Vanka the thief. Vanka Cain. Biography. Life story. Information about Ivan Osipov in official history

If rumors are to be believed, the first stones were thrown on the afternoon of April 29, when the four police officers who beat Rodney King and the judges who acquitted them were leaving the courthouse. Immediately after this, thousands of people took to the streets of Los Angeles. A few hours later the riot spread throughout the city and very soon the situation began to resemble civil war. The police abandoned the main areas of conflict, giving way to the streets to the revolting poor.

Rodney King beating by police

Systematic arson of capitalist enterprises began. In total, more than 5,500 buildings burned down. People shot at police and at police and journalist helicopters. 17 government buildings were destroyed. The premises of the Los Angeles Times were also attacked and partially looted. A huge cloud of smoke from the fires covered the city.

Flights departing from Los Angeles International Airport were canceled and arriving planes were forced to divert due to smoke and sniper fire. Following the cultural capital of the nation, spontaneous uprisings spread to several dozen cities in the United States.

The riot was the only such violent episode of civil unrest in the United States in the 20th century, leaving far behind the urban riots of the sixties, both because of its sheer destructiveness and because the April-May 1992 riots were multiracial uprisings of the poor.

As Willie Brown, a prominent Democratic representative in the California State Assembly, told the San Francisco Examiner: “For the first time in American history most demonstrations, as well most of violence and crime, especially robbery, were multiracial in nature, involving everyone - blacks, whites, Asians and Latin America".

At the very beginning of the riots, the police were outnumbered and quickly retreated. The troops did not appear until the troops began to decline. Some rioters with megaphones tried to turn the protest into a war against the rich. “We should burn their neighborhoods, not ours.

We must go to Hollywood and Beverly Hills," one man shouted into a megaphone (London Independent, May 2, 1992). Burnt shops just two blocks from the homes of the rich show how close the riots came to the lair of the ruling class. TODAY WE WILL CELEBRATE AS IF IT'S 1999...

The uprising began among blacks but soon spread to the Latin neighborhoods of South and Central Los Angeles and Pico Union, and then to unemployed whites in the area from Hollywood in the north to Long Beach in the south and Venice in the west. East Los Angeles was spared only because of the massive concentration of the forces of order there. Everyone went outside. There was an unprecedented sense of togetherness.

Before setting stores on fire, people took fire hoses to protect their homes from the spreading fires. The old people were evacuated; it was a family affair. Cars full of people showed up at the knitting factory, loaded up and drove away. Massive looting continued for two days. The police were nowhere to be seen. Consumer goods were redistributed, otherwise some people would have had nothing.

As for the beating of truck driver Reginald Denny, the people who attacked him had shortly before defended a fifteen-year-old teenager from the police who were beating him. This of course was not reported in the media mass media. In an article dated May 1, Harry Cleaver wrote: “The remarkable thing about the dynamics of the uprising was the defeat of the means of mediation.

When the verdict was announced on the evening of Wednesday, April 29, all self-respecting “community leaders” in Los Angeles, including the black police chief, Major Bradley, tried to prevent a clash by channeling the people's outrage in a controlled direction. Meetings were organized in churches where passionate pleas were mixed with equally passionate indignant speeches designed to provide a helpless, cleansing outlet for emotions.

At the largest such meeting, broadcast on local television, a desperate mayor went too far, pleading for complete inaction. Just as good trade unions that cooperate with employers consider negotiating agreements and maintaining peace among workers as their main task, community leaders consider their main goal maintaining order."

Fortunately, they didn't succeed. The May Day issue of The New York Times, a newspaper that considers itself the voice of the US ruling class, noted with alarm that “in some areas, a street party atmosphere prevails, with blacks, whites, Hispanics and Asians united in a carnival of plunder.

As countless police watched silently, people of all ages, men and women, some carrying small children in their arms, entered and exited supermarkets, carrying large bags and armfuls of shoes, bottles, radios, vegetables, wigs, auto parts and guns. Some stood patiently in line, waiting for their time to come." The liberal entrepreneurial humor magazine "Spy" wrote that people who drove up to the supermarket in

large parking lot, specially opened doors for disabled people. A one-day anarchist newspaper in Minneapolis, borrowing the appearance of the newspaper "USA Today" and called "L.A. Today (Tomorrow ... The World)" ("Today Los Angeles, tomorrow ... the whole world") wrote: "In L.A. Angeles are celebrating..." An eyewitness in Los Angeles exclaimed: "These people don't look like burglars. They look exactly like game show winners."

In the robberies, this proletarian “short-term suppression of market relations,” Harry Cleaver even noted the emergence of “new laws (!) of distribution and a new type of moneyless public order, when enormous wealth is transferred from entrepreneurs to the have-nots. In this direct appropriation, however, we must see the political content behind the arson: the demand to destroy the institutions of exploitation...

The disruption of the trade networks of capitalist society is a blow to its circulatory system"The image of these riots, as well as riots in general, created by opponents of such uprisings is completely false. Riots are usually presented as a chain of meaningless clashes, when the rioters rush at each other like hungry sharks.

In fact, crimes against people virtually disappeared as previously divided proletarians of different colors and nationalities united in mass collective violence, "proletarian shopping" and a celebration of destruction. During the riots there were far fewer rapes and gang hooliganism than on normal days when the “forces of order” reigned supreme.

Following the uprising, young people who were previously unable to walk down a nearby street because it was under the control of a rival faction can now do so. One Los Angeles resident told us that she feels safer as a woman on the streets since the riots. Mothers of many children from four areas receiving welfare have united to fight against looming benefit cuts.

When these women picket the welfare offices, the ruling class knows that they have more than a hundred thousand rioters behind them. Conservatives estimate that this is the number of poor people in Los Angeles and its environs who have acquired collective experience in arson, robbery and clashes with the police, experience in the judicious use of collective violence as a weapon of political struggle.

The number of participants in the uprising was apparently still approaching six figures. This can be judged by the fact that over 11 thousand people were arrested (5,000 blacks, 5,500 Hispanics and 600 whites). The vast majority of rebels and robbers managed to escape unpunished. The significance of the Los Angeles uprising is perhaps best measured in comparison with the San Francisco riot, the second largest riot in the country (or maybe third if you count the violence in Las Vegas). If the San Francisco riot had happened on its own, independent of the events in Los Angeles, it would have been the largest in California since the sixties.

On April 30, more than a hundred stores in the central Market Street area of San Francisco were looted. Many expensive stores in financial center city, the rebels invaded the lair of the rich Nob Hill and destroyed a fair number of luxury cars. In one of the fashionable hotels, a group of young people chanting “Death to the rich!” broke all the windows.

As during the anti-Gulf War campaign, East Bay demonstrators marched along Highway 80 and blocked the bridge, causing traffic jams that stranded hundreds of thousands of vehicles. It was a commendably clever, tactical use of capitalism's engendered automobile urbanism as a weapon against capital. The events in Los Angeles resonated up and down the coast and in other areas of the United States.

Despite the few and atypical racist incidents, the riots were for the most part a series of essentially positive events, exclusively anti-police uprisings, which led to the fact that in the areas where they occurred, market relations were temporarily destroyed and totalitarian reality began to crack. modern America. These riots were an explosive return of class warfare to the United States on a scale greater than the heroic uprisings of 1965-1971.

These riots were more racially mixed than the urban uprisings of previous decades, and were further confirmation of the ongoing war between social classes.

The wave of riots among the poor became a decisive blow to the triumphant propaganda of the ruling classes, which followed the fall of their main imperialist enemy - Soviet Union and the defeat of former US allies Panama and Iraq. This propaganda claimed that humanity as an animal species had reached the "end of history" and that democracy and the market represented the inevitable outcome of human evolution. SECTS, LIES AND VIDEOS...

Radio and newspaper reports during the riots clearly show how our enemy, the media, was baffled by the suddenness and scale of the uprisings. But what was most disorienting and terrifying to these ruling class lackeys was the multiracial nature of the uprising.

When filming on the streets, people of all skin colors were always present. For fifty years, one of the foundations of capitalist ideology in the United States has been a massive and determined denial that our society is a class society. The uprising, at least for a short time, destroyed the results of half a century of implementation of democratic ideology.

The groveling media managed to film the beating of white truck driver Reginald Denny, and the report of this very unusual incident was shown again and again hundreds of times in order to denigrate the uprising as a race riot. Denny's rescue by several black men was not often shown on television. Towards the end of the uprising, the people who saved Denny, out of naivety or stupidity, accepted awards for his rescue from representatives of local businesses.

This allowed the bourgeoisie to appropriate ownership of such humanitarian acts and present the unrest solely as an episode of mass psychosis or a pogrom. This swift and insidious upheaval by the rich and the media is understandable, coming from a region that specializes in exporting spectacle and airwaves to the rest of the world. The bourgeois media described the looting and burning of Korean stores as "racially motivated."

Unfortunately, many businesses were spared simply because they were owned or operated by blacks or because they had a predominantly black workforce, as in the case of McDonald's. However, on the other hand, it was a manifestation of class war, which took the form of a race riot in which workers and the poor, who were mostly black, confronted shopkeepers who were mostly Korean.

The United States is a monstrously racist society. Fifty years of total mass disinformation has destroyed class consciousness among the poor and successfully divided the working class along racial lines. This is why some rioters expressed their hatred of the constant plunder of the poor in racial terms. The media buried the analysis of the causes of the uprising under a pile of superficial remarks about racism in the United States.

By limiting the riots to the issue of racial relations between “whites” as such and “blacks” as such, the media attempted to hide the multiracial nature of the riots and portray them as the exclusive expression of “black criminality.” Working-class and poor whites, no matter how poor and exploited they are, and no matter how they have resisted the police and commodity relations, are united in this propaganda scheme with rich whites simply on the basis of skin color.

It must be emphasized here that we are not liberals or racists: we do not feel sorry for the looted or burned businesses, no matter what race or nationality they belonged to, but for the fact that the rioters chose some targets and left others untouched, mistakenly looking at their oppressors with race point of view.

The riots of April-May 1992, like the riots that have occurred over the past ten years, clearly demonstrated that the most realistic, practical and direct way that can help the working class and the poor overcome ingrained racism and racial divisions may be found in a violent struggle against our common enemies - the police, businessmen, the rich and the market economy.

On May 2, 5,000 Los Angeles police officers, 1,950 sheriffs and deputies, 2,300 patrol officers, 9,975 National Guardsmen, 3,300 military and Marines in armored cars, and 1,000 FBI agents and border guards entered the city to restore order and secure stores. Hundreds of people were injured. Most of those killed during the clashes were killed during the suppression of the uprising and were not participants in the riots.

Those killed were mostly bystanders who became victims of the police. So, in Compton, two Samoans were killed during their arrest, when they were already obediently on their knees. The police also tried their best to end the truce between the various gangs. They wanted the working class of Central and South Los Angeles to start shooting at each other.

The Maid "Revolutionary Worker" wrote that one elderly woman told young people, nodding at the police: "You need to stop killing each other and start killing these fuckers." More than 11 thousand people were arrested in Los Angeles. These were the largest mass arrests in the history of the United States. Insurance companies, assessing the damage caused by the Los Angeles uprising, called it the fifth worst natural disaster in US history.

In the most radical and consequential episodes of class war there have always been and always will be cases of thoughtless use of violence.

The recent riots also involved not angels, but living people of flesh and blood, with all the vices and limitations imposed on them by horrific poverty and exploitation, reflecting the daily violence of this fucking society with all its horrors and mystifications. We must support all rioters, regardless of what they are accused of and what we consider fair and unfair.

None of them can count on a fair trial, but even if they could, we must nevertheless adhere to the strategy of unconditional support for all hostages taken by the state during the May Day events.

The city was covered in smoke from fires. Shots rang out in the streets. More than five and a half thousand buildings and structures were on fire. Set fire to cars smoked. The streets were littered with shards of broken glass. Passenger airliners did not dare to approach the huge metropolis because of the thick smoke and shots from the ground: drugged up rioters, seizing rifled weapons, fired at everything that moved. Gangs of blacks and Latinos engaged in shootouts with store owners. The Koreans especially fought for theirs. And someone fled in panic, abandoning their property to the wild crowd. People of all ages and colors enthusiastically robbed supermarkets, carrying armfuls of goods out of them. Many people came to rob in cars. The trunks and cabins were crowded household appliances and electronics, food and auto parts, perfumes and weapons. At the beginning of the riots, the police simply retreated and hardly intervened in what was happening. There were calls in the streets for people of color to rise up against white supremacy.

No, this is not a retelling of the contents of a Hollywood thriller about the near future of the United States. Not a work of fiction. This is a description of the real-life riots that rocked Los Angeles, California, April 29 - May 2, 1992.

April 29 of this year marked the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the uprising of blacks and Latinos in Los Angeles. It lasted 8 days. About 140 people were killed during the uprising. The city's Korean community managed to contain it, and then the FBI and the National Guard completed the job.

Indiana University historian P. Gilge, in his book Unrest in America (1997), estimates the number of riots and riots in the United States since the 1600s to be approximately 4,000. In his opinion, "... without By understanding the impact of the riots we will not be able to fully comprehend the history of the American people...."

Indeed, how many cases of persecution of various minorities does the history of the United States know? Starting with violence against Indians, blacks, Mexican migrants, Asians, and then increasing... The black riot in Los Angeles is another example of the fact that even in modern American society there is a problem of racial conflicts. In addition, the disastrous socio-economic situation of the lower strata of the population caused by the economic crisis also played an important role in this case.

The 1992 Colored Uprising was sparked by two events. The first - on April 29, 1992, a jury acquitted 3 policemen (another received only a symbolic penalty) accused of beating the black man Rodney King. Four police officers tried to detain King and two of his comrades on March 3, 1991. While his friends immediately obeyed the police’s demands, got out of the car and meekly lay on the ground, clasping their hands behind their heads, then King resisted. Later, he justified his behavior by saying that he was free due to parole(he was imprisoned for robbery), and was afraid that he would be put back behind bars. The police ended up beating him severely, breaking his nose and leg.

The second event - on the same days, the court actually acquitted Korean-American Sunn Ya Doo, who shot 15-year-old black woman Latasha Harlins in her own store during an attempt to rob it. The court gave Sunn Ya Du only 5 years probation.

It is worth adding that the jury that considered the Rodney King case consisted of 10 whites, 1 Latino and 1 Chinese.

All this together gave the blacks a reason to declare that “white America” is still racist. They especially hated the Koreans and Chinese, whom the blacks declared “traitors to the colored world” and servants of the “white murderers.”

For the first hours, the blacks' performance was peaceful - their political activists, including several Baptist pastors, took to the streets with posters:

But in the evening, black youth appeared on the streets. She began stoning whites and Asians. These photos show what this barbarity looks like:

America does not like to remember these events. After all, they did not happen sometime, but immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union. Then, when the rulers of the United States reveled in victory, when the American market-capitalist system was declared the best achievement of mankind. But it turned out that in the USA itself there are millions of beggars who are ready to destroy and break. That the rule of conservative free-marketers, which has lasted since 1981, has managed to get many Americans to the core.

(Blacks beat up a Korean they come across)

Systematic arson of commercial enterprises began. In total, more than 5,500 buildings burned down. People shot at police and at police and journalist helicopters. 17 government buildings were destroyed. The premises of the Los Angeles Times were also attacked and partially looted. A huge cloud of smoke from the fires covered the city.

As Willie Brown, a prominent Democratic representative in the California State Assembly, told the San Francisco Examiner:
“For the first time in American history, most of the demonstrations, and most of the violence and crime, especially looting, were multiracial in nature, involving everyone—blacks, whites, Asians, and Hispanics.”

At the very beginning of the riots, the police were outnumbered and quickly retreated. Troops did not appear until the unrest subsided. Some rioters with megaphones tried to turn the protest into a war against the rich. “We should burn their neighborhoods, not ours. We should go to Hollywood and Beverly Hills,” one man shouted into a megaphone (London Independent, May 2, 1992). Burnt shops just two blocks from the homes of the rich show how close the riots came to the lair of the ruling class.

At night, houses and shops burned. The epicenter of the uprising was the area of South Central Los Angeles. Looking ahead, we will say that during the uprising about 5.5 thousand buildings were burned. Blacks also broke into residential buildings where whites lived - raped and robbed them.

A day later, on the evening of April 30, the uprising began in the central neighborhoods of Los Angeles populated by Latinos. The city was on fire. These photos show fires in Los Angeles:

As for the beating of truck driver Reginald Denny, the people who attacked him had shortly before defended a fifteen-year-old teenager from the police who were beating him. This, of course, was not reported in the media. In an article dated May 1, Harry Cleaver wrote: “The remarkable thing about the dynamics of the insurrection was the defeat of the means of suppression. When the verdict was announced on the evening of Wednesday, April 29, all self-respecting “community leaders” in Los Angeles, including the black police chief, Major Bradley, tried to prevent a clash by channeling the people's outrage in a controlled direction. Meetings were organized in churches where passionate pleas were mixed with equally passionate indignant speeches designed to provide a helpless, cleansing outlet for emotions.

At the largest such meeting, broadcast on local television, a desperate mayor went too far, pleading for complete inaction. Just as good trade unions that cooperate with employers see their main goal as negotiating agreements and maintaining peace among workers, community leaders see their main goal as maintaining order.”

They failed. The May Day issue of The New York Times, a newspaper that considers itself the voice of the US ruling class, noted with alarm that “in some areas, a wild street party atmosphere prevails as blacks, whites, Hispanics and Asians unite in a carnival of plunder.” . As countless police watched silently, people of all ages, men and women, some carrying small children in their arms, entered and exited supermarkets, carrying large bags and armfuls of shoes, bottles, radios, vegetables, wigs, auto parts and guns. Some stood patiently in line, waiting for their time to come.”

The liberal entrepreneurial humor magazine Spy wrote that people who drove up to a supermarket in a large parking lot deliberately opened the doors for the disabled. A one-day anarchist newspaper in Minneapolis, borrowing the appearance of USA Today and called L.A. Today (Tomorrow… The World)” (“Today Los Angeles, tomorrow… the whole world”) wrote: “They are celebrating in Los Angeles...” An eyewitness in Los Angeles exclaimed: “These people do not look like robbers. They're just like game show winners."

By limiting the riots to the question of racial relations between “whites” as such and “blacks” as such, the media attempted to hide the multiracial nature of the riots and portray them as the exclusive expression of “black criminality.” Working-class and poor whites, no matter how poor and exploited they are, and no matter how they have resisted the police and commodity relations, are united in this propaganda scheme with rich whites simply on the basis of skin color.

But the main goal of the rebels was robbery. Hundreds of shops and even residential buildings were looted. They took everything out, right down to diapers (you can see this in the first photo above). In total, goods worth up to $100 million were taken out. The total material damage from the uprising amounted to about 1.2 billion dollars:

Those killed were mostly bystanders who became victims of the police. So, in Compton, two Samoans were killed during their arrest, when they were already obediently on their knees. The police also tried their best to end the truce between the various gangs. They wanted the residents of Central and South Los Angeles to start shooting at each other.

"Revolutionary Worker" wrote that one elderly woman told young people, nodding at the police: "You need to stop killing each other and start killing these fuckers." More than 11 thousand people were arrested in Los Angeles. These were the largest mass arrests in the history of the United States. Insurance companies assessing the damage caused by the Los Angeles uprising called it the fifth-deadliest natural disaster in US history.

In the most radical and consequential episodes of class war there have always been and always will be cases of thoughtless use of violence. (This is not a class war - the poor population rebelled in response to racial oppression and policies aimed at the mass creation of social outcasts. - P-O)

None of them can count on a fair trial, but even if they could, we must nevertheless adhere to the strategy of unconditional support for all hostages taken by the state during the May Day events.

Max Enger

The first two days - April 29-30 - the police practically did not interfere with the riot. The maximum that the local police were able to do was to fence off the site of the uprising so that it would not spread to other neighborhoods where wealthy whites lived, as well as to the business part of the city. In fact, for two days, a third of Los Angeles was in the hands of insurgent people of color. Moreover, the blacks even tried to storm the Los Angeles police headquarters, but the law enforcement officers withstood the siege. The crowd also destroyed the editorial office of the famous Los Angeles Times newspaper, justifying it by saying that it was a “stronghold of white lies.”

The whites fled in fear from the captured neighborhoods and from the surrounding areas. Only Asians remained. They were the first to fight back against the blacks and Latinos. The Koreans especially distinguished themselves. They rallied into about 10-12 mobile groups, each of 10-15 people, and began to methodically shoot the colored people. The remaining Koreans stood guard over houses, shops and other buildings. In fact, it was the Koreans who then saved the city, preventing the uprising from spreading to other neighborhoods and holding back the brutal crowds of people of color:

On April 30, more than a hundred stores in the central Market Street area of San Francisco were looted. Many expensive stores in the financial center of the city were destroyed, the rebels invaded the lair of the rich Nob Hill and destroyed a fair number of luxury cars. In one of the fashionable hotels, a group of young people chanting “Death to the rich!” broke all the windows.

Max Enger

(A policeman interrogates a wounded Korean who killed three colored raiders)

Only by the evening of May 1, 9,900 National Guardsmen, 3,300 military and marines in armored cars, as well as 1,000 FBI agents and 1,000 border guards were pulled into Los Angeles. These security forces cleared the city until May 3. But in fact the uprising was suppressed only on May 6.

The security forces did not stand on ceremony with people of color. According to various sources, they killed from 50 to 143 people (there were no autopsies on most of the corpses, and it remains unclear who killed whom). About 1,100 people received gunshot wounds. Often, as witnesses later testified, security forces killed unarmed people “to intimidate” others. In several cases, for example, they shot blacks who were searched by them and forced to their knees. Or the security forces shot in the arms and legs of those caught (hence such a large number of non-fatally wounded).

The civil militia, made up of whites, completed the job. The police helped security forces search for and detain people of color. Later, she took part in clearing the rubble, searching for corpses, providing assistance to victims, and other volunteering.

More than 11 thousand rioters were arrested. Of these, blacks made up 5,500 people, Latinos - 5,000 people, and whites only 600 people. There were no Asians at all. About 500 of those detained are still serving sentences in prison - they received sentences ranging from 25 years to life imprisonment.

(An Asian woman thanks the National Guardsmen for saving her)

The phenomenon of the “black riot” caused considerable damage to the state treasury - $1 billion. But no less significant damage was caused to the pride of those who rejoiced at the collapse of the USSR. After revenge in the political and economic field (the US economy was recognized as the most efficient), such a tense internal situation and the socio-economic crisis significantly darkened the picture of American comprehensive well-being.
In the United States, they proposed abolishing the city of Detroit

In Ferguson they made us remember how it was last time.

MyTen tried to reconstruct in detail what followed during the riot in Los Angeles in 1992. Since subjectivity is everything to us, we, as usual, will express our assessment of the situation as a whole. It did not influence the given chronology. You may not agree with her. But we will say what we want to say. The opinion of the author, of course, may not coincide with the opinion of the editors.

10 stages of the 1992 Los Angeles riot.

1) First we need to understand the reasons for such massive riots in Los Angeles.

Historically, the population of South Los Angeles is very poor. In the 90s, this was further aggravated by the economic crisis.

Already by that time, the public in the States was nervous about the beating of a black detainee by white police officers.

By that time, the Los Angeles police had already been accused of racial intolerance many times, and this can explain many subsequent events. In particular, when one of the police officers was accused of racism, the only thing he could do was accuse the detainee, Rodney King, of .

2) On March 3, 1991, after, according to some sources, a chase, a police patrol stopped a car with three passengers. All three were African American. All police officers are white. We would gladly not focus on this, but this is the root issue of the subsequent unrest. Two passengers unquestioningly obeyed orders, and Rodney King, the third detainee, behaved defiantly. This is clear from the arrest. He did not calm down even after he was shot twice with a stun gun. At that moment, when he stood up from the ground for the second time, King lunged towards one of the policemen. It was from this moment that Argentinean citizen George Holliday, passing by, began filming everything that was happening.

The three police officers begin beating King and hit him with a baton a total of 56 times. This ends for him with a fractured facial bone, two broken legs, numerous hematomas, and lacerations. But he remains alive.

3) History would not have developed properly if it were not for the American press. The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, ABC News, after receiving the George Holliday videotape for a year, constantly return to this topic. The Los Angeles Times publishes a story dedicated to Rodney King two weeks after the incident.

The case drags on for a year, but ultimately, in 1992, the district attorney accuses the police of exceeding their authority and causing excessive violence.

On April 29, 1992, a jury of nine whites, one biracial, one Hispanic, and one Asian found the cops not guilty. This is generally considered the starting point of the riots.

4) 1 day. Peaceful demonstrations over the acquittal of the police quickly escalated into a real riot. In connection, as already written above, with heavy economic situation, the population of Los Angeles received the riots with a bang. From 6 pm, looting of stores and burning of buildings begins. At 18:45 a demonstrative “revenge” takes place. The white driver, Denny Oliver, is pulled out of a truck that stops at an intersection and beaten to within an inch of his life. This is filming in live an ABC News helicopter circling the city. Suddenly, another African American man intervenes in the scene and saves the nearly dead driver by quickly shoving him into the truck and (violent video, we warn).

The city authorities mobilize all police officers and officers and ask for the National Guard to enter the city.

5) 2 day. On the second day, life in the city is more like a film about a society that has survived the apocalypse. Shop owners are up in arms defending their business. Gunfire is heard for the first time. Rules traffic no one observes (taught by the bitter experience of a truck driver who was injured precisely because he stopped).

The country's president, George Bush, is publicly commenting on the situation for the first time (unlike Barack Obama, who commented on the situation in Ferguson an hour and a half after the verdict was announced). George Bush calls to stop the pogroms and says to the “anarchists”.

From now on, doctors and firefighters travel only in a motorcade with police officers, as attacks on them have become more frequent.

The state governor declares a state of emergency.

Rodney King calls to stop the pogroms, but does it rather sluggishly (again, compared to how the mother of the murdered Michael Brown does it in Ferguson). on his “Bill Cosby Show” he condemns the riot and calls for an end to the unrest.

About 400 people try to storm the police headquarters.

Any arrest in the city provokes even more violence.

6) 3 and 4 days. Up to 4,000 soldiers enter the city national guard. On the evening of May 1, George W. Bush declares that “terrorism, which appears here and there, will be suppressed in the shortest possible time” and that justice will prevail.

Los Angeles Airport is grounded due to thick smoke hanging over the city from burning buildings.

The governor and mayor are asking for at least a doubling of the number of soldiers in the city and the number of doctors deployed from neighboring states. The entertainment of the metropolis finally stops working. The famous hippodrome, which at that moment was hosting one of the most famous festivals, Los Alamitos Race Course, is closing.

The riots spread to San Francisco, where the pogroms are no longer purely racial in nature. Over the course of 24 hours, more than 100 stores were looted there.

By the beginning of the third day, namely by 9 a.m., a thousand casualties were reported and. Data on those detained at that time are not provided.

By the fourth day, the media did not undertake to accurately calculate the number of dead and wounded.

7) 5 day. On May 2, up to 10,000 police officers, 3,000 military personnel (by that time there were already 12,000 National Guard soldiers in the city) and thousands of FBI agents arrived in Los Angeles. Also in the city are 1,500 soldiers from the United States Marine Corps First Division. During the day, the police injured 15 people and injured hundreds.

It is precisely such tough measures that can turn the situation around.

The story of the Koreatown of Los Angeles deserves special attention: even on the first day, the Koreans put up such a defense against looters that the National Guard did not dare to use force, since “there could be personnel losses.” For almost 24 hours, the mayor of the city had to personally persuade the Korean commune to lay down their arms. For a long time, the Koreans refused to believe that order could now be established in the city.

The “police case” is handed over to the “feds.”

8) 6 and 7 days. The city is gradually coming under the control of the military and police.

Mode State of emergency removed.

The mayor of Los Angeles officially announces an end to the riots in the city. National Guard soldiers remain within the city for another 6 days, and additionally deployed police until May 27.

9) The losses suffered by the city are difficult to estimate accurately. - more than $1 billion over 5,000 buildings. There are more than 2,000 victims. - 53 people.

The retrial ends with the two police officers being found guilty and receiving prison sentences, two more are found not guilty. All four were dismissed from the police without the right to reinstatement.

10) Rodney King was awarded a settlement of more than $3 million by the Los Angeles Police Department.

In subsequent years, he also had problems with justice and was detained on various charges.

These pogroms can be assessed differently: from the strongly right-wing (allegedly African-Americans are to blame for everything) to the radical left (again, supposedly the States are a police state).

The truth, as usual, is somewhere in the middle. In any state there is an unresolved national question and the government of any state, especially a large one, will harshly suppress any radical expression of will, be it the USA, Russia, China or India.

In the spring of 1992, a real apocalypse broke out in respectable Los Angeles. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans carried out a large-scale pogrom in the city, thus expressing protest against discrimination against the black population.

Hell in the City of Angels

On the fine days of May 1992, the sky over Los Angeles was clouded with smoke from raging fires - thousands of buildings and cars were blazing. Spontaneous clashes broke out on the streets every now and then, accompanied by the sound of broken glass, shooting and screams of people.

These rioters, stoned and drugged, took rifled weapons and fired at everything that moved, while simultaneously destroying shops and offices along the way. Some tried to protect their property, while others fled in panic, leaving everything to the raging crowd.

People of all ages and nationalities robbed supermarkets with some kind of devilish frenzy, carrying out armfuls of everything they could get their hands on. The most enterprising ones filled the trunks and interiors of cars with household appliances, electronics, spare parts, weapons, perfumes, and food.

At first, the police did not interfere in the looting of the city: several thousand law enforcement officers were simply powerless to stop the rampant elements. Even passenger airliners did not dare to approach the huge metropolis plunged into chaos, flying around the seething city.

This is not the first such incident in Los Angeles. In August 1965, six days of rioting in Watts, a Los Angeles suburb, killed 34 people, injured more than a thousand, and caused $40 million in property damage.

Despite all the differences, both events have the same roots: the protest of the black population against discrimination by the authorities and the police. Los Angeles, which found itself in the middle of the 20th century on the path of a mass exodus of the colored population of the United States from the disadvantaged south to the free north, became perhaps the most “African-American” city in the country.

So, if in 1940 about 63 thousand representatives of the black diaspora lived in Los Angeles, then by 1970 its number exceeded 760 thousand people. A spark was enough to ignite this huge mass of indignant people.

By race

At the turn of the 1980s-90s, the southern part of central Los Angeles (South Central Los Angeles), where the bulk of the black population lived, was most affected by the economic crisis, and it was here that the highest percentage of unemployment was recorded. The result is a high crime rate and regular police raids.

Representatives of the African-American community were convinced that when arresting and using force, the city police were guided solely by race. The black population of Los Angeles was particularly outraged by the verdict of a Korean-American woman who, on March 16, 1991, shot and killed a 15-year-old black girl in her own store. Despite the fact that the jury found Sun Ya Du guilty of premeditated murder, the judge gave her an extremely lenient sentence - 5 years of probation.

However, the straw that overwhelmed the patience of the black population of Los Angeles was the court verdict against four police officers who brutally beat the black American Rodney King. Three of them escaped any punishment at all.

On March 3, 1991, after an 8-mile chase, a police patrol stopped Rodney King's car, which was carrying three other African-Americans. Police officer Stacy Kuhn ordered four deputies - Powell, Wind, Briceno and Solano - to handcuff King. However, the latter showed quite aggressive resistance to law enforcement officers, in particular, hitting one of them in the chest. The police were forced to use a stun gun, but when this method did not calm the offender, the security forces switched to more decisive actions and simply began to beat King with batons and kicks.

It was later discovered that King's blood contained traces of alcohol and marijuana, although this did not absolve the police from responsibility. All this action was captured on camera by Argentinean George Halliday, who lived nearby. Footage of the incident subsequently spread throughout the American media.

Colorful bacchanalia

Already on the evening of April 29, after the acquittal, thousands of angry crowds of “blacks,” and along with them “Latinos,” poured into the streets of Los Angeles. Stones flew, shots rang out, fires blazed. Rioters set fire to 17 government buildings.

According to eyewitnesses, what was happening was more reminiscent of a civil war, and all this was literally a stone's throw from the dream factory - Hollywood and the fashionable Beverly Hills area. On the streets, calls for an uprising of “coloreds” against the domination of “whites” were increasingly heard; the most aggressively inclined, through a megaphone, convinced the crowd to go “to Hollywood and Beverly Hills to rob the rich.”

But one of the first to suffer was not the snickering bourgeois, but 33-year-old truck driver Reginald Denny. A crowd of rioters pulled him out of the cabin and beat him almost to death - he could neither walk nor speak. At that time, the police only circled the scene of the incident and broadcast everything live on TV. They were given orders not to interfere.

Korean Americans suffered a lot, especially store owners: it was revenge for an unfair court decision in the case of the murder of a black girl by a Korean woman.

Very quickly, the riot engulfed the African-American and Latin neighborhoods of south and central Los Angeles, and the authorities managed to hold the east of the city. Public transport was suspended in the city, and rail and air traffic was also disrupted. Sports and cultural events have been postponed to a later date. Following the City of Dreams, the uprisings spread to several dozen more US cities.

The next day, the riots spread to San Francisco. Over a hundred shops there were looted. As prominent Democratic Party spokesman Willie Brown told the San Francisco Examiner: “For the first time in American history, most of the demonstrations, and most of the violence and crime, especially looting, were multiracial in nature, involving everyone—blacks, whites, immigrants from Asia and Latin America.”

Denouement

On the morning of May 1, at the request of California Governor Pete Wilson, a special transport with guardsmen left for the city, but before their arrival, only 1,700 police officers had to cope with the riot. In the evening of the same day, President George H. W. Bush addressed the people, reassuring everyone and assuring that justice would prevail.

Only on the fourth day of the riots did reinforcements enter the city: about 10,000 guardsmen, 1,950 sheriffs and their deputies, 3,300 military and marines, 7,300 police officers and 1,000 FBI agents. Mass raids and arrests began, and 15 of the most active rebels were killed by law enforcement forces. The uprising was suppressed.

The US Department of Justice has opened a federal investigation into the beating of Rodney King. US federal authorities later brought civil rights charges against the police officers. The trial lasted a week, after which a verdict was reached, according to which all four police officers who participated in the beating of Rodney King were fired from the ranks of the Los Angeles police.

As a result of the six-day Los Angeles riot, according to official data alone, 55 people were killed, more than 2,000 were injured, more than 5,500 buildings were burned, and more than 5,500 buildings were damaged, amounting to a total loss of more than $1 billion. Insurance companies ranked the damage as the fifth-worst natural disaster in US history. The arrests made turned out to be the largest in the history of the state - more than 11 thousand people, of which 5 thousand African Americans and 5.5 thousand Latin Americans. The total number of participants in the uprising was close to a million people.

It is curious that Rodney King was paid compensation in the amount of $3.8 million from the Los Angeles police. Using part of these funds, he opened the Alta-Pazz Recording Company label, where he began recording rap. Subsequently, King did not settle down, and still had problems with American justice.