Lesson #1: The police are not there to protect you.
Looking back, I do believe that Reginald Denny was the beginning of my conversion to conservatism. Perhaps not PC to admit but there it is. Before Reginald Denny I had friends that were black. OJ sealed it.
I lived in an area of Long Beach that was heavily hit by the rioters. It was straight out of a dysoptian horror film. My take always:
1) open carry
2) band together with your nieghbors and patrol like vigilantes.
3) dumpsters on wheels borrowed from the strip mall around the corner provide decent street control to prevent ravaging hordes from entering
4)The rich are pussies and run like scared rabbits.
5) Cops are trained to do nothing and let the looters wear themselves out
my most memorable image of the aftermath of the riots was 4 commercial streets. 3 were ravaged and looted for their entire length. 1 wasn’t
The 1 street that didn’t get ravaged happened to have a Greek owned burger joint on a prominent corner. The menfolk of the owners got lawn chairs, sat on the roof, and simply popped off of few shots at any car full of hoodlooms. Their burger joint was untouched and the hoodlooms didn’t go further down that street.
They Greek brothers and cousins stood vigil for 3 days and nights shooting at anything and anyone that didn’t belong. They alone saved hundreds of small stores and businesses.
Rioting savages respect only two things:
- well-aimed rifle fire
- a shotgun with a good pattern
Nothing else.
Here endeth the lesson.
Somewhere I have a VHS tape copy of about an hour’s worth of hand-held footage of Hurricane Hugo’s 1989 ravishment of St. Croix, USVI. It really tore that island a new one and there was widespread looting in the cities. There was a one-story food market in Christiansted owned by Pakistanis. I was told that it was the only store not looted. There’s about a minute of video of about 20 Pakistani males standing on the perimeter of the flat roof of the building each armed with what looked like either AK 47’s or 74’s.
After the riots, my company opened a store in South Central LA to show our solidarity with the oppressed people. Our white President went to LA with some token black people to show he was down for the struggle.
A few years later, they asked me to produce a report of the stores that were weakest in performance (sales, shrinkage, etc). The worst store was the LA store by a large margin. I sent the report to the Director and he came back with “Take the LA store out of the report and keep it out”. I was worried the President would notice it was missing but he was blissful. The worst performers got closed.
I lived about 100 miles from the LA riots but I watched the local LA TV stations here’s what I learned from watching the coverage and from talking to cops and other people over the years:
1. The LA riots where planned. The media had run a campaign against the police and against the Korean community for 6 months before the they started. Tons of lies, distortion and propaganda to inflame the areas blacks. Including an edited video showing a Korean store owner shooting a black shop lifter for no reason. The full tape that I didn’t see for years later showed the shop lifter grab the store owner and bash her head into the counter top about a half a dozen times before she was shot. The Media lies.
2. The cops pulled back to just beyond Korea town because whoever planned the riots wanted Korea town burned out.
3. When the Koreans started fighting back the media urged the cops to disarm them. Half the coverage was about how awful it was that the Koreans where shooting the looters. Lucky for the Koreans LAPD was gutless cowards. Eventually the cops moved into the Korean areas to prevent the the Koreans from going on the offensive to end the riot.
In summery: The cops made zero effort to stop the riots and actively tried to keep them going by stopping armed citizens from restoring order. The Media and other powers planed riots in advance. All the riots of the 20 century may been organized this way for all I know. People in power use riots and the threat of riots as a power tool. The LA riots where not soon repeated because they didn’t achieve their goal of destroying the Korean community and have been seldom used since.
Thank you Ms. Parker.
Ping.