Troops Go In

Daily Express 2nd May 1992

PRESIDENT Bush last night sent in the army to retake the blazing, riot-torn city of Los Angeles.

A 5,000-strong task force was drafted in after a summit at the White House with the same senior aides and military chiefs who helped plot the battle to wrest Kuwait back from the Iraqis.

Top adviser was Gulf war hero General Colin Powell, the highest-ranking black officer in the U.S.

The decision to swamp the city with soldiers came after a second day of widespread disorder and violence which raised the death toll to 37 and left 1,500 people in hospital.
Early today a sombre George Bush went on coast-to-coast television to explain his
Law of the gun: Pages 2 & 3 Living a nightmare: Pages 4 & 5
Opinion: Page 8 Mugging of America: Page 9
decision. He appealed for calm but warned he was not prepared to allow the killing and rioting to continue.

The President said: "The murder and destruction on the streets of Los Angeles must be stopped. Lootings, beatings and random violence ... must be condemned."
He chose the 4,000 soldiers from the Seventh Infantry Division at Fort Ord in Northern California to end the violence. They are specially trained in street warfare and armed with MK-16 rifles.

It was these troops who clashed with Noriega's forces in Panama in 1989. Many of them last saw action in Operation Desert Storm. They have been given the backing of an extra 1,000 federal marshalls, as well as FBI agents, prison guards, riot control specialists from every major city, plus SWAT squads — SAS-style police teams with full body armour and high velocity weapons. Already on the streets were 6,000 National Guardsmen as the City of Angels reeled from two days of destruction estimated at £200 million.
The new attempt to restore order came as many Los Angeles citizens began taking their own measures to protect themselves.

Hollywood movie stars and small-time shopkeepers alike armed themselves, forming queues outside gun shops.

Immigrant Koreans were seen firing at looters as they tried to ravage stores. Of the 37 dead, most are believed to be black or Hispanic looters aged between 15 and 45. The death toll is worse than the Watts disturbances of 1965, when 34 people were killed.
Police working round the clock have arrested more than 1,000 people, including 300 in Long Beach, the home of the liner Queen Mary which was hit yesterday by looters.
There were more than 5,000 fires around the city in the wake of the decision by a jury in nearby Simi Valley to clear four white Los Angeles police officers of beating up 26-year-old black motorist Rodney King. He appealed for calm late last night.

Limping, he stepped outside his lawyer's of/ice ana said: "People, can't we get along and stop making it horrible for older people and the kids? We've got enough smog in Los Angeles, let alone having to deal with setting these fires.
"It's not right. It's not going to change anything. We'll get our justice. They've won the battle. I love people's colour. I'm not like they're picking me put to be. We've got to quit. Let's work it out.
"I was upset to see the security guard shot on the ground. Those people will never go home to their families again."

As he spoke Attorney-General William Barr announced that a federal grand jury in Los Angeles was reviewing the case.

Earlier, at least one firefighter was shot and others said they were attacked with sticks and axes. "They're lighting fires faster than we can put them out," said Scott Taylor, 34, at the end of a 20-hour shift.

Copycat riots erupted throughout America as a white backlash rippled across the nation.
At least 10 other cities from Madison ;in the north to Miami in the south reported anarchy.

Gunshops said many people were 'arming themselves with pistols, shotguns and rifles after being horrified by the rampant violence on TV.

One shop in Miami sold out of small .22 handguns which fit into women's handbags.
Atlanta woke up as a six-hour curfew was lifted after 300 screaming students ran amok during the night, breaking windows, looting and beating whites on the streets.
Firebombed

A huge underground mall was closed down and downtown roads blocked off. Police threatened to use tear gas if the riots got worse.

More than 100 people were arrested, with 41 treated in hospital as black youngsters — some of them women — kicked whites, shouting: "This is how Rodney King felt."
They defied pleas from community leaders to stay calm and began smashing glass and overturning cars outside the Capitol, the state's main government building.
In the gambling town of Las Vegas two police stations were firebombed as a curfew was declared overnight.

One policeman was critically wounded after being shot in the face by a looter as 200 protesters were prevented from marching onto the casino strip.
In San Francisco police dragged 900 rioters off to jail while killing one looter who fired an automatic rifle at officers.

Crowds took over two main highways, jamming traffic into the city for miles and closing lanes on the Bay Bridge to Oakland.
They also smashed department stores and overturned cars — sometimes with drivers and passengers still inside.

In Madison, Wisconsin, the windows of 34 patrol cars were smashed in a city garage and notes left at the scene saying "Justice for King" and "All pigs must die".
Black and Hispanic demonstrators gathered at the Capitol building in Denver, Colorado, calling for a citizen review commission.

In Indianapolis and New York thousands of teenagers left school to demonstrate while marchers in Cleveland chased a passing van flying Confederate and Nazi flags.
In Boston a call went out for residents to wear black ribbons in an 81-day protest — the number of seconds it took for King to receive 56 blows from the officers arresting him.
About 500 University of California students at San Diego burnt three police officers in effigy.

And in Tampa black, white and Hispanic high school students fought each other with the action spilling from classrooms into the playgrounds.
At one school, police were called in to stop the battles. The city has been on tenterhooks for a decade since a Columbian-born officer shot dead a local youth.

In Chicago, usually a tinder box of troubled race relations, city officials were meeting community leaders in a bid to ease tensions.

Politicians everywhere were condemned for failing to make immediate demands to stamp out the burning, killing and looting the moment it began.

The Los Angeles Police Department, which appeared paralysed after the verdict in the King case, was also criticised for not moving more quickly.
"Mayor Tom Bradley was more concerned about re-hashing the verdict while innocent citizens were being dragged out of their cars and beaten nearly to death," said one critic. "He lost control of the city and is only just getting it back."
Atlanta police chief Calvin Howard was also blamed for inciting students when he warned that angry black officers could turn their weapons on colleagues.
He told astounded residents: "Beware, because you are going to see police officers training their guns and fighting other officers now. We are not going to accept the verdict."

Americans were sickened by the violence they saw on TV, especially drivers being hauled out of cars and trucks.

The Los Angeles hospital where driver Reginald Denny, 34, was taken after being beaten, was besieged with calls asking about his condition.

He was seen on TV being kicked in the head while on the ground and was apparently shot with a pistol by a youth who then mocked him.

Daily Express reporter Philip Finn, who toured the not-hit LA streets, reported: "Everywhere I went today there was the awful stench of burning buildings. The sounds of gunfire crackled over the constant scream of police sirens and the jangle of fire trucks fighting a losing battle against the blazes.
"Mobs of rampant black youths pulled white drivers from their cars and kicked and beat them senseless."

The violence went on through the night despite a dusk-to-dawn curfew imposed by LA Mayor Tom Bradley, a black former policeman, who yesterday begged Washington for help.

Columns of smoke could be seen from 50 miles away, and helicopters whizzed about and heavily-armed troops crowded on street corners. Looters showed contempt for everyone.
"Go ahead and kill us," screamed 19-year-old Diego Fernandez as he smashed a store window. "We're already dead, and we're going to kill you, too."
Student Don Jankiewicz, 25, looked on stunned. "These people aren't like looters," he said. "They're like game show winners — you should have seen them pulling out the microwave ovens.

All the city's schools were closed, along with many businesses, and thousands of people fled for safer suburbs.

Everyone was caught up in the fear. Alfonse Washington, a 28-year-old black man said: "Every time a white person sees me coming they just run away.

Three Expressmen report from the city gripped by turmoil and bloodshed

WE WAITED last night for the nightmare to arrive on our doorstep. It seemed to be haunting everywhere else, every street and psyche.

The death toll was around 18 when I collected my daughter from school.
She's seven and along with the rest of the class they had spent the day talking about the violence on the streets.

The mother of my daughter's best friend works downtown in a government office opposite the Los Angeles police department's headquarters, the Parker Centre.
She had driven through gunfire in Beverly Hills and seen gangs roaming near our homes.
As she gathered her daughter in her arms she whispered to me: "I'm frightened."
We all were. We all are. We are living in something we can't understand.
I've lived here for 18 years and never known such panic, even during earthquakes. And the panic was because you couldn't do anything but wait. What next? Who next? Our house next?

The phone rings and you jump because it could be a friend in trouble. One call yesterday was from my travel agent. He's British and so is his wife Jenny.
She was taking a client to lunch in the mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles, an upmarket business area, when a group of blacks in smart cars tried to run them down.
Bruises

Jenny ran into the doorway of an office building. Three men followed her and beat her with baseball bats.

She survived but has bruises and bumps on her head, breasts and legs. Her husband told me he wanted to go out and shoot some of these people. He's from London. He doesn't own a gun. Not yet anyway. But his reaction is part of the vigilante fever.

While we were talking on the phone a TV "riot flash" told me that looters were being sprayed by AK47 assault rifle fire. " Then the other line went and it was my daughter's school saying classes had been cancelled until further notice.
She goes to a private school a long way from the ghettos but the headmaster had been advised there could be "problems".
The school is a five-minute drive from our home.
There are armoured cars patrolling our streets as National Guardsmen take up positions at street corners all over the city.

Driving through was like going out in Noriega's Panama or enduring the strife of Salvador or the Belfast I recall from a couple of decades ago. Here you just didn't always know who was the enemy. You didn't want to leave your family or your home.

The news came from the television. And, ironically in a society that lives on the telephone, only intermittently by friends' calls because of the overload on the lines by emergency services. It feels as though we're living in the Twilight Zone. We can just hope we get back to reality before it is too late.

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