Misremembering the “Rodney King Riots” of April 1992
In 6 days in 1992, 63 people were killed; in 150 days in 2020, fewer than 25 people were killed…
[Defund] the police comin’ straight from the underground
A Young nigga got it bad ’cause he brown
And not the other color so police think
They have the authority to kill a minority
[Defund] that shit, ’cause I ain’t the one
For a punk mother-defunder with a badge and a gun
To be beatin’ on, and thrown in jail
We can go toe-to-toe in the middle of a cellA 2020 update/vandalism to ‘Fuck tha Police” by N.W.A., on the 30 year anniversary of the ‘Rodney King riots’
The riots unfurled on CNN. Like the Gulf War, fires popped up all over the city through greenish ‘night vision’ camera filters…except…then they showed sobbing people…who looked like my classmates…Black, White, Korean, Latino. These were my neighbors, my friends, a county or two away.
Why did “they” burn down their own neighborhood?
Things were different in 2020. Maybe Millennials and new kinds of protesters are smarter than we were back in 1992.
The Death Toll in 1992 and in 2020 and Other Differences
Over 6 days of the 1992, at least 63 people died as a result of the riot. (Don’t tell me it’s an ‘uprising’ unless you’ve seen more real uprisings in other countries than I have.) That’s more than 10 people per day.
Over the course of 150 days of ‘riots’ inflamed after the murder of George Floyd, more than 3000 protests and demonstrations occurred. Over 94% of the protests did not result in any reports of violence.
About 25 people were killed in incidents linked to the George Floyd protests. Of those casualties:
- 11 people died as a result of actions directly at the protests (mostly, shootings — 9 BLM protesters, 2 ‘counter protesters’)
- 14 other people died in incidents linked to the protests (e.g., fire tear gas at a crowd, if someone gets trampled or has a heart attack, then their death is ‘linked’ to the protest, but not clearly a ‘direct action’)
The death toll is still too high. The death rate was less than 1/60th what it was during the Rodney King riot.
Maybe the police AND the protesters both tried not to be as lethal in 2020?
During the “Rodney King Riots,” insurance claims for property damage amounted to $1 billion, which is about $2 billion in “2020 dollars.”
So far, insurance claims for property damage linked to the 2020 protests MAY reach to $2 billion; but we’ll need to see how this goes. Sometimes, insurers are slow to pay out on a claim (e.g., when white people burnt down Greenwood in 1921, insurers never paid out).
“When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” — some racist asshole
A Cultural Shift? ‘Fuck tha Police’ — 1992, 2016, and 2020
‘Fuck tha Police’ was the anthem of the Rodney King riots. Growing up in SoCal, we all knew the song. Cool kids boomed it everywhere from their car stereos. They probably knew it better in South Central.
To be honest, I preferred Public Enemy’s ‘Fight the Power.’
To revolutionize make a change nothin’s strange
People, people we are the same
No we’re not the same
Cause we don’t know the game
What we need is awareness, we can’t get careless…Public Enemy, “Fight the Power” (1989)
N.W.A. offered a “Los Angeles” way of handling brutality: fantasize about revenge. When fantasy is one of the biggest industries around, such thinking is not naïve. MC Ren, one of the N.W.A. co-authors and performers on “Fuck tha Police” thought it is a ‘perfect protest song.’ Maybe…in a world where protesters fantasize about turning the tables on the people they believe to be tormenting them.
“Fight the Power” is a call to battle…against someone. “The powers that be”? Like…Elvis Presley? Bobby McFerrin (who sang ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’)? Well…ok, Public Enemy might not have known exactly ‘which powers’ needed to be fought, but they didn’t mess around with fantasies either, and they fully grasped the need to do the fighting ‘together’ — to call out their ‘best trained, best educated, best equipped” troops (and everybody else too).
Rolling Stone reports ‘Fuck tha Police’ took on new life in late 2014 in response to the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, and in connection with too many other acts of police brutality. Makes sense.
The Michael Brown shooting was tragic, ghastly…and presented a very new sort of ‘power fantasy’ that didn’t require even a modicum of the talent and panache of N.W.A. (but a whole lot of chutzpah).
By broadcasting ‘eye witness testimony’ on social media, one could draw an audience of millions of people. EVEN IF YOU WEREN’T AROUND TO BE AN EYE WITNESS. A cell phone, an internet connection, and enough power to channel anger to the world in seconds. Even better, if the police or investigators call you on it, you can say they intimidated you, that they lied, and many people will believe you.
“Fight the Power” meant changing something about how the Ferguson police force operated. At least, Obama’s Dept of Justice wanted things to go that way. None of this fantasy BS — none of the social media or grand jury ‘fake witness’ testimony BS — just unite and get something done to make things better.
“Fight the Power” wasn’t far removed from a host of slogans the GOP had test-fired for years — albeit with a rather different conception of which power needed to be fought (and how). If that song started getting increased play, it could confuse some of their faithful.
By contrast, “Fuck tha Police” was immensely helpful to GOP. It offended law enforcement, viscerally, as it always had. Law enforcement was already a bit hostile toward Hillary Clinton (including the FBI?). Conservatives as a whole, hearing about the existence of the song, would frown and feel that ‘those people’ threatened the ‘good guys’ in law enforcement. A handful of their base would actually turn out, because look at what those other people are saying...
So ‘Fuck tha Police’ surged. That surge probably helped Trump ever so slightly — another thought worm discouraging someone from voting for the ‘lesser of two evils’ (to hell with Hillary “Superpredator” Clinton!) while encouraging someone who had a favorable view of law enforcement (usually…someone white who believed that law enforcement should focus on people who look different).
That’s not N.W.A.’s fault. Art gets exploited, weaponized, and deployed in a world of rampant amplification — the artists are not responsible for it.
But I expected a repeat in 2020 when George Floyd was murdered. I expected the slogan to galvanize GOP voters in Red State America yet again, and drive millions of them to vote. That actually happened in 2020…
BUT something else happened too. “Defund the Police”? Not an entirely ‘new’ slogan — but one never amplified as it was in 2020 after the George Floyd murder.
Some sort of watered down “Fuck tha Police 2.0”? No.
Instead of a ‘power fantasy/revenge’ — “Defund the Police” is a “tough-budget-negotiation” power fantasy, with a side of “get some mental health dudes who don’t point guns at local addicts or mentally ill people.”
To Trump voters, “Defund the Police” was the same as “Fuck tha Police” — a call for lawlessness. But even with unprecedented surges in Trump voters in 2020, an even bigger surge occurred…against Biden? Well, maybe enough folks grasped that a call for dialogue matters that they turned out to vote.
Maybe enough people saw that 2020 protesters were NOT trying to burn down America, and that 2020 police were NOT (always) trying to kill as many protesters as they could — and that dialogue might be feasible.
Crazy.
Gen X has impressive visionaries. We’ve also had our share of exceptionally angry revolutionaries (in 1992, and…many other times). But the young folks leading these charges today are smarter than we were.
