A time to riot: L.A. uprising 1992; a decade has passed since Los Angeles bore the nation's largest social upheaval of the 20th century, it's a time most of the city would rather forget. This writer included. (To the Point).

Although I've long since tried to come to terms with the riots, a resolution has yet to present itself. A recently transferred reporter in the Los Angeles Times' San Diego edition, I was dispatched back to L.A. in 1992 to cover disturbances that broke out in two of my old beats--Koreatown and south Los Angeles. In hindsight, I can say that experience led directly to my departure from mainstream journalism a few months later.

In the spring of that year, Los Angeles shook in anger and fear. Following not guilty verdicts in the trial of four white LAPD officers who beat into submission an African American motorist named Rodney G. King, an enraged few in south Los Angeles and the city center vented their frustration with the inequities of L.A. life.

During three days and nights of firebombing and looting, combatants also took to pummeling hapless victims who were snatched from sidewalk and traffic thoroughfare, and broke off the harshest street justice dealt by fists and heels. Others took what they could as police and sheriff's forces stood down citywide.

Separate terms have been applied to this moment in time by laypersons, street soljas, politicos, and social scientists. Whether you identify with the concept of riot or civil unrest or insurrection or even urban rebellion, there is at least one truth that goes uncontested. Namely, that from April 29 to May 1, 1992, for the second time in the latter 20th century, Los Angeles imploded socially upon itself. And more than any other singular cause, the finger of blame extended toward what collectively we come to know all too well: the city forgets.

Sure, memory snaps back once the ransacking starts. Visions of Watts in '65 come racing. Or even the summer of '66, which saw violent spasms in Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco, and 40 other cities. Likewise Newark and Detroit in '67. The following year, 1968, the same could be said of Memphis and 124 other urban centers, which burned after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. To be fair, it's not just Los Angeles. At a given time, it seems, the entire nation has fallen susceptible to long-term memory loss.

As recently as last spring, a violent public response flared in Cincinnati under disturbingly familiar circumstances. An unarmed, 19-year-old African American man was shot and killed by a white officer. Yet the same set of concerns--police sponsored violence and misconduct aligned with a racially suspect verdict in court--somehow eluded the city's civic agenda. Until rioting broke out April 9, 2001.

And with a city illuminated by flame, memories can just as soon form a flood.

Media and Race: It's Personal

When I got started in news reporting in the late '80s, the state of race relations made for an uneasy approach to assignments about Korean and African Americans. Especially when working for a traditional metro daily such as the Times, whose reputation was already established as aloof and indifferent to people in the largely black neighborhoods that had been stigmatized by the journalistic code name: South Central.

Early and often during those five years at the paper, people on the street would remind me of the legacy left by a scion of the Times' founding family, the Chandlers. Responding to criticism in the '60s about the dearth of reporting in the city's black communities, publisher Otis Chandler was quoted as saying the Times doesn't cover the community because people there don't read. In whatever context this comment was made originally, the repercussions lasted well into the '90s, and certainly fueled the suspicion, if not flat-out contempt, people expressed when reporters repped the Times in these erroneously designated zones of illiteracy.

At the same time, the paper's coverage of Korean Americans was virtually non-existent, which became increasingly problematic as the community's growth and Koreatown's prominence in the cityscape became difficult for even the Times to ignore. My accelerated placement in a Metro newsroom desk was the result of years of flack caught by management for favoring foreign correspondence at the expense of news occurring in its own front yard.

Many among the Korean community vanguard have cited the riots as the symbolic period of initiation for Korean Americans, an entry point into American society, and our defining moment within this country's evolving racial dynamic. Make no mistake; this was baptism by fire. It was under this same white-hot light, I saw and understood what this news business was really about.

It's Hot Up in Here

Although a range of factors led to Los Angeles' unrest 10 years ago, most observers would say racial conflict ranked high, if it was not the No. 1 cause. Many would also say it came down specifically to 56 baton blows, supplementary boot stomps, and taser jolts visited on Rodney King's felled body, having been pulled over in his Hyundai Excel in suburban north San Fernando Valley during the wee hours after midnight on March 3, 1991.

Some 21 officers joined in the drubbing or tacitly watched on, all failing, to a person, to report any possible misconduct. Unbeknownst to the swarm of officers, who gathered for King's infamous roadside traffic citing, an amateur videographer named George Holliday captured the arrest from the balcony of his Lake View Terrace residence. While the scene exudes an eerie business-asusual air, those 81 seconds of videotape also show a beating as chilling as any delivered in the pre-civil rights era. Holliday later sold the footage to a local news station. It was telecast the following morning in Los Angeles, then picked up hours later by cable news and beamed around the world.

Memory Key

Few people would dispute that an important aid to unlocking memory, if not ambivalence, has been the acceleration of TV news influence, both in the rapid transfer of information and the desensitizing effects of such unchecked transmission.

Arguably, what contributed to the escalation of L.A.'s rioting was the fact that news crews were better equipped technologically and, perhaps more than ever before, provocative footage was broadcast in its raw and unadulterated form, with the most compelling shots looped over and over.

The technological advancements were not always accompanied by cogent commentary. More often than not, mind-searing images were met with verbalized utter disbelief by those charged with reporting the events. Broadcast journalists, who fumbled with ways to meaningfully term the mayhem, represented what much of the city knew, or cared to know, about its all-but-forgotten hood.

So, as street skirmishes broke out at the intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues, those earliest antagonists who first cast stones did so with a force and trajectory the likes of which had not been witnessed. At least not by as wide an audience as on that verdict day with competing news helicopters roaming the sky, pulling unprecedented amounts of violent footage from scenes unfolding at ground level. Rebels made themselves heard indeed.

In a not-so-parallel tangent, it will probably never be known how many assaults on person and property were inspired by the repeated airing of truck driver Reginald O. Denny's hapless plight the evening the verdicts were issued. Denny was pulled from the cab of his big rig at 6:35 p.m., and bludgeoned by oxygen tank, claw hammer, and brick, then sprayed with black paint.

When L.A.'s days of violence finally drew to a close, 55 people were dead. At one count, 2,383 people were injured. Immediate property damage touched 15,000 homes and businesses, totaling some $850 million. All told, these tragic results garnered the 1992 upheaval the ignominious distinction of the nation's worst civil unrest, as has been often noted, since the Civil War.

Although Denny's assailants appeared to have free reign in the unpoliced intersection, several suspects were later identified through news footage turned state's evidence. Two residents from the area were eventually convicted in connection with the assault. Additionally, we do know now that two of the four people who came to the wounded trucker's rescue knew to do so because they saw the attack on television.

Life is Cheap

What distinguishes the 1992 conflagration is the depth to which despair had descended in the city's most neglected residential area, the much-feared and institutionally sidestepped South Central L.A. Also of significance, it should be noted, the media initially reported that the violence was fueled by a conflict between African and Korean Americans, but the reality was the riots represented "the first multiethnic eruption of discontent" in history, as U.C. Riverside Ethnic Studies professor Armando Navarro wrote in a 1993 issue of Amerasia Journal.

Not only did race factor in this riot, but native-versus-immigrant and interethnic dynamics were at work as well. Tension arose from the influx of Latino families in traditionally black neighborhoods, and none too many of the participants were reportedly very happy about it.

Racial conflict became the leading news hook in interpreting this major shift in L.A.'s population. Even the oft-slung, pop-demographic journalese of the day, "the Browning of South Central," referring to a community in transition, was seldom trotted out without an incident of conflict to back it up. These were signs, according to the Times, that we were a troubled city.

There is a feeling most reporters of color, I imagine, experience, one of being put on the spot when forced to serve as a representative of one's race. Maybe due to this identification, I felt an unspoken pressure to handle the race stories, above all others, with fairness and equanimity. Because of my own misgivings about the newspaper, I found myself at turns adopting a double-agent identity, feelings that came on particularly strong when covering issues of ethnic conflict and urban neglect.

With that in mind, I did what little I could as a neophyte reporter, looking for and reporting on exceptions to the rule, trying to flesh out the guts of real-life people who didn't fit the popular race-related storylines--the so-called "Browning" effects and the "Black-Korean" conflicts. While admittedly a self-imposed weight, I felt somehow responsible for finding the story that didn't fir the racial mold. I was motivated by a fuzzy logic. If reporters like me don't shoulder these assignments, who then? Who'll try to get race right?

I soon learned there was little room in the news hole for exceptions to the rule, and so would the conflicts prevail in headlines and nightly news spots. My role in bringing voices to some of these stories ended when I saw how merchant-customer disputes between non-African and non-Korean subjects were routinely passed over by assignment editors. It was quickly established: if the players were not black or Korean, the incident was not racialized, and given minimal, if any, coverage.

As the escalation of strong-armed robberies at Korean-owned stores began to correspond with published reports about Black-Korean tension, I realized what was happening was not only very wrong, it was poor journalism. And so after much thought, I decided to leave the Times. End of story.

Aftereffects: a Citywide Hangover

Veteran investigative journalist Kyung Won Lee contends that news reports during and prior to the riots fed the violence and destruction of 4.29.92. Via editorial broadsides done in K.W.'s inimitable style, Lee takes media executives to task for their complicity in stigmatizing immigrant shopkeepers and pitting them against African Americans, he says, for the sake of bolstering sweeps week ratings.

Terming the lack of understanding and mainstream indifference to Korean Americans' riot experience "a blank chapter in American immigration history," Lee took it upon himself to conduct a group introspection, which he is chronicling for future generations through a series of academic and applied research projects.

Among the many consequences of the King beating and the police department's handling of the riots has been a decade of scrutiny fixed on the LAPD. All efforts to regain the department's reputation as one of the nation's preeminent forces have been addled by misfire, including a wide-reaching corruption scandal involving officers in the department's Rampart division and the infamous O.J. Simpson case in which homicide detective Mark Fuhrman perjured himself under oath. In the Rampart imbroglio, five officers were indicted for lying under oath, falsifying police reports, planting and stealing evidence, and shooting an unarmed suspect. Thousands of cases were reviewed and more than 100 convictions have been overturned.

Days after the Watts riots, state appointee John A. McCone, a former CIA director, led an eight-member commission on an inquiry into the causes of the riots. To review the 101-page McCone report now gives a reader insight into the city's truncated attention span. In their nascence, the findings underscore a dismal reality: conditions leading to riots 35 years ago loom over the same neighborhoods. As in the '60s, those issues have still gone largely unaddressed.

On a final bleak note, figures for the unparalleled destruction of the 1992 riots were based largely on reports by business and property owners. These assessments seldom accounted for the loss of income and livelihood suffered by tens of thousands of wage earners for whom little or no emergency relief existed beyond unemployment welfare. So, as cycles go, a pattern of neglect in riot-torn areas began anew. The newest group of have-nots was destined to be--almost upon arrival--forgotten just the same.

John Lee has written for LA Weekly, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Korea Times, among other publications.