L.A. Riots, Civil Unrest or Civil Rebellion?

While most people and media outlets refer to the 1992 mayhem as the “L.A. Riots”, others have coined alternate terms—such as “civil unrest” and “civil rebellion”— to characterize the events in a different light. So what are the various connotations behind each of these names? And which one is correct?

For former LAPD chief Bernard C. Parks, it’s a simple answer.

“It’s a riot,” Parks said. “Whenever you have people come out in those numbers of civil disobedience, and basically begin to loot stores and people get killed and injured, I don’t know how you could call it anything but a riot.”

At the time, it was undeniably a riot. Immediately following the verdict, angry Angelenos set fire to buildings, exchanged gunshots and looted stores. The weeklong commotion left 53 dead, thousands injured and more than a thousand buildings destroyed. The city incurred nearly a billion dollars in damages.

However, when considering the mayhem in retrospect, calling it a “riot” glosses over the “very serious issues that existed in those communities, and in fact, still exist,” said Professor Leland Saito, who teaches sociology at the University of Southern California.

“[By] calling the Civil Unrest of 1992 a riot, you’re focusing on the behavior of some of these individuals,” Saito explained. “And clearly, the looting, burning down businesses, there was this kind of behavior occurring. But what that ignores though is what were some of the root causes of the civil unrest.”

The issues serving as the undertone of the 1992 events include massive deindustrialization, high unemployment, lack of adequate housing, lack of adequate health care and a broken educational system, Saito said.

But to Dr. Anthony Samad, a renowned commentator and professor of political science and African American studies at East Los Angeles College, the term “civil unrest” is a government term that tries to revise the true events in retrospect.

“The ‘civil unrest’ term came out of the mayor’s office, city council and police,” Samad said. “They don’t like to use terms like riots because riots essentially show dissatisfaction or democratic disability. ‘Riots’ represents a term that shows that both government and the social establishment is out of control.”

Samad said he alternates between “riot” and “rebellion” to describe what happened that week—“depending on what side of the fence you were on or your racial, cultural prism.”

While the term “riot” sufficiently captures the experiences of Korean merchants who incurred the brunt of the looting and damages, the black community largely calls it rebellion, he said.

“At the end of the day, [with] the police being let off for beating Rodney King, [it] was an act of frustration that represented a rebellion of ‘justice’,” Samad said.

The term “riots” also highlights the spontaneity of the events that overtook the streets, he added. Had the police been convicted on April 29, 1992, it may not have left such an indelible mark in L.A.’s history.

“There may have been some underlying symptoms, but what caused the event of April 29 was the verdict,” he said. “We can frame these things in traditional lexicon but at the end of the day, riots happen on a spontaneous basis.”

But are these terms—riots, civil unrest, rebellion— mutually exclusive? Is one more correct than another?

“I think all the terms describe part of something that happened in ’92,” said Joanne Kim, chief operating officer of Community Coalition, a south LA organization. “I don’t want to put too much in a name. It’s a label. It’s not just the name but in how we reflect upon what happened in ‘92.”

That’s why Community Coalition prefers the term “civil unrest”, Kim said.

“There was chaos and rioting going on for sure,” she said. “But as an organization working on improving the quality of life in south L.A., I think it’s important to focus on the social and economic conditions that led to the civil unrest and the reactions. Not just to the verdict, but all of the injustices that led up to it. It [was] a reflection of people’s anger, people’s frustration [and] people’s hopelessness.”

She added: “But if we choose to focus on the rioting and the mayhem and the opportunism which definitely was there, then we’ve kind of lost the opportunity to turn this tragedy into an opportunity to better ourselves as a society.”