Los Angeles Riots, Part II

1992

Chad Cole had a brutal hangover as the white school bus bumped its way along up I-5. Earlier that day, as the dust-red sun broke its yolk over the green and brown brush of the Santa Ana Mountains, Cole had woken up in the bed of a pickup truck. The day prior began with a trip to the dry cleaners, had turned into a night of drinking with a friend and ended back at the home of a woman the two men had met out at a bar. His friend slept with the woman inside the house—Cole slept in the truck. Cole was 19 years old, a native of Sherman, Texas just north of Dallas, where he had been a high school football star with his name in the hometown paper. Just before graduating high school, as the United States flirted with the idea of entering war in the Middle East, he joined the Marines.

Soon after waking up stiff and dehydrated, Cole had his head held out the window of his fellow Marine’s truck, puking as they drove, as they barreled back toward the base—to Camp Pendleton, in Oceanside, California. The two of them were determined to make it back in time for their morning exercise, for formation, and to avoid the wrath of their regiment’s commander, Colonel Clifford Stanley. Cole just hoped to stave off the shakes long enough to get through formation. “Don’t puke,” his mantra. He and his fellow Marines in the 3^rd Battalion, First Marines were just running out the clock. They had been told that after their morning routine, they would be released for a three day weekend. Plenty of time for the steady pounding of a headache to cease. But now the morning had come and gone, and Chad Cole was standing in formation, listening to orders being given by Colonel Stanley. Lance Corporal Cole was about to be deployed into battle for the first time. No cargo planes or long flights would be necessary. Cole and about 1500 fellow Marines would be driving less than 100 miles north, to Los Angeles.

It was Friday May 1, 1992. Two days prior, around 4:15 PM on April 29, a group of people at the Pay-Less Liquor and Deli on Florence Avenue in South Central “just decided they weren’t going to pay for what they were getting,” as one witness recalled. Soon, the store owner’s son’s head was bleeding, the result of having a broken beer bottle smashed over his head. It was in reaction to the verdict in the Rodney King trial, which came in around 3:15 when Judge Stanley Weisberg announced the jury’s decision to acquit four Los Angeles Police Department officers after they were accused of beating a man named Rodney King, who had led the officers on a high speed chase on the Foothill Freeway. The beating had been captured on video by a nearby neighbor named George Holliday, who happened to step onto his porch as the four men kicked and wailed away on King’s body. By the time Colonel Stanley addressed Lance Corporal Cole and the other Marines at Camp Pendleton, the ensuing violence had already led to 3,800 fires, 1,000 injuries, and 31 people dead. By the end of the five days of rioting, over 12,000 people would be arrested, over 2,300 injured, over a billion dollars in property damaged, and 63 people would be dead.

Death and destruction had come to Los Angeles again. Nearly 27 years after much of South Central Los Angeles burned during riots that came in response to decades of police mistreatment and systemic economic inequality for Black Angelinos, it was burning again for the same reasons. The problems that led to unrest in 1965 hadn’t been solved by 1992, and in fact, they had become worse. Poor schooling had continued along with a severe limit on job opportunities for those living in the very same neighborhoods. And the addition of a crack cocaine epidemic and an influx of guns had not helped things.

Still, the level of violence was apocalyptic. Cameras rolled as a truck driver named Reginald Denny was pulled from the cab of his truck and severely beaten by a group of rioters. Korean store owners shot down at looters from the rooftops of their businesses. LAPD officers engaged in open warfare against citizens, as smoke filled the sky. Eventually, California Governor Pete Wilson had called in the National Guard on Wednesday night, and throughout Thursday they engaged crowds alongside LAPD officers. During the early morning hours on Friday May 1, Governor Wilson requested federal assistance. Soon, President George H.W. Bush invoked the Insurrection Act. Marines like Lance Corporal Cole were on their way to Los Angeles to restore order to the city, much of which had spiraled into a blaze of chaos.

Cole and his fellow Marines spent much of Friday in Tustin, California, about 30 miles from the heart of the rioting, to receive riot training on how to engage with civilians. The following day, on Saturday May 2, they were on the ground—without much to do. By then, the fires and the worst of the violence had been suppressed. Mostly, they stood guard around the structures and businesses that hadn’t yet burned to the ground. As Cole later reflected, their deployment was unnecessary. Another Marine who was also deployed, C.J. Chivers, agreed. Chivers later wrote, “How a government prepares for and uses violence — including when, why and against whom — contains on some level a declaration about what kind of government that government is…I’d like to say we understood the context of the role we were given: that even a limited Marine deployment in a genuinely extreme situation would run inevitably into the ugly history of state force in the United States, and who receives the brunt of it.”

Eventually, the riots ended by Sunday, May 2. The Marines, like Cole, returned to Camp Pendleton. Last week, 700 Marines returned to Los Angeles. By then President Trump had already become the first president since 1965 to federalize the National Guard without a request from a given state’s governor, in this case, Gavin Newsome. However, unlike 1965 and 1992, the anti-ICE protests did not lead to widespread violence. Indeed, there was some rioting—the images of Waymo vehicles on fire amid a sea of Mexican flags will be featured in Republican ads for the next decade. But unlike 1992, which led to 63 deaths, not a single person died. Unlike 1992, when over 2,300 were injured—thankfully—only a few were last week. That is because law enforcement did its job, without the need for federal control. The President’s use of the Marines put those soldiers at unnecessary risk, and undermined the work of the local police: it was both anti-soldier and anti-cop, and should be characterized as such.

But for the President, as always, it’s about an image not results. This is all part of the plan: for the President to color himself in calls for law and order, and to cast Democrats as lawless enablers of illegal immigration. It’s the same dichotomy that he rode to his largest electoral victory in three tries this past November. Again and again, President Trump is testing if Democrats will align themselves with avatars that voters, writ large, do not like: Ivy League institutions like Harvard, Foreign Aid, Illegal Immigration, the Mainstream Media. Rest assured, what happened this past week in Los Angeles was a staging incident, not a riot on par with those that occurred in 1965 and 1992. The President did not invoke the Insurrection Act, which was last used in 1992, but he soon could in some other circumstance. Rather than focus on where the puck is, we should focus on where the puck is going. All of this will soon spill out into the open this summer. More raids will lead to more protests, and more violence. At every turn, the President will reach for more power, even when it isn’t there. And in that reach, he will send young Marines just like Lance Corporal Chad Cole to American cities, not to suppress riots, but to valorize his own image and embolden his own interests, irrespective of the Marine’s safety or America’s strength.

Sources:

https://www.mca-marines.org/wp-content/uploads/1992-Riots-in-Los-Angeles.pdf

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/magazine/la-riots-1992.html