Los Angeles is a bastion of social justice protest but this time is different

Australia Broadcast Center

a day ago

Los Angeles has a long history of protesting over racial justice issues, but what has happened on the city's streets over the past week is, so far, very different from the riots of the early 1990s.
In the LA riots of 1992 the city erupted into what was almost a week of violence that would result in more than 50 people losing their lives.
Scholars now describe that rioting as an "explosion of rage and frustration" that had been building.
On March 3, 1991, a man named Rodney King led police on a high-speed chase before police officers caught up with him on a street in San Fernando Valley.
From there, a scene played out that would set in motion the events that led to one of the biggest civil disruptions in modern US history.
Because living nearby was a man who had a new video camera, and after being awoken by the noise outside, he pressed the red record button.
He captured nine minutes of grainy vision that would become the first widely seen video of what many believed was obvious police brutality in the United States.
In the vision, King, a black man, is laying face down on the ground as the white police officers surrounding him take turns to kick and beat him.
The video was undeniable and, for many, it was the "smoking gun" confirming what they already knew about the conduct of officers from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) — an organisation that had a notorious reputation at that time.
But a year later, at 3pm on a warm Wednesday, a jury acquitted those police officers of excessive force and that decision set Los Angeles alight.
"People in LA did not take to the streets when that footage first saturated the airways. It wasn't just hooligans looking for any reason to go off," said Jody Armour, a professor of law at the University of Southern California.
Professor Armour said when "that promise of equal justice seemed so flagrantly flouted" by the jury, "all hell broke loose in LA".
The city's law enforcement ranks were overwhelmed and its mayor, as well as California's governor, made a call for help. National Guard troops were soon on the streets of Los Angeles.
Right now, there are federalised National Guard troops and soon there will be US Marines — members of the United States military — on the ground in Los Angeles to patrol what is still a mostly peaceful protest.
Local officials did not ask for those forces to be there. In fact, they have publicly and legally opposed their presence.
In 1992 the National Guard was called in to help control widespread, destructive rioting, but right now those forces appear to be escalating the situation, and some experts are warning it is all in the name of "political theatre".
There are some key differences between the situation playing out in Los Angeles right now and the 1992 riots.
Most notably, the scale of the protests compared to the scale of the response. Professor Armour was in LA in 1992 and remembers very clearly the city on fire.
"In 92, where I am now in View Park, … there were flames across the skyline. Three or four days in, there were smoke and flames at 12 or 13 different places across the skyline. I'm looking now, there are no flames anywhere," he said.
"Traffic was shut down everywhere. I constantly heard helicopters humming overheard. Right now I'm not hearing helicopters.
In 1992, after nearly a week of rioting, more than 50 people had lost their lives and more than 2,000 had sustained injuries.
Thousands of people were arrested, it's estimated 1,100 buildings were affected and the total bill of property damage was more than $US1 billion (about $1.5 billion).
The United States has seen several widespread racial justice protest movements and moments since then, including the birth of Black Lives Matter.
In May 2020, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin put his knee on the neck of George Floyd and kept it there for more than nine minutes.
The police officer would eventually be found guilty of murder, with videos of the arrest pored over by the prosecution.
The court heard that during the initial four minutes and 45 seconds of the available videos, Mr Floyd said, "I can't breathe," 27 times.
Those were the last words uttered by Eric Garner, who was killed by New York City police officers in 2014 and became the rallying cry of the Black Lives Matter movement.
On the day of Mr Floyd's death, protests broke out across multiple US cities, including in Los Angeles, where the National Guard was sent it to quell the demonstrations.
At that time, Governor Gavin Newsom was the one to send in the troops and he had the support of the mayor to do it.
Yale historian Elizabeth Hinton, who wrote a book about race-related uprisings and police violence, said the 2020 protests were characterised as violent, but, for the most part, were not like that in reality.
That was even truer today, she said.
This time, protests have been sparked by Donald Trump's immigration raids.
They began on Friday after US Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) agents made dozens of arrests across the city over alleged immigration violations.
Unlike the 1992 riots, protests have been mostly peaceful and have been confined to a roughly five-block stretch of downtown LA, a tiny patch in the sprawling city of nearly 4 million people.
There has been vandalism and some cars set on fire, but no homes or buildings have burned.
More than 190 people have been arrested over the past several days of protests, according to the most recent update from police.
The vast majority of arrests were for failing to disperse, while a few others were for assault with a deadly weapon, looting, vandalism and attempted murder for tossing a Molotov cocktail.
These protests aren't over and, as more break out in other cities across the country, authorities appear to be preparing for a large day of demonstrations on Saturday.
But at this stage, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has said the LAPD can manage the protests in the city without the need for troops.
Professor Armour warned circumstances could quickly change and said the federal troops brought "an air of menace".
"It is more sporadic now, but that doesn't mean that it cannot gain momentum," he said.
"In downtown and some other places, there are pockets of real resistance and conflict, but when we're talking about [the] George Floyd [protests] five years ago or 1992 even, it was more widespread. It's a very different scale."
Professor Armour called the federal response "political theatre".
On rare occasions, presidents have invoked an 18th-century wartime law called the Insurrection Act, which is the main legal mechanism that a president can use to activate the military or National Guard during times of rebellion or unrest.
The last time it was used was in 1992 when troops were deployed to Los Angeles to help control the riots.
Presidents have also relied on another federal law that allows them to federalise National Guard troops under certain circumstances, which is what Mr Trump did on Saturday.
Mr Trump is said to be considering invoking the Insurrection Act to give troops on the ground in LA powers to participate in law enforcement activities.
That's something that would be seen as a dramatic escalation and that Mr Newsom would take issue with.
The back and forth between Mr Trump and the Californian governor, who is widely predicted to make his own run at the presidency in 2028, has been escalating since the weekend.
Mr Trump has been defending his decision to intervene, saying: "You have violent people, and we're not gonna let them get away with it."
Following those remarks, Mr Newsom hit back, saying: "Trump wants chaos and he's instigated violence."
He asked Mr Trump to stand down the National Guard, calling it a "serious breach of state sovereignty".
"This is an unmistakable step toward authoritarianism that threatens the foundation of our republic," Mr Newsom said.
On Monday, Mr Newsom announced California was suing Mr Trump. A hearing on the matter is due to happen on Thursday, local time.
Donald Trump and his base love military might. Troops on the ground and images of the United States's strength are part of his political messaging.
Professor Armour said he believed the decision to send troops to Los Angeles when they were not at all necessary was strategic.
"Of the two pillars he was elected on, one big pillar was, 'I'm going to get aggressive on immigration, law enforcement. I'm going to be super aggressive,'" he said.
"It doesn't translate well locally in Southern California and LA — we're very pro-immigrant, we're very concerned about looking out for immigrant rights — but that is a local attitude that's very different than the national one … at least according to Trump.
"It's political theatre. This is his chance to say that, 'In LA you have a bastion, a pocket, of anti-enforcement of immigration laws, but I have a mandate from the people. I'm going to have to override this resistance.'
"I think a lot of people in his base will eat that up."
Trump has pledged to launch the "largest deportation operation in US history", but it's worth noting ICE records show the Biden administration deported more people from the United States than Mr Trump did during his first term.
There are other examples where presidents have used National Guard troops to enforce federal decisions that are at odds with state or community norms, even if the values are very different.
In 1957, US president Dwight Eisenhower signed an executive order that federalised the National Guard in Arkansas.
Years earlier, the Supreme Court had ruled in the Brown V Board of Education legal case that racially segregated schools were "inherently unequal", but when the deadline for integration arrived, there was resistance in Little Rock, Arkansas.
That forced the president to take control.
"With Executive Order 10730, the President placed the Arkansas National Guard under federal control and sent 1,000 U.S. Army paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division to assist them in restoring order in Little Rock," US national archives read.
In the iconic images from the so-called "Little Rock crisis" federal troops are seen escorting black students safely into a school building. A year later, the first black student graduated from Little Rock Central High School.
There have been very few times in US modern history that the Insurrection Act has been invoked, but Donald Trump is a president who consistently breaks norms.
His potential use of that mechanism to empower federal troops could escalate the situation in Los Angeles even further, but after a week of protests, local authorities still maintain there was never any need for them.
ABC/AP