‘Neighbors Apologized for the Looting’

Beginning on April 29, 1992, when a Simi Valley jury found Los Angeles police officers not guilty in the beating of motorist Rodney King, L.A. exploded and burned for three days. Tuesday marks the fifth anniversary of what has come to be seen as a turning point in the history of Southern California.

MARY REESE BOYKIN and DEBORAH BELGUM spoke to people who lived or worked in the riot-torn areas of South-Central and Lynwood.

MARION MILLER

Dentist, Crenshaw district

When I left the office that Wednesday night, the office building (at 38th and Crenshaw) was intact. On Thursday, I reported to work at 7:30 a.m. The cleaners next door had been broken into; some buildings were burning. I called my employees and patients and told them not to show up and went home.

Early Friday morning, while I watched television at home, I saw the front of the burning building collapse. The back was already gone. I couldn’t believe it. I was angry.

I felt certain that I was covered. But when a friend said, “You had better hope that it is not declared an insurrection, leaving you uncovered,” I was nervous the entire weekend. When I called the insurance company Monday, I was assured that I was covered, regardless.

I knew it would be difficult to restore my practice, so I was both surprised and grateful to God about how my patients reacted. Over that weekend, 55 patients called my answering service to leave their telephone numbers. They even left numbers of friends whom they had referred to me.

A week later, Dr. Lawrence Paxton and his practice partners offered their office in the 3700 block of Stocker to us for 2 1/2 days a week. I stayed with Dr. Paxton until that October, when I moved to the fourth floor of the same building.

The stress of restarting a business is too much. There are concerns about how long it takes to reestablish, finding another place to practice, the expenses, the customization of an office.

We have been blessed; my business has grown. There were eight dentists in my old building; six of us reestablished in the Crenshaw district. Following the riots, the other two retired.

JAMES KIM

Owner, Sam’s Market in South-Central

We had heard from the television news that there was rioting. Then a friend called and said something was happening at Florence and Normandie and that we better close down the store. We were closed for 10 days.

We came back every day to look at the store, but after the second day, everything was messed up. They broke the windows. They broke the doors. They broke the glass doors to the coolers. We lost everything. Every other store was the same way in the area.

We’ve been here a long time [since 1983] and you know everybody in the neighborhood. We never thought about riots happening. It took us two to three months to get back to normal. Insurance covered 70% of the costs.

In the past five years, not much has changed. The neighborhood is the same, the neighbors are the same. The only difference is when the new generation comes in. The teenagers are growing up and having families.

We try to treat the people who come in here as our neighbors. That’s why our store was looted, but not burned down. Our neighbors came and said they were deeply sorry the store was looted.

After this happened, most of my family members were disappointed that this happened because this was the first time since we had been in the United States that we had suffered like this.

We read English and understand it. Now we are trying to learn more English to speak better.

V.G. GUINSES

Executive director, Save Every Youngster

My organization works closely with gangs, especially with members who are trying to turn their lives around. There are some things that need to be cleared up about the 1992 riots.

Gang members did not start the riots. They participated, but disturbances broke out across the area--at Parker Center, near USC, an incident near Magic Mountain. Florence and Normandie got the attention, is called the flashpoint. But what happened there wasn’t planned. It was like an argument where one word leads to another. And it wasn’t all about Rodney King. Young people were already sitting on top of dynamite. The decision of the King jury was the match that lit the dynamite. Many racial groups--not just blacks--participated in the riots.

The National Guard did not stop the riots. The kids stopped themselves. They had enough sense to know when it was time to get off the streets. By the time the Guard arrived, many of the youngsters were watching the guardsmen on their new, stolen TV sets.

And gang members felt sold out by King’s “Can’t we all get along?” speech. Some of them felt that their homeboys had been arrested, they had violated their parole and this was King’s response.

Since the riots, I haven’t seen any improvements. There are a lot of promises about rebuilding South-Central and creating jobs that were never kept. Lots of these young people do their time in prison and once out on probation, they are begging for jobs. But they can’t get jobs once a background check is done. That young man has a baby, is trying to raise a family, trying to get his head together, and he can’t get a job. He finds no place for training or hope. So his probation becomes merely a vacation from prison.

BYRON BOWERS

Writer, South-Central

I was driving home from work and got off on Florence and Normandie, a few blocks past my house. Somebody started screaming, “That’s a white guy; kill him!” I’m thinking, “What kind of white guy would be out in this neighborhood tonight?” I turned around looking for the Caucasian of ignorance and then realized--the confirmation of my suspicion--that the crowd was referring to me.

My windshield was shattered. The doors of my Jeep were flung open. I start shouting, “I’m half-white; I’m half-black!” Previously, I had only used those words as a punchline to a joke. People started taking a closer look.

From the start, a young Belizean woman tried to defuse the whole thing. Someone demanded that I turn over my wallet. I heard a few people screaming for me to just get out of the area, to take off.

Before I cleared the first block, a young woman began hanging from the windshield of my Jeep. Every time I slowed down to let her off, people rushed my Jeep. We wound up at my house. I remembered I cracked jokes that night about moving to Alaska.

Since that night, I’m more aware and pay more attention to what’s going on. I know that the most secure situations have a way of turning. Now I would rather have a very real sense of insecurity than a false sense of security.

To be grounded in reality, I have to accept both of my ethnicities. I don’t see how you can be half of one thing and half of another and consider yourself just one. You don’t look at a zebra and say it’s black or it’s white, for it’s both. But prior to this incident, race was a nonissue for me. I was comfortable with everybody. The race issue remains divisive. People aren’t looking at things critically because media focus on how people respond as a group to certain issues instead of looking at people as individuals.

Occasionally, the young lady who came to my aid that night and I have hung out a few times--at Venice Beach, the movies--not a dating thing but a friendship based on her courage that night.

LEO GUTIERREZ

Store owner, resident near Florence and Normandie

At the time of the riots, I worked at the California Mart. Around 5 or 6 o’clock, my wife called and said, “Don’t come home. There are too many problems around here; it’s burning all over.” I live a block east of Florence and Normandie. I have lived here since 1989. I told her, “I don’t have a choice.”

There were three or four policemen around my house. The store one block away was burning and it sold explosives, so as soon as one fire was put out, another one started. I was scared.

But I never thought about moving. I feel safe here. When I bought my house, the property came with a second building. I turned that building into a store in September 1996.

My wife and I work here 12 hours a day. I get an opportunity to know my neighbors. They tell me, “We need a place like this in the neighborhood.” They don’t bother me or give me a hard time. They help me to make a living and I help them. We work together.

JOHN STEDMAN

Sergeant, L.A. County Sheriff’s Dept.

I had been a sergeant for only three days when the riots started. I was in charge of 11 deputies who patrolled the city of Lynwood and surrounding county areas.

Basically, we were running from one place to another getting rid of looters. We were overrun the first 24 hours. Then we finally got some federal troops in the area and it calmed down quite a bit by the third day.

I wasn’t panicked. I knew we were going to get control of it eventually. I think most of the law enforcement agencies got caught with their pants down, but now we are 50,000 times better than we were.

We trained extensively in things like crowd and riot control, gearing up for the second trial [in the Rodney King case]. We were ready for it. We were much more prepared as a department.

Most of Lynwood and the surrounding county area is rebuilt today or there are new businesses. To me, it feels a lot more relaxed out there. We have done more community-oriented policing to take care of the quality of life issues--everyday things such as blight, graffiti, cleaning up the alleys and the neighborhood so people take more pride in their neighborhood.

We interact more with the community and have deputies whose job is to just take care of problems, from gang members hanging out in front of people’s houses to parking problems and prostitutes.

I don’t think anyone has forgotten the riots. I think they remember, but I don’t think anyone wants a repeat of it. We learned a lot from those riots.