissed me off. We’re telling people where there are no cops so they can stay away from the violence! Well, that may be your intent and it may help some... BUT YOU ARE OPENLY BROADCASTING WHERE THERE IS NO LAW ENFORCEMENT.

My X-type is too a real Jaguar > fintail 07/24/2017 at 14:00

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Firearms are a lot harder to get and scarcer now than they were then, there were lots of shootings, police choppers were shot at, police cruisers were shot up, people were shot. The gun wasn’t invented in the last 25 years, also they were much easier to get 25 years ago and cheaper. 1992 was before the Brady Bill, before California banned high cap magazines, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. AK47's were, cheap plentiful and easier to get than a BB gun.

Seriously I bought in when I turned 18 in 1993 for $125.00 18 was old enough to buy a rifle not a hand gun.

Tripper > jvirgs drives a Subaru 07/24/2017 at 14:00

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It was on the history channel, and it played back to back to back, so I’m thinking it must be new.

functionoverfashion > CalzoneGolem 07/24/2017 at 14:01

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I always wondered about why the song was called April 29, but the lyric says April 26... also why the parenthetical Miami? Wikipedia explains the date bit, but not Miami...

I remember a friend coming over to my house in high school with this “new CD a friend gave him, you gotta hear it. Where can we listen to it where your parents won’t hear it?” I had to steal the only CD player in the house to hook it up in the basement where we only had a record player.

Now get off my lawn.

Tripper > fintail 07/24/2017 at 14:02

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Hah I dunno there were a lot of people shooting at each other then. I think that was one of the craziest parts, some of the store owners just blasting away into the street, one of the guys looked like he wasn’t even aiming at anything in particular

Tripper > crowmolly 07/24/2017 at 14:04

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There was audio from the news helicopters, but random innocent people being beat to death/nearly to death and spray painted on in the middle of the street was the most sickening part for me.

Textured Soy Protein > Tripper 07/24/2017 at 14:04

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I was 10 in 1992 but my parents were good about explaining the news to me.

As a 10 year old, my reaction was to be similarly upset that the cops didn’t get in trouble for beating up Rodney King on TV, but I couldn’t make the logical leap to why people would destroy their own neighborhoods.

It takes a bit more maturity to understand the sense of desperation and hopelessness that would cause a community to destroy itself in response to one of its members being so publicly wronged.

crowmolly > fintail 07/24/2017 at 14:06

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Might fare better today, but it’s tough to say whether or not this drop was due to the riots themselves having an effect on the police and the people.

CalzoneGolem > functionoverfashion 07/24/2017 at 14:08

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I was 16 when that album came out.

functionoverfashion > CalzoneGolem 07/24/2017 at 14:09

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I was 15!

CalzoneGolem > functionoverfashion 07/24/2017 at 14:11

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Then you can get off my lawn!

fintail > crowmolly 07/24/2017 at 14:13

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I suppose the LAPD today can’t be worse than in 1991 (although no doubt still has issues). Maybe some gentrification pushed crime out too - maybe that explains Chicago :)

fintail > My X-type is too a real Jaguar 07/24/2017 at 14:15

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I was assuming most of the weapons used wouldn’t be legally acquired. Chicago is said to have strict laws, too. I suppose the rampant ceaseless gang-related stuff is a lot less common now.

fintail > Tripper 07/24/2017 at 14:16

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I could see that happening today too, I think the paranoid gun hoarder types are just as prevalent.

It might not end up much worse today, but I doubt it would be better, unless someone tries to impose martial law, and maybe not even then.

crowmolly > fintail 07/24/2017 at 14:19

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In my haste I totally forgot to mention the Watts truce. That had a lot to do with it.

DipodomysDeserti > fintail 07/24/2017 at 15:39

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There were just as many (if not more) guns in LA in ‘92 as there are now. A whole bunch of people were killed trying to loot the Korean neighborhoods as the cops never showed up to protect them. A lot of the deaths were never reported.

DipodomysDeserti > functionoverfashion 07/24/2017 at 15:40

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The story is he fucked up recording it, but it was their best take so they stuck with it. Don’t do drugs, kids.

Ash78, voting early and often > functionoverfashion 07/24/2017 at 15:46

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The song was kind of a joke — the guys were on tour around that time, they were nowhere near LA at the time (Oregon, IIRC), and the list of cities toward the end were just their tour stops. It was just supposed to be kind of a tongue-in-cheek “historical fiction” if you want to call it that.

Ash78, voting early and often > Tripper 07/24/2017 at 15:49

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After having lived through the 90s and seeing this all once before (most of it on live tv), I knew most of the stories, so my mind started to wander. All I kept thinking was “Damn, this must have taken forever to edit!” and “If this happened today, there’d be thousands of times more footage and you’d have an even harder time making a movie of it.”

Not to make light of the situation, it’s just that we spent most of the 90s talking about the riots and beat the horse to death. Still, it was refreshing to take a new look through adult eyes. It really reminds you of how we’re teetering on the brink of societal collapse.

Tangentially related, but the LA Riots were the (unseen) major event and motivator behind most of American History X. Excellent film.

My X-type is too a real Jaguar > fintail 07/24/2017 at 16:27

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Scarcity drives up cost in the early 90s there were no background checks and importation laws were very different pretty much anyone could go to a pawnshop/gunshop pinky swear they had no criminal record and buy a gun. Now most of those weapons must be bought on the black market. They cost exponentially more and can be harder to get. The point is the number of weapons on the street is probably the same or lower per capita.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > Tripper 07/24/2017 at 16:35

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Has it already been a quarter century since this event? My god, I’m getting old. I watched the same documentary recently, and let me tell you, it really hit home. I was living in Inglewood at the time, on the wrong side of the tracks, literally, from Westchester/LAX (and I mean literally, not the figurative ‘literally’, since the railroad tracks were the boundary between Inglewood and Westchester) and got to experience the fun first hand. My office and school were also in Inglewood and they were both closed, for obvious reasons. I wanted to leave town, but I had agreed to pick up my parents at LAX when they returned from a vacation to Tahiti in a couple of days, so I went up to the top of my building, eight stories up, and watched my city burn.

When it came time to pick up the folks I realized that my gas tank was empty, and the fumes in my tank weren’t going to be enough to get us the 55 miles down to their place in Laguna. Most sane businesses in the area were closed, and that including just about every gas station in the area. After a bit of hunting I finally found an open station, an Arco at the corner of Century and La Cienega. I normally avoided that station because I didn’t like mixing with airport traffic and they tended to gouge those turning in their rental cars. There were a couple of APCs there and a number of armed National Guardsmen at the station, so I felt relatively safe fueling up there.

I parked and headed up to TBIT (Tom Bradley International Terminal) and went to meet their Qantas flight. I found the big board with all of the gate assignments and looked for theirs; this was pre-9/11 so you could stroll up to the gate to meet people. What I saw terrified me. Instead of a gate assignment it just had something kind of generic like ‘See attendant’. Now I’m crazy about the airline industry and have read and collected just about every book written, including NTSB reports, about airline disasters. I am a walking encyclopedia of airline disaster knowledge. And when the sign says something seemingly innocuous like ‘See Attendant’ it means that the aircraft has crashed and we’ll tell you the bad news behind closed doors and away from the prying eyes of the television news cameras. Feeling nauseated and faint and trembling a tad I strolled over to the Qantas office for the bad news.

As it turns out, for safety reasons they decided en route to avoid Los Angeles and divert to San Francisco until things quieted down. Whew - that was an immense relief. A few hours later they departed SFO for LAX, flying in over the ocean instead of the normal route over Compton, South Central, Inglewood and all of those other lovely neighborhoods where random gunfire is a common occurrence, but was even more pronounced during the riots.

I picked up the folks, grabbed their luggage, picked up my roommate and the four of us headed for safety behind the Orange Curtain in my trusty 320i where we could just watch the damage on TV instead of enjoying the scent of the corner liquor store burning down. A warm pool and cold beers were waiting for us, and with police all over the LA Basin a little preoccupied with the major events, it was a very fast blast down the nearly deserted freeways to home, a neighborhood that we used to joke about where the $750,000 houses were considered the slums. Where the crosswalk buttons were mounted about 18 inches higher than normal so that those on horseback could easily reach them.

My parents had enjoyed their vacation, tuning out entirely as you are supposed to do whilst on vacation, and had absolutely no idea what was happening back home. The first information about the events came from the flight crew, about half way home, when they explained the reasons for the diversion. Nowadays with smartphones and Internet damn near everywhere, it seems almost impossible to actually get away from it all like they did back then. Maybe I can see this being possible when on a fishing or backpacking trip somewhere up in the mountains; maybe there are other places but the whole ‘vacation’ thing is still kind of a foreign concept to me...

Tripper > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. 07/24/2017 at 16:55

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Damn, that is wild! The whole time I was watching I thought, “I can’t imagine what it was like being in proximity to all of this.”

fintail > DipodomysDeserti 07/24/2017 at 17:10

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No doubt. I have to believe people would be even more likely to open fire today, too.

fintail > My X-type is too a real Jaguar 07/24/2017 at 17:11

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In a situation like this, I don’t think people will be buying guns, but maybe being handed them.

I also believe in this day and age, the willingness to simply open fire might be greater.

CaptDale - is secretly British > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. 07/24/2017 at 17:37

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That is wild. I was a baby and my mom threw me in the car and took us out to my grandparent’s in Palm Desert incase things got really big and bad

functionoverfashion > Ash78, voting early and often 07/25/2017 at 09:30

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Hence the Eureka California reference... my uncle lives there and I am certain no one there is fed up with the police and rioting.

That makes sense...