Are you saying he was arrested during the LA riots but served no time at all in jail for it?
Jones first moved to the Bay Area in the spring of 1992, when the San Francisco-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights hired a batch of law students to act as legal observers during the trial of Rodney King's assailants. Eva Paterson, who was then the committee's executive director, remembers getting a cover letter that stood out from the rest: "It was this piece of stationery that had little faces across the top, a stencil of little guys with dreads. We said, 'Oh, yeah, we're hiring him.'"Paterson got to know Jones over the coming months, and enjoyed having the young radical in her office. "He was a kid then, really," she said. "He was brilliant, pretty feisty, pretty in your face, but that's how you are when you're young. Just a force of nature."
When the verdicts came down - not guilty for three of the officers involved, and deadlocked on the fourth - Paterson's office, like the city, reacted with disbelief. Paterson said she felt like picking up her office chair and hurling it out the window. The staff hit the streets to monitor the demonstrations that erupted in San Francisco. One week later, while Jones was observing the first large rally since the lifting of the city's state of emergency, he got swept up in mass arrests. It was a turning point in his life.
Jones had planned to move to Washington, DC, and had already landed a job and an apartment there. But in jail, he said, "I met all these young radical people of color - I mean really radical, communists and anarchists. And it was, like, 'This is what I need to be a part of.'" Although he already had a plane ticket, he decided to stay in San Francisco. "I spent the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary." In the months that followed, he let go of any lingering thoughts that he might fit in with the status quo. "I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the verdicts came down on April 29th," he said. "By August, I was a communist."
You are probably right it doesn't really matter. But it does sound a bit different than say "he was arrested during the L.A. riots..."
This is what really happened. On May 8, 1992, the week AFTER the Rodney King disturbances, I sent a staff attorney and Van out to be legal monitors at a peaceful march in San Francisco. The local police, perhaps understandably nervous, stopped the march and arrested hundreds of people -- including all the legal monitors.The matter was quickly sorted out; Van and my staff attorney were released within a few hours. All charges against them were dropped. Van was part of a successful class action lawsuit later; the City of San Francisco ultimately compensated him financially for his unjust arrest (a rare outcome).