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NDTV
3 hours ago
- Politics
- NDTV
1992 Los Angeles Riots: The Last Time 'La La Land' Burned
Los Angeles is burning again. The weekend ICE raids lit the first spark. Armed agents fanned across workplaces, detaining dozens in what activists say were overly aggressive immigration crackdowns. It didn't take long for the anger to spill onto the streets. Protesters hurled rocks, burned vehicles, and faced tear gas and rubber bullets as the city spiralled into chaos. In a move that reminded many of past strongman politics, President Donald Trump deployed 2,000 National Guard troops, without the California Governor's consent. The streets of LA, already tense with chants and smoke, now stood under federal boots. This isn't the first time 'La La Land' has been here. Rewind to 1992, the last time Los Angeles truly burned. When The City Erupted It was April 29, 1992. Four white Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers had just been found not guilty in the brutal beating of Rodney King, an unarmed Black motorist. The attack was captured on video. It showed Mr King on the ground, arms flailing, as batons crashed down over and over. The footage aired across the world. Yet, when the not guilty verdict came, the rage exploded. Six straight days of fire, looting, and violence engulfed Los Angeles. Entire neighbourhoods were torched. Stores burned. Helicopters circled above a city at war with itself. More than 60 people were killed, over 2,000 injured, and around 12,000 arrested. The damage was Over $1 billion, and 1,100 buildings destroyed. President George W Bush deployed thousands of federal troops to restore order. At the time, the fire department was fighting flames and dodging bullets along with it. The Aftermath The Rodney King riots didn't emerge out of nowhere. For decades, communities of colour in LA lived under a system they believed brutalised them with impunity. Mr King's situation only confirmed what many already suspected. As the 1992 jury read its verdict, people began chanting: "No justice, no peace." On that very day, a truck driver was pulled from his vehicle and beaten on live television. Police retreated. Fire spread. The mayor declared a state of emergency. President George Bush sent in troops. And Rodney King's famous televised plea, "Can we get along?" echoed across a broken city. The aftermath was seismic. LA Police Chief Daryl Gates resigned. Mayor Tom Bradley chose not to run again. The city settled with Mr King for $3.8 million. Fast forward to 2025. The players have changed. ICE raids instead of police brutality, immigration raids instead of beatings. But the flames are familiar.
Time of India
8 hours ago
- Politics
- Time of India
Watch: Fox News crew kicked out of Los Angeles protests as tensions erupt over Trump's National Guard deployment
— Mollyploofkins (@Mollyploofkins) Live Events — ElijahSchaffer (@ElijahSchaffer) A protester was arrested for throwing a Molotov cocktail at officers. Another was taken into custody for ramming a motorcycle into a police line. At least four self-driving Waymo vehicles were set on fire, sending massive plumes of smoke into the air as the electric cars exploded intermittently. — DogRightGirl (@DogRightGirl) (You can now subscribe to our (You can now subscribe to our Economic Times WhatsApp channel Protests in Los Angeles spiraled into chaos on Sunday as thousands took to the streets in a fiery response to President Donald Trump's controversial deployment of the National Guard. Demonstrators blocked major freeways, set self-driving cars ablaze, and clashed with law enforcement using tear gas, rubber bullets, and flash bangs to contain the evening, police declared the protest an unlawful assembly and began making arrests. Some protesters, refusing to disperse, hurled concrete chunks, fireworks, electric scooters, and rocks at California Highway Patrol officers stationed on the closed southbound 101 Freeway. Officers took cover under an overpass as tensions marked the third and most volatile day of demonstrations against Trump's immigration crackdown in Southern California. The arrival of around 300 National Guard troops only fueled outrage in the city of 4 million, with much of the activity centered in downtown Los the most widely shared moments online was a viral video showing a Fox News crew being kicked out of the protest site. Protesters were seen heckling the journalists, vandalizing their vehicle, and allegedly looting their equipment. The footage, circulating across social media, quickly sparked debate over media presence at politically charged the protests turned increasingly violent:By late afternoon, demonstrators moved onto the 101 Freeway, bringing traffic to a standstill until officers forcibly cleared the roadway. Throughout the evening, flash bangs echoed through the streets as police imposed a citywide dispersal order and shut down several blocks of Los Angeles Police Department used crowd-control munitions to disperse what they described as an unlawfully assembled group. Dozens were arrested over the weekend. The federal immigrant arrest tally in the L.A. area climbed to more than 100, with some of those detained being protest participants. Among them was a prominent union leader, accused of obstructing law large, the current wave of protests has not yet reached the scale of past uprisings in the city—such as the Watts Rebellion (1965), the Rodney King riots (1992), or the 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations—each of which prompted official requests for National Guard time, Trump's direct federal activation of the Guard—without a request from California Governor Gavin Newsom—has sparked constitutional concerns and fierce political backlash, further fueling the unrest unfolding on L.A.'s streets.
New York Times
17 hours ago
- Politics
- New York Times
When the National Guard Went to L.A. in 1992, the Situation Was Far Different.
Some Republicans have drawn parallels between President Trump's dispatching of National Guard troops to Los Angeles on Saturday and what happened in 1992, when soldiers and Marines were sent to the Los Angeles area to restore order after the Rodney King riots. But that was a far different situation. In contrast with the isolated skirmishes seen in Los Angeles County over the past few days, there were neighborhoods in 1992 that had devolved into something resembling a lawless dystopia. Drivers were pulled from cars and beaten. Buildings were burned. Businesses were looted. In all, 63 people died during the riots, including nine who were shot by the police. The mayhem, which went on for six days, was rooted in Black residents' anger over years of police brutality. It ignited after four officers were found not guilty of using excessive force against Mr. King, a Black motorist who had been pulled over after a high-speed chase, even though videotape evidence clearly showed the officers brutally beating him. That anger had erupted before, notably in the Watts riots of 1965. The violence in 1992 was also fueled by tensions between the Black and Korean American communities in the area, and by the shooting death of a Black girl by a Korean American shopkeeper. It got so far out of control that major-league sports events were postponed or moved to safer locations, dusk-to-dawn curfews were imposed, schools were closed and mail delivery was withheld in some neighborhoods. On the third day of the violence, President George H.W. Bush activated the National Guard at the request of Gov. Pete Wilson and Mayor Tom Bradley of Los Angeles. Thousands of Army and Marine troops were sent into Los Angeles as well. Caravans including Humvees and other armored vehicles rolled into the city along the freeways. The protests of 2025 bear little if any comparison to the widespread upheaval and violence of 1992. The protesters have directed their anger mainly at ICE agents, not at fellow residents, and the demonstrations have so far done relatively little damage to buildings or businesses. 'It doesn't appear to me that they're anywhere near close to needing the National Guard now,' said Joe Domanick, an author who has written extensively about the Los Angeles police. 'It looks like an opportunity for Trump to clamp down and use the military in ways that aren't necessary yet.' Much of the anger today is emanating from Latinos, the main group being targeted by federal immigration agents. Latinos make up a plurality of Los Angeles residents, hold many powerful political positions in the region and account for nearly half of the officers in the Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. 'These organizations are going to be caught in the middle,' Mr. Domanick said. 'They've invested in community policing, to the extent that they could, and many of these officers have parents and grandparents who were probably undocumented. It's a very complex situation.'
New York Times
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In Menendez Brothers' Case, a Reckoning With the 1990s
After Lyle and Erik Menendez were resentenced on Tuesday, paving the way for their possible release after more than three decades in prison, one of the first things their lawyer, Mark J. Geragos, did was make a phone call. Leslie Abramson, the brothers' defense attorney at their trials in the 1990s who found herself parodied on 'Saturday Night Live,' had in recent years warned Mr. Geragos that his efforts to free the brothers were doomed, in spite of the groundswell of support on social media. 'No amount of TikTokers,' he recalled Ms. Abramson telling him, 'was ever going to change anything.' Facing the bank of television cameras staking out the courthouse, Mr. Geragos told reporters he had just left a message for his old friend. 'And so, Leslie, I will tell you it's a whole different world we live in now,' he said. He continued, 'We have evolved. This is not the '90s anymore.' Indeed, over the last many months, the culture and politics of 1990s America seemed as much under the legal microscope as the horrific details of the Menendez brothers' crimes and what witnesses described as the exemplary lives they led in prison ever since. At times, putting that decade on trial felt like a legal strategy by the brothers' lawyers. In court, Mr. Geragos often invoked the criminal justice policies of the era — three-strikes laws, punitive long sentences and a rising prison population — to argue that under today's mores the brothers merited a second chance. During his closing argument at Tuesday's hearing, Mr. Geragos described the time as a 'crazy, collective, lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key mentality we had.' When the brothers stormed into the den of their family's Beverly Hills mansion in the summer of 1989 and shotgunned their parents to death, Los Angeles was on the cusp of a tumultuous era. By the time the brothers went on trial for the first time, in 1993, the city was still reeling from the deadly riots that followed the acquittal of the police officers in the Rodney King case. The first trial was one of the first to be televised gavel to gavel to a national audience and foreshadowed the public's obsession with the O.J. Simpson trial, and the explosion of true-crime programming today. The brothers were tried together but each with their own juries, which heard the brothers' assertions that they had been molested by their father and had killed out of fear. Neither jury could reach a verdict, so a mistrial was declared. By the time their second trial began, just after the acquittal of Mr. Simpson in 1995, the judge changed the rules, banning cameras in the courtroom and limiting testimony about sexual abuse. The changes were seen at the time as a reaction to the acquittals of Mr. Simpson and the officers in the Rodney King case, which had embarrassed law enforcement officials. (Years later a federal appeals court judge suggested that the rules were unfairly changed to improve the chances of a conviction.) Without being able to consider a lesser charge of manslaughter, as the jurors in the first trial could, the brothers were convicted of murder and sentenced to life without parole. 'It was clear politics had a major impact on the second trial,' said Robert Rand, who has covered the case since 1989 and has written the book, 'The Menendez Murders.' 'Because the D.A.'s office had suffered a string of major high-profile case defeats.' How popular culture treated the story, regularly mocking the brothers as spoiled kids who invented the claims of sexual abuse and killed for their inheritance, regularly came up in court during the resentencing process. 'It has been a relentless examination of our family in the public eye,' said Anamaria Baralt, a cousin who testified on the Menendez brothers' behalf and spoke about their being 'the butt of every joke' on 'Saturday Night Live' and other late-night shows in the 1990s. 'It has been a nightmare.' Another cousin, Tamara Lucero Goodell, said the vilification of late-night talk show hosts, like Jay Leno, left her 'incredibly private' and 'closed off.' Mr. Rand said he was one of the few reporters at the time who took the sexual abuse claims seriously. 'I was dating another reporter who was covering the case, and she would tell me that the other reporters covering the trial were ridiculing me behind my back because I was going on Donahue and Oprah and these '90s TV shows and saying I believed Lyle and Erik Menendez,' he said. Today, the media landscape looks very different, and the brothers have arguably benefited from that new landscape. Two shows on Netflix last year helped inject momentum into a slow-moving legal process, and new interest in the brothers' fate was fueled by campaigns on TikTok and other social media by younger people who felt the brothers were mistreated in the 1990s. Last fall, George Gascón, then the district attorney of Los Angeles, filed a petition asking a court to resentence the brothers. But Mr. Gascón, who had come into office promising to unwind many of the policies of the 1990s by focusing on rehabilitation and less punitive sentences, lost his re-election bid to Nathan Hochman, a former federal prosecutor. Mr. Hochman is a more traditional prosecutor, emphasizing the rights of victims and taking a tougher line on sentencing. He came out against the resentencing of the brothers, saying they had not demonstrated 'full insight' into their crimes. In court, Mr. Geragos has called the prosecutors ''90s Neanderthals.' In an interview with NewsNation, he said that Mr. Hochman 'was elected because the '90s were calling, and they wanted their D.A.'s office back.' One of the witnesses who testified in support of resentencing was Jonathan Colby, a retired judge from Florida who has worked with the brothers inside prison training puppies to work with wounded combat veterans and autistic children. Mr. Colby said that, as a judge overseeing criminal cases in the 1990s, he was a law-and-order judge who almost always imposed the toughest sentence possible. 'Unfortunately, I was proud of that,' he said. He said that his association with the brothers changed his mind about the role of prison, and hoped that, if they were to be released, he could work with them to educate judges about the possibilities of rehabilitation. 'I never thought prisons were capable, or prisoners were capable, of rehabilitating themselves,' he said. After California's prisons became so overcrowded during the 1990s, a U.S. Supreme Court decision ordering the state to reduce its inmate count led to a series of legislative reforms, including the resentencing law that allowed the brothers to have their case reconsidered in court. When the brothers said they had killed because they had been sexually abused by their father, prosecutors and some in the media treated the claims with skepticism. (At trial a prosecutor said, 'Men cannot be raped since they lack the necessary equipment to actually be raped.') 'If they were the Menendez sisters they wouldn't be sitting here,' Mr. Geragos said in court, pointing to the brothers who appeared on a screen from prison, wearing blue jumpsuits. When Lyle Menendez arrived in state prison in 1996 after his conviction, he said that one of the things that boosted his spirits during that dark time was the number of sexual abuse victims who sent him letters. 'I received a lot of ridicule in the '90s about it but also a lot of support, and a lot of victims reaching out, appreciating that, and finding their voice through mine,' Lyle Menendez said on a recent podcast interview with TMZ. Last fall, as efforts to free the brothers gathered momentum following the release of a Netflix series from the producer Ryan Murphy, Gov. Gavin Newsom weighed in, saying on his podcast, 'I think our parents would remember Manson as an indelible thing. But for us, I think it was O.J. and the Menendez brothers, which were so much a part of the narrative of our lives.' After Judge Michael V. Jesic said on Tuesday that he would reduce the brothers' sentences, making them immediately eligible for parole, and that the case was now in the hands of the governor. Governor Newsom has said he would also consider clemency. 'No doubt what Ryan Murphy did with this series really lit things up,' Mr. Newsom said on his podcast last year. 'I think social media has lit things up. I don't know about you, but I'll tell you, I can't even tell you how many times my kids online have said, 'Hey, what's going on with the Menendez brothers?''
The National
01-05-2025
- Politics
- The National
Why I was disappointed by John Swinney's Kneecap intervention
It was the worst kind of 'gotcha' journalism and Swinney should be too savvy to fall for it. The idea that politicians should have a say in the line-up of a music festival is laughable, and unhealthy for a democracy. We've been here before. Music, particularly hip-hop, has often served as a useful distraction device for the worst of our politicians. I'm not quite old enough to remember Streets Of Sorrow by The Pogues being banned, but I am old enough to remember the Guildford Four being released as innocent men, showing the song to have been entirely true. I also remember Cop Killer by Body Count. It was a song about, well, killing cops, written to be controversial and succeeding. US Republicans and Democrats fought over who was more outraged, urging ridiculous sanctions on any shops which dared to stock the CD. The CEO of Time-Warner, the record company in question, begged people to consider the socio-political context around the song, calling it an 'anguished cry' from a suffering community. Cop Killer was a response to the brutal racist beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police and to long decades of discrimination and abuse of African-Americans by police forces around the United States. Neither Body Count nor Kneecap are issuing instructions, they are protesting. Kneecap are protesting against the Tories, who have been in government for the majority of their lives. The United Nations reports that the last Tory government literally starved a quarter-of-a-million of its own people to death with its vicious benefits reforms targeted at the most vulnerable in our society. If Kneecap are guilty of anything beyond bad taste, it's that they've given some of the worst politicians this country has ever suffered an opportunity to cast themselves in a more sympathetic light, for a week or so at least. Directing the public gaze away from their vile decisions and at some convenient rappers is about as good as it gets for the spiralling Tories right now. Kneecap took the Tory government to court over a decision by Kemi Badenoch to deny them public funding because of their beliefs about a united Ireland. Their lawyers described the case as 'a penalty kick with no goalie'. The Government ended up handing close to £20,000 to a trio of West Belfast hoods and Badenoch, then a government minister, had her prejudices put on public display. There is perhaps an element of revenge at play here. As with the Cop Killer controversy, we are surely required to look a little deeper. Why do the Tories elicit such responses? Why do people actively hate them, rather than just disagree with them? Is it because their decisions in government lead to the 'systematic immiseration of millions' according to the UN; disproportionately women and children, many of whom died? We should remember David Clapson, who died because he was so heavily sanctioned he couldn't afford electricity. The insulin in his inoperable fridge spoiled, and he died from untreated diabetes. Four years later another diabetic, Amy Driver, died after being sanctioned for missing an appointment at the JobCentre. I could go on as there is an endless list of vulnerable people who have suffered and died as a result of inhumane policy decisions made by Tory MPs. Arguably, they aren't entitled to demand civility from Kneecap, or anyone else, and they definitely are not entitled to drape themselves in a cloak of victimhood and demand our sympathy. David McDonald Clarkston via Belfast
