On April 29, 1992, a Simi Valley jury announced its verdict in the trial of Laurence Powell, Stacey Koon, Timothy Wind and Theodore Briseño. Despite damning video evidence, the four Los Angeles Police Department officers were found not guilty of assaulting black motorist Rodney King, and — with the exception of Koon, for whom the jurors remained deadlocked — they were also found not guilty of exercising excessive force during the course of King’s arrest.
Outraged that the criminal legal system had delivered such an astonishing result, countless Angelenos stormed the streets, looting and burning stores throughout the city. Over the next six days, the violent uprising took more than 60 lives and caused almost a billion dollars of property destruction.
The looting and arson now sweeping Minneapolis in response to George Floyd’s killing has no doubt triggered many ambivalent memories of that prior revolt 28 years ago. Indeed, the two historic moments share more than a few similarities. Both fiery insurrections erupted as immediate reactions to police violence. Yet, in both cases, the faster, more spectacular violence of looting and arson arose from the slower, more insidious violence of racism against these communities.
As unrest continues in Minneapolis and in cities across the country, we should reflect on the Rodney King revolt and its aftermath to reckon with ways to build a just society moving forward.
The Rodney King uprising calmed after armed forces deployed to Los Angeles, but Mayor Tom Bradley knew that to prevent outbursts in the future, he had to address deeper, underlying issues. Like Minneapolis today, L.A. in 1992 had its troubles: a police department that antagonized locals, a segregated geography that distributed housing and other resources unevenly, a public health crisis — the HIV/AIDS epidemic — that policymakers were slow to acknowledge and a weak labor market that funneled workers into low-paying service sector jobs.
Sensing that simply hiring more police officers would not correct the underlying injustice, on May 2, Bradley unveiled an ambitious project called Rebuild Los Angeles (RLA). It was intended, the mayor suggested, to revive the ailing city by repairing demolished buildings and tackling egregious urban problems.
Using tax breaks and other financial incentives, RLA would entice corporations and businesses into setting up shop in Southern California. In doing so, Bradley believed, the project would kindle a trickle-down renaissance of jobs, ultimately resulting in “a better Los Angeles” that would “leave no one behind.” In an era of slashed budgets and economic austerity, many agreed that the private sector was best equipped to carry out Los Angeles’s reconstruction and fix its problems.
A number of corporate partners eagerly signed on with RLA, and for a while, the strategy looked like it might succeed. Vons Companies, for instance, agreed to build 12 new supermarkets in the L.A. area, which would improve locals’ access to groceries and create an estimated 2,000 jobs. Toyota collaborated with the Los Angeles Urban League to open an automotive training center, which over the next 12 years trained 3,000 Angelenos to become car mechanics and secured them jobs upon graduation.
Despite some early victories, however, many remained displeased with RLA. A coalition of local activists and social critics insisted that the project’s model of attracting business investment could not — at least not by itself — remedy the racial inequality in Southern California. They argued that this multifaceted problem required affordable housing and better public schools, not just corporate promises and trickle-down economics.
They also pointed out that, although several RLA partners had indeed vowed to create job training centers, some offered no actual jobs to support that expanding labor pool. Unlike Toyota, IBM and Pioneer Electronics did not guarantee employment for those who completed their training programs; they were, in other words, preparing workers for opportunities that did not exist.
Another organizer observed that RLA had successfully closed long-term deals with prominent corporations while letting more immediate needs, such as access to food and baby formula, go entirely unaddressed. The uprising and the resultant closing of stores had exacerbated a widespread hunger crisis, yet RLA had no plan for resolving it. Others worried about the project’s lack of transparency; one Crenshaw-based organizer described investment money ostensibly earmarked for her district as “ghost funds, because they’re supposed to be there, but nobody’s seen them.”
These critics proved prescient. In November 1992, Los Angeles Times journalists uncovered evidence that RLA Chairman Peter Ueberroth greatly exaggerated the scope of his organization’s successes and even lied about which big-name corporations he had negotiated with. Later, in October 1993, the project revealed that it had exhausted most of its $3 million start-up grant, originally intended to last five years. During an RLA board meeting, it became clear that an overwhelming majority of the funds had gone to “personnel and administrative costs” and not actual programming. Ultimately, the project could not counter an emerging employment crisis. According to one estimate, South Central L.A. lost 55,000 jobs from 1992 to 1999. African Americans suffered disproportionately.
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By most measures, RLA failed its mission. It had mismanaged valuable resources, ignored concerned critics and stubbornly insisted on a single-minded strategy that acknowledged only one aspect of a complex crisis. In the aftermath of the Rodney King uprising, people eagerly imagined a better Los Angeles, but RLA squandered tremendous potential energy that might have been harnessed into something more transformative. After all, the project did little to address the structures — such as residential segregation, declining public education, poor medical care and draconian policing — responsible for racial inequality. Since then, other organizations in Southern California have rallied around those issues, but without more political weight and public support, they face a daunting path forward.
As was the case in Los Angeles in 1992, Minneapolis insurrectionists and their communities cannot be made whole by more armed law enforcement authorities patrolling their streets and surveilling their neighborhoods, nor through corporate promises and neoliberal policies. Rebuilding after this ongoing revolt will require tackling the myriad grievances that provoked it in the first place.
It is tempting to fall into the trap of endlessly moralizing over protesters or looters or the legality of their actions or the righteousness of their cause, yet the real work of justice, if it is to happen at all, will take place in the weeks and months and years following this revolt, and it will require us to reckon with generations of structural racism.