Los Angeles Riots (1992)

On April 29, 1992, a jury in Simi Valley acquitted four Los Angeles Police Department officers of almost all charges in the videotaped beating of Rodney King — a Black motorist whom officers had struck more than 50 times with batons following a car chase. Within hours, Los Angeles erupted. Over six days, 63 people were killed, more than 2,000 injured, and roughly $1 billion in property destroyed — much of it in Koreatown, whose immigrant business owners received little police protection and absorbed the concentrated force of displacement and rage.

The King beating had been recorded on a home video camera and broadcast nationally, making the trial a referendum on LAPD brutality. When the verdict came, it crystallized years of accumulated tension: aggressive policing in Black neighborhoods, the economic devastation of South Central Los Angeles, and a department whose conduct had been documented and largely excused by City Hall for decades. Mayor Tom Bradley declared a state of emergency. Governor Pete Wilson called in the National Guard. President George H.W. Bush sent federal troops. The violence stopped; the conditions that produced it did not.

The riots forced an institutional reckoning with the LAPD. Police Chief Darrell Gates resigned; reform efforts began that would take years to produce results. On the day of the verdict, Rodney King appeared before cameras and asked the question that became the lasting phrase of the crisis: "Can we all get along?" Two of the four officers were subsequently convicted in federal court on civil rights charges. The riots remain the deadliest episode of urban unrest in the United States since the 1967 Detroit uprising.