Posted on 04/28/2012 10:16:54 AM PDT by Kaslin
As we remember the last riot in Los Angeles, the seeds of the next one are being sown.
Al Sharpton was in Los Angeles on Thursday, attending a church rally marking the two-month anniversary of Trayvon Martin’s death. Why Los Angeles should be chosen as the venue for such an event may at first seem a mystery, but whatever one may think of him, Sharpton can be counted among the true masters at manipulating the media. And here in Los Angeles this week, much of the media has been consumed with observing the 20th anniversary of what is often referred to as the Rodney King riots. The not-so-subtle message Sharpton was here to convey is this: Listen to me, do as I say, or face the consequences.
Recall that on April 29, 1992, four Los Angeles Police Department officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King, who had led police on a high-speed pursuit through L.A.’s San Fernando Valley. When he finally pulled over, unlike his two passengers King refused to submit to arrest and was struck with batons, kicked, and shocked with a Taser, all of which was captured on that famous videotape by a man who lived nearby. The tape (edited portions of it, actually) was played on television in what seemed to be a continuous loop for months, and then was played again ad nauseam throughout the officers’ trial. It was that tape, and the careful but deceptive manner in which it was edited and shown, that led to the near-universal expectation that the accused officers would be convicted. When they weren’t, much of Los Angeles was put to the torch in days of rioting and looting.
By yoking himself to the memory of the Los Angeles riots, and to the coming trial of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, Sharpton is implicitly threatening violence even as he explicitly denounces it. “I’ve fought for justice for Trayvon,” Sharpton wrote at the Huffington Post, “because I believe in America and I don’t believe we should burn it down. Let’s prove that we are in fact the United States of America, and let’s not miss another opportunity to show just how great we can be.”
And just how great can we be, Mr. Sharpton, if “justice for Trayvon” results in an acquittal of George Zimmerman?
Sharpton surely knows this is a real possibility. As pointed out by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, among others, the case against Zimmerman is feeble. But this is of little import to Sharpton, and indeed may even be to his advantage. The initial narrative of the Martin shooting – racist white guy shoots harmless black child – has come unraveled, leaving Florida special prosecutor Angela Corey in the unenviable position of pressing a murder case in which the only known eyewitness bolsters the defendant’s claim of self-defense. But expectations of a conviction have already been raised, not least by Sharpton himself, leaving him in the role of the man who will pour oil on the troubled waters. And, conveniently for Sharpton, the anniversary of the L.A. riots arrives to provide exactly the right platform for the type of self-promotion at which he is so adept.
Just as the details of George Zimmerman’s deadly encounter with Trayvon Martin have escaped the limits first placed on them by the media, so too did the actual facts of Rodney King’s arrest fly in the face of what had been presented to the public, leading to genuinely reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors who acquitted the four LAPD officers twenty years ago. But that hasn’t prevented some from trying to make history conform to long-discredited canards about the LAPD, one of which was recently trotted out in the Los Angeles Times.
“LAPD goes from longtime oppressor to community partner,” read the headline over an April 22 column by Times columnist Sandy Banks. I’ll allow that Banks probably didn’t write the inflammatory headline, but while the piece itself is worth reading for the interview with three police officers who worked through the riots and are still patrolling South Central L.A., it repeats the most tired of tired clichés about how that area once was policed. The LAPD, writes Banks, was “an occupying army.”
Utter rubbish.
Like the three officers interviewed in the Banks piece, I too was working in South Central L.A. on the day the riots began. In 1991, the LAPD had about 8,000 officers, or 2,000 fewer than it has today. But while in 2010 the city had a Part I crime rate of 273 per 10,000 residents, in 1991 that figure was a staggering 1,010. And in 1991, in the four police divisions that patrol South Central L.A., the department put no more than 80 cops on the street on a typical night, hardly anyone’s idea of an occupying army. And while the LAPD now investigates fewer than 300 murders each year, in 1991 it handled 1,025, the greatest share of which occurred in South Central L.A. On those infrequent occasions when the department did manage to muster a larger number of officers to patrol the area, it was in response to a level of violence that seems all but incomprehensible today.
And though there is much less violent crime in L.A. than there was twenty years ago, a disproportionate amount of it still occurs in those same neighborhoods. This is a fact evidently lost on Henry Watson, one of the central figures from the opening moments of the Rodney King riots. It was Watson and Damian “Football” Williams who were the primary culprits in the assault on Reginald Denny, who on April 29, 1992, was dragged from the cab of his big-rig dirt hauler and beaten nearly to death at the intersection of Florence and Normandie Avenues. In one part of a retrospective series on the riots produced by the NBC affiliate in Los Angeles, Watson spoke of his anger on hearing that the four LAPD officers had been acquitted in the beating of Rodney King.
“Enough is enough,” Watson told KNBC. “And you know, history has a tendency to repeat itself, you understand? So it’s boiling. It’s hot right now with the [Trayvon Martin] issue in Florida. . . . You can’t keep killing black folks. We’re not going to allow it.”
He apparently prefers to leave the killing of black folks to other black folks, about whom he expressed no outrage in the interview. According to the Los Angeles Times, since Jan. 1, 2007, there have been 166 people killed within two miles of the intersection of Florence and Normandie, the great majority of them young black men killed by other young black men. And many of them, victims and killers alike, were members of the same street gang to which Watson and Williams once belonged. (To no one’s surprise, Damian Williams is serving a life sentence for killing a man in 2000.)
And I may have missed it, but I didn’t catch Al Sharpton commenting on L.A.’s black-on-black crime problem while he was here in town, either. How many more will be killed in the time it takes to get a resolution in the Zimmerman-Martin case?
Unless some previously undisclosed evidence emerges against George Zimmerman, he will not be convicted of any crime, and in any event I’m confident he will never be convicted of murder. When he is acquitted, or when a mistrial is declared with a hung jury, what will happen? When that day comes, the prudent citizen will avoid the intersection of Florence and Normandie.
You can bet Al Sharpton has a bailout plan when this little war he is so carefully crafting goes awry.
Everyone I talk to is convinced there will be civil unrest when Zimmerman walks. Everyone I talk to is armed and ready.
Obama wants riots because voters will be frightened and will believe only Obama can restore peace. Clinton was our first black president, after all.
Riots reduce support for Bush president in dead heat with Clinton, Perot Poll shows big lead decreased sharply
May 05, 1992
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1992-05-05/news/1992126057_1_perot-clinton-bush-president
George Zimmerman is Hispanic, Caucasian, and Black. He isn’t all white, just as Obama isn’t all white. They are TRYING to stir up a race war that is certain.
There is ONE RACE = the HUMAN RACE!
Glenn Beck should invite Tawana Brawley on his show
There’s one big difference between the King and Z-M cases—no tape of an alleged beating for the media to loop endlessly. That means the cue will drag through the courts for while and may be gradually defused and diffused (yes, I did deliberately use two different verbs with similar spellings to describe what may happen and what the FL authorities probably desire wii happen).
Does the prosecutor think she can pack the jury with people already convinced of Zimmerman's guilt? It worked with the Scooter Libby case.
The sixth amendment is supposed to guarantee the accused a right to an impartial jury and compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his defense. Will that apply when it the state rather than the federal government prosecuting him? What if the eyewitness who saw the beating and ran inside to call 9-1-1 is scared off by the mob and won't appear in court?
"Masters" is a misleading category for a parasitical agitator, who simply exploits the contemporary state of the mass media in America--i.e., analytically dysfunctional.
A rat that gets into an unprotected food locker, is not a master at break-ins.
The problem with Sharpton & the media involves two phenomena:
1. The Leftist orientation of those graduating from major American "Institutions Of Higher Education," which instills in most journalists the mythology that holds traditional White Americans responsible for most or all of the problems of other peoples, both at home & abroad.
2. The concomitant "dumbing" down of the verbal arts in America, which leaves even the minority of journalists who would like to be more objective, without the self-confidence to really challenge the Leftist element, which is committed to an insane agenda of Egalitarian make believe & blame (always blame of those who succeed, for every problem of those who do not.)
The "Rev." Al just knows how his 'bread is buttered,' so to speak.
William Flax
That may or may not be what he wants, but if there are riots, the independent vote will desert him and he will lose big.
Another black initiated race riot in Los Angeles would actually be funny at this point.
After the Rodney King riots, the LAPD spent millions of dollars preparing for the next riots, procuring an assortment of stuff and making extensive and authoritarian plans for dealing with rioters.
And that is just the police. On the first day of the riots, the adjacent Korean neighborhood was trashed by rioters. But by the second day, the Koreans were armed to the teeth and more than happy to greet any rioter who came back with a barrage of gunfire. None were foolish enough to do so.
This is the point. They may want to “riot for Trayvon” all they want, as long as they only injure each other, and burn and loot each others property. The rest of society has had it up to here with their “zany antics”, and have no more toleration for it.
Oddly enough, I think a large part of the black community knows this as well, so will not participate, leaving only the fanatical and criminal.
The motivation is the looting - free stuff.
I remember the 1992 riots, women get scared and just want the riots to stop. Since the liberals control such things, women back the liberals.
Perot lost points after the 1992 riots, too.
He should already be arrested for already starting a race war. Look at all the Trayvon motivated black on white crime.
In this era if there are riots they will be filmed, written about, twittered, and posted on the internet out of the control of the media narrative. Quite a bit of the film will be created by the rioters themselves. There won’t be any way to disguise it as a noble reaction to injustice as was claimed in the L.A riots.
Given the demographics, a Black agitator choosing LA as the venue for a race riot - based on a Hispanic/Black incident - does not seem a particularly smart move.
You just can’t fix stupid.
No one believed that in 1992.
When the fear set in, and every city in America became afraid (for example, Phoenix had mini-riots) the women don't care about why, they just pick a protector. It's like the Stockholm Syndrome.
On the other hand, maybe Obama already knows he will lose. He would really love big riots in that scenario.
I remember a video of a Korean shop owner liberally slinging 9mm rounds at looters with a Beretta 92FS. I think that was before the high cap magazine ban in California.
Isn’t there a law about inciting a riot?
“Why Los Angeles should be chosen as the venue for such an event may at first seem a mystery, but whatever one may think of him, Sharpton can be counted among the true masters at manipulating the media”
Yes, he is a master, with a few reservations: the media is specifically vulnerable to his type, and there’s no way Sharpton would be as successful with the same talent, skills, and intelligence were he, for instance, a neo-nazi. That being said, the choice of L.A. isn’t a mystery to me, though I was unaware until now of the riots’ anniversary. Because anniversary or no, people still associate L.A. with the riots so long as you give them a nudge by talking about racial justice and police incompetence.
More than that, L.A. is a good place to rabble-rouse apart from the riots. There’s lots of black people and lots and lots of media there.
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