People take part in a rally and peace parade in Los Angeles' Koreatown, on the 25th anniversary of riots that erupted after the 1992 acquittal of four white police officers in the beating of black motorist Rodney King, Saturday, April 29, 2017. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon)
As you may be aware, on Saturday we marked an inauspicious anniversary: It has been 25 years since the outbreak of the “Rodney King riot” in Los Angeles. And as you may also be aware, the occasion has been marked by many retrospectives, in print and on film, examining the riot, its precursors, and its aftermath. Sadly, but not unexpectedly, these retrospectives have almost uniformly followed a theme much in fashion these days, to wit, that the police were the bad guys and the rioters were heroic warriors for social justice.
Perhaps the most glaring example of this revisionism and moral inversion came courtesy of the A&E network’s L.A. Burning: The Riots 25 Years Later, in which perspectives on the riot are offered primarily by people with an axe to grind against the police in general and the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in particular.
Some of the rioters themselves are interviewed and, incredibly, allowed to present their narrative unquestioned. Among them was Henry “Kiki” Watson, one of the four men convicted in what became the emblematic scene from the riot’s first hours, the beating of truck driver Reginald Denny at the intersection of Florence and Normandie Avenues in South Los Angeles.
You’ll recall that Mr. Denny was driving a load of gravel west on Florence when he was pulled from the cab of his truck and beaten nearly to death, then lay helpless in the street as rioters picked through his pockets and left him for dead. Had it not been for some good Samaritans in the crowd, one of whom was a truck driver, Mr. Denny almost certainly would have died in that intersection while his attackers danced and carried on around him.
In the A&E program, Mr. Watson expresses no remorse for his actions. Rather, he seeks to explain away his misdeeds by saying he was “swept up” in what was happening. “You get swept up,” he tells the interviewer, “into the emotions of a particular moment when there’s temporary insanity or whatever. You behave in a manner you wouldn’t ordinarily behave.” One must wonder what swept him up into the armed robbery for which he was convicted prior to the riot.
Also “swept up,” apparently, was Damien “Football” Williams, who was shown on video throwing a chunk of cinderblock at Reginald Denny’s head, then pointing and laughing at the helpless man while dancing around the intersection. Alas, Mr. Williams was unavailable to be interviewed for the program as he is serving a 46-year sentence for the 2000 murder of a drug dealer. If only we could learn what it was that swept him up into that crime.
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