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jlf1961 -> You would have thought..... (4/24/2017 2:13:24 PM)
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Its been almost 25 years since the incidents at 71st and Normandie and a little later at Florence and Normandie and you would have thought that things in the US would have improved, or at least as a nation we would have learned something....
But clearly we havent, or more appropriately, the powers that be havent learned a damn thing.
For my personal experience with the LA civil disturbance, aka the LA riots or as some called it, the LA revolt, the 29th of April was little more than a continuation of an 18 hour shift as the Security supervisor for a Department of Defense site in Western North Carolina. The company I worked for had just gotten the contract for the site and I had been transferred from the Savannah River Nuclear facility in Savannah GA.
As part of the firms Nuclear Security division, I was licensed as an armed security officer in every state in the US that had a nuclear plant.
So, I got off work, drove 60 miles to my apartment and had barely had any sleep when the phone rang, two and a half hours later I was on a plane for LA.
Flying into LAX was unreal. You could see the fires that were still burning as the plane made its final approach.
The drive from the airport to the local office was equally unnerving since we were told inside the airport to suit up and put loaded magazines in side arms and then load our shot guns.
It was also the only time that I can remember absolutely zero traffic on the streets and running every light between the airport and the Wilshire Hilton hotel where we were put up.
There were also no police cruisers seen anywhere.
The first few days were the worst. It was no different than being in a war zone. The cops were trigger happy, store owners were trigger happy, and then there was the humorous things I noticed.
Like one of the few 7/11 store in south central that was open with both SWAT officers in place around it and a 2 platoons of National Guardsman with two snipers on the roof.
But what had happened to cause the riots?
Well, people blame the fact that the four cops that beat Rodney King being acquitted.
That was the immediate cause, but the problems went deeper.
A couple weeks after the King beating, a young African American girl was shot in the back of the head by the wife of a Korean Shop owner. She ended up getting five years probation for voluntary manslaughter.
Transcripts of communications between LA officers were released with references to the King beating as something out of the movie "Gorillas in the Mist."
A police department that had a number of armored vehicles with battering rams that were supposed to be used to fight the drug problem, but in one incident these vehicles completely destroyed an apartment complex in a 'drug' raid... although no drugs were found.
In the period between the beating of King and the riots, at least four incidents involving LA police raiding homes in which shots were fired immediately after the initial shouting by police to identify themselves, with innocent women and children wounded in the shootings, and in three incidents no drugs, or drug paraphernalia was found in the raids.
And not all the victims were black, some were Asian and Hispanic.
During the riots, tv station helicopters where reporting live on just where there were no police, which meant that the loiters were being told where to go and not have to worry about police response.
Chief Gates was at a fund raiser to raise money to get an proposal to set a term on his position as Chief of Police stopped, and the officers at the fund raiser with him did not inform him of the violence at 71st and Normandie or the fact that the division commander for that area had pulled all officers out of the area.
No one thought to close Normandie and Florence to traffic to prevent the numerous cars from being attacked by trying to drive through the area completely unaware there was a danger.
No one thought to stop the public buses or school buses from entering the area.
And the Mayor and Chief gates spent the next few days blaming each other for the lack of response.
Now we have "black lives matter" following a number of shootings by police of African American males. Doesn't matter that white American males are shot by police in the US at 3 for every one African American.
Doesnt matter that police forces in areas that are predominantly minority populated are still primarily white.
Doesnt matter that the news media is going to concentrate on minority members being shot by police and not white Americans.
And as Ferguson and Baltimore clearly showed, no body has learned anything that LA taught us, or the Watts riots before that.
The worst part of the whole fucking mess, is that it still exists, adding a new twist as deemed appropriate by our newly elected president which basically tells cops to use profiling to protect the streets.
President Trump openly said he would put mosques and any place Muslims gather under Department of Justice surveillance. He publicly agreed to the New York city police policy of stopping minority males and frisking them for the leanest of reasons.
So, when the next LA happens, when people who arent white have taken enough shit, and the entire country blows up, who are we going to blame? Minorities? Our police? Our leaders?
Or are we going to blame ourselves for not doing shit to change the underlying problem?
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