1992 Los Angeles Riots
On the afternoon of April 29, 1992, a jury in Ventura County acquitted four LAPD officers of beating Rodney G. King. The incident, caught on amateur videotape, had sparked national debate about police brutality and racial injustice. The verdict stunned Los Angeles, where angry crowds gathered on street corners across the city. The Los Angeles riots would become one of the worst in the nation’s history.
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The beating victim says he’s at peace with all that’s happened to him and that he’d go through the night of March 3, 1991, again. Now out of work and nearly poor, he wears the physical and emotional scars of his ordeal.
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L.A.-area high school students find lessons about the 1992 riots gripping and galvanizing — when their teachers have time to turn the focus away from standardized tests.
