What Caused Los Angeles to Explode in 1992?

Posted at http://bonniegadsden.blogspot.com/2012/06/what-caused-los-angeles-to-explode-in.html?m=0

I read an interesting article by Dave Zirin: Want to Understand the 1992 LA Riots? Start with the 1984 LA Olympics This stuck out to me.

Before the Olympics, Gates was on thin ice as police chief. In 1982, he infamously said that African-Americans died under a chokehold used by police officers because “the veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do on normal people.” But Gates emerged from the Olympics as an untouchable hero. Every incentive for him and his department was to stay in “Olympic mode.” Treating the city as occupied territory became institutionalized. From 1984–89, there was a 33 percent spike in citizen complaints against police brutality. The complaints went nowhere. According to a Los Angeles Times investigative report, the district attorney’s office chose not to prosecute the “vast majority” of complaints. Between 1986 and 1990, 1,400 officers were investigated on suspicion of using excessive force, less than 1 percent were prosecuted. Frustration, as Langston Hughes predicted decades earlier, “festered like a sore.” I think people believe that the only strategy we have is to put a lot of police officers on the street and harass people and make arrests for inconsequential kinds of things. Well, that’s part of the strategy, no doubt about it. – LAPD Chief Gates, May 1988 With this mindset of those who’s duty is to serve the people, it is no great wonder why the pot boiled over in 1992.  The people were treated not as citizens, but as enemy combatants.  The people attempted to redress their grievances, but were ignored by their elected officials.  After years of living under this oppression, the people had enough and revolted. Does that last paragraph sound familiar? This occurred in our founding generation, and it is preparing to occur again in this generation.  The people are fed up with the way they are being treated.  Are you prepared for what is to come?  You better be, because the lid is being placed over the boiling pot, whose contents are highly volatile.