LA Riots of 1992
“We felt betrayed by our local law enforcement that's supposed to protect and serve. They literally abandoned us and left us pretty much on our own.” - Sonny Kang to NBC News on the LA Riots
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One of the places that was particularly affected was LA’s Koreatown, where armed looters reigned the streets. Some claim the motivation for targeting Koreatown and Korean Americans stems from growing tensions between the Black American and Korean American communities in LA. Some rioters say that Korean Americans were “taking money from their community”, that they were racists and were disrespectful against black customers. Coupled by the increased poverty rates in less well-off communities, some say this is the result of backlash by Black communities against Korean and Latino communities who began to move to LA.
Despite knowing that the Koreatown area was heavily targeted, no help was sent to the fight off the onslaught of violence. In fact, police blocked off all access to Koreatown. One Korean American recounts, "It was containment. The police cut off Koreatown traffic, while we were trapped on the other side without help. Those roads are a gateway to a richer neighborhood. It can't be denied." Instead, Korean Americans had to fight for themselves. Using makeshift and borrowed armed weapons as their only defense, many went to their own store rooftops to protect against rioters. After 6 days of non-stop rioting, more than 60 were killed and approximately $1 billion of property was lost, 40% of which were from Koreatown alone.
Reflecting on the tensions and motivations prior to the riots is complex. A couple weeks after the Rodney King incident, Latasha Harlins was mortally shot by a Korean American shopkeeper after committing a robbery, setting off further tensions between Korean Americans and other minority groups. While some see it as racial tensions due to the recent influx of Korean and Latino Americans, others see that it was class tensions and extreme poverty levels that fueled these riots. A Special Committee from the California Legislature report said that the cause of the riots was rooted in racial tensions, lack of education and employment opportunities, and impoverished living conditions in Southern LA neighborhoods.
While the atrocities left many families needing to rebuild a lifetime’s worth of work, it jump-started initiatives to bridge gaps between different races as well as a desire to begin having these conversations in the public eye. Some have made efforts to bring in Black, Latino, and Korean communities together, citing that many of the struggles they faced were more similar than different. However, others have criticized the little progress made, saying that economic inequality and poverty rates among Black and Latino communities continue 25 years after the riots happened.
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