Community Corner
L.A. Riots: A Stunning Acquittal
Echo Park muse Jenny Burman remembers the day she heard all LAPD officers had been acquitted in the beating of Rodney King.
When the Rodney King verdicts were read, I was in my car, driving from Silver Lake to my job at the Daily News in Woodland Hills. I worked an afternoon-to-night shift on the news copy desk, and I remember the 101 through Hollywood and then the Valley as “not guilty,” “not guilty,” “not guilty,” was declared. It truly had not occurred to me that all of the cops who had beaten King would be acquitted.
When I arrived at our editorial offices just a few minutes after the verdicts, the gates were shut for the first time since I had begun working there about six months earlier. The guards, who were mostly moonlighting policemen, were double in number. One had brought his border collie.
The newsroom was exceptionally busy–no surprise there. But I was surprised to look at one of the ceiling-mounted televisions to see my husband on TV at Parker Center, where he was among a crowd milling and growing.
The next few days were a lesson in how quickly this city could be turned upside down. I went to work every day, driving on freeways that were at certain points literally empty except for my car. Being alone on the freeway made me feel more frightened than the lootings on Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake, or the near-looting I attended in the 7-Eleven on Silver Lake Boulevard: A car drove up filled with young guys, and the employees had pulled out chains and were waiting.
The people who had been about to buy milk and other staples hurried out of the store or to the back. I put my milk carton on the ground and walked out. A helicopter was hovering over the store, and the would-be stealers of candy, beer, and magazines beat it.
The air was filled with smoke, and Nettie’s restaurant–across from the 7-Eleven–was packed with people sitting at tables, all talking to one another. A lot of the people were getting their food to go. For better or worse, they didn’t have to stop at the stop signs–no one was stopping--as they hurried home to watch TV newsreporters Bree Walker and Michael Tuck, clearly exhausted, take swipes at one another on air, interspersed with images of police guarding an already-looted FootLocker.
