20 years ago today LA went crazy
by digby
I took my husband to the airport in the morning and we were told that airplanes were having trouble with visibility because of the smoke from the fires all over the city. It was my first clue that things were much worse than I’d thought. I went to work and my office had a bird’s eye view of South LA and I watched the number of smoke plumes double, then triple that morning.
I went ahead with a scheduled lunch with our legal team for a planned celebration of the end of a big deal we’d all been working on because it was in West Hollywood and we all figured that the riots were far away. In the middle of our meal the manager came over and told us that they were shutting the restaurant since there were reports of looting in the nearby mall. This turned out to be a rumor but rumors like that were flying fast and furious that afternoon. The city had somehow turned crazy just during the time we were inside the restaurant.
People were driving on the medians and generally acting like fools on the road. I saw someone with a shotgun just casually walking down the street. In Beverly Hills. The mayor came on the radio as I was heading back to the office and told people to go home and stay home, so that’s what I did. My normal 30 minute commute was two and half hours that afternoon.
Here’s what we saw on the news:
There’s a lot to be said about the underlying causes for this conflagration. LA policing has always been problematic, going all the way back to the beginning. I have to say, however, that this article by Dave Zirin in The Nation puts the whole thing in a completely different perspective. He says this particular bomb was armed during the 1984 Olympics. It’s a very interesting thesis and one I hadn’t heard before.
That night it was helicopters overhead all night long. The National Guard had arrived and was camping out at the Federal Building which wasn’t far from where I lived. We could see that there was still major burning and looting all over south LA on television. But the army was there to guard the north and the west — where all the important (white) people lived.
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