Yes, the author seems to like to project bad behavior on eveyone. The reality is it's really a small segment of scumbags that go wild, followed by theiving opportunists, as we saw in LA.

The majority of people are civilized. And remember, this was not 3 million people trying to escape a nuke or the fallout from a nuke. These are people who feel society owes them something and used the trial as an excuse to commit mayhem.

The rioters and thieves are scumbags. They are the 5% that plague every society.

+2

That tale is a work of fiction.

I spent three and half days there as part of the mutual aid response.  We staged at Los Alamitos and drove into LA, the free way was completely empty and plumes of smoke were rising everywhere.  Took my camera and shot lots of pictures.  The story posted is mostly BS, some parts are true.  Looters reflected the ethnic neighborhood.  I saw plenty of black and Hispanic looters.  I remember seeing a lot of "black owned business" signs, many of which were put up by shop owners who were not black.



The NG had an ammo snafu and many units deployed initially with very little ammo.  The LEOs shared with them, I gave nearly a case of 223 Winchester away to a couple of NG teams we bumped into.



Many of the residents there were very appreciative of the response and welcomed us.  I remember a little Hispanic lady bringing us coffee and those Mexican pastries in the first morning.



What was very surprising was the amount of people who drove in from other areas to participate in the rioting.  I stopped a guy after the curfew was who driving completely falling down drunk, he had driven in from the High Desert that was over an hour away just to come "play".  We hooked him up and left his POS Caddy parked on the street down in Inglewood.  Drove back by about an hour later and his car was fully engulfed.



The intersection of Florence and Normandie on day 2 looked nearly like something from Fallout 3.  Tom's Liquor and the gas station across the street were completely burned out, along with other businesses on the intersection.

OK, here's what I think from reading his stuff:

The tone the story was written in is correct.  That was how it felt to be nearby when it was going down.

However, it is a little too well written and flows too well to be authentic.  Real first hand accounts of scary stuff contain distorted impressions and odd jumps in the narrative, as well as just generally being badly written.

Also on the .203 thing, I think that's just an ignorant typo.  He probably meant .223.   For a non-gun guy(?), getting most of the digits right is good enough.  Same goes for his wrong memory of California's waiting periods.


Bottom Line:
I think he waited 15 years after the fact to write a somewhat fabricated and embellished account of what happened.  I think there was probably some kernal of truth in there.  But memory is a malleable thing, made worse and more distorted by the urge to "improve" on his story.  Dialogue was definately made up.

Out of that entire steaming pile of shit the author of that travesty plopped down upon our screens, you guys chose to quibble over the length of the waiting period?  Seriously?

There is so much fodder there.

The Desert Eagle stuck down the front of his pants.

Cellphones and laptops in 1992.

The riot gun with the polychoke hidden behind the water heater.

The nonexistent intersections and WalMarts.

The .203 that he hid in the gutter and covered with leaves when the police helicopter flew over.

Eyewitness accounts that state no rioting happened anywhere near the area he claimed to be in.

The baby food jar and the mexicans.

Little Trotsky who was murdered and his girlfriend gangraped.

Wire caltrops.

The bimbo wife and the milk run.

You're slipping.

While the story seems to be (sort of) BS, I lived in Santa Barbara at the time and we watched on TV; very, very frightening.  Have always wondered what would have happened if OJ was found guilty?  A repeat of 92?  Don't forget what happened after MLK was assinated; I was in Viet Nam at the time with the USMC and that event changed everything.

This story reads like a White Supremacist's porn fantasy without the sex.

Like anyone who owned a Desert Eagle would move to Australia and their gun control.

What a load of shit.

It had plenty of mexican crotch grabbing.  Also, Little Trotsky's girlfriend was gangraped.

That is probably enough to count as sex in a white supremacist's porn fantasy.

This.

I picked up on that too.  Hand held ones were even more rare; most were wired into a vehicle.

Also some serious 88 undertones in the story.

I agree with the assertion that humans are not so far away from savagery.  I've seen it plenty of times with my own eyes and have read about many more historical examples.  It doesn't matter the society or race; it's just waiting to happen.  From Nazi Germany to the heart of Africa, people do horrible things to each other with little or no pretext.

I'm stunned at the number of people who give that account any kind of credit, or overlook the idiocy in there and think it has any redeeming value, or even treat it with anything but contempt and ridicule.

If you didn't know that humans are savages by now, you haven't been paying attention.  Also, there is no need to pay attention to mall ninja internet masturbation when we have many, many real case studies from the LA riots, Katrina, or the 1968 riots to discuss.  We can even branch out and consider situations in Haiti, Africa, or anywhere else if you want.  We should do that in another thread, though.  This one should be reserved for derision and laughter directed at the retard who wrote that story.

I'm still wrapping my mind around a guy that goes by Texas working as a security guard in LA writing an article called "'92 LA riots from a military perspective" and posting it on a Australian survivalist forum.

As I often repeat, SHTF == civil unrest, not some other bullshit. It can, and will happen and it doesn't take much to get it going once the threat of punishment has been removed.

Dude it's got Pia Zadora, those huge ass briefcase phones, a Deagle, a convenient roll of barbed wire, a .203, and soda bottle suppressor all used/owned/in contact with a Rodeo Drive mall ninja!  How is that possibly farfetched?!!  I mean it's not like he was riding Segway out of the Souper Salads to the 31 Flavors with ceramic trays taped to himself.

Shit, I forgot about the soda bottle suppressor.

I deliberately didn't mention Pia Zadora.  She wasn't worth the time to type her name out.

And that's why it was so bad. The cops weren't doing their job and weren't confronting the problem.

It pisses me off to NO end that this twat wrote this account.


I lived through Katrina, and I wrote my accounts on TheHighRoad.org, and the Saiga Forum when I was actively participating on those forums.

As I saw it, I wanted to truly help others by helping them realize can happen, and reinforce the need to be prepared.
There is so much misinformation surrounding events like this that we run the danger of losing credibility when obvious BS is spewed.

The writer quoted in the OP has been utterly debunked as a poser –– likely wishing to gain "internet" fame by his fabricated account.  How sad is that?

In my opinion, he weakens the credibility and message of every person that actually DOES want to help others and call attention to the need for preparation–– all for a narcissistic need for notoriety.


–– John

Reads like another SHTFantasy story to me. Sorry, not buying it. The dialogue was bullshit... soliciting a handjob as a threat in the middle of riots? Uh... yeah.



Fun read though.

Here are a few memories of my own from the riots:

The agency I worked for at the time discussed the situation earlier in the day.  The braintrust disagreed with us lower ranking folks and concluded no riots would occur, so we did nothing to prepare.  I left work by 1500 hours, only to turn a TV on a couple hours later to see we were right.  I hauled ass back toward my downtown LA office.  It was surreal to be able to haul ass - traffic had vanished off the southbound 101 freeway.  A  lot of shit was on fire by the time I got there.  The takeover of the area surrounding LAPD headquarters was in full swing.  They also meandered around the downtown area, kicking in glass doors and firebombing other buildings. Those attempts were largely ineffective - I guess they forgot that even though it was after business hours, many of the government buildings had security or LE protection 24 hours a day.  Those were the only genuinely angry folks I saw throughout the riots.  They were pissed at the system, pissed at LAPD, pissed at whitey, and pissed at Chief Gates.

By night two, we could literally see cars streaming in from the east on the 10 and 60 freeways.  Were these the angry, disaffected people the media scum were describing?  Hell no.  They were coming in to shop - loot, actually.  My guys and I were helping LAPD jamb these idiots.  Not one of them said a word about their frustration with the system.  They were there for free stuff.  There were some times when we could make arrests and return the property to the shop owners, but not always.  When we'd see some asshole walking down the street carrying a freshly-stolen boom box, TV, or kitchen appliance - and we just had no way to make an arrest - those items got smashed, and the suspects walked away free.  No doubt they went down another street and did it again.  There just weren't enough of us to deal with all of them.

All the LE agencies had to pitch in and do Fire Department escorts day two and later.  There were a few gun fights out there that went unreported.  Some agencies had their SWAT teams doing the escorts.  The word was that if there weren't any apparent hits, they'd just pick up their brass and go to the next call with FD.  The FD guys weren't going to object, because they wouldn't do a rescue without protection.

I did some time in the south central area as well during the riots.  The mood of the folks was angrier than those further north, but it was also punctuated by pure glee.  They loved to be able to act out what they normally had to keep under wraps.  Lots of smiling on their faces when they openly defied orders to disperse, etc.  It was rather nice of them to stay in their hoods and burn their own liquor and convenience stores, wasn't it?  I live in a "suburb" community of LA, yet it's actually within LA city boundaries.  We were completely unaffected by the shenanigans of the "oppressed" out here.

I remember giving a Channel 7 News camera guy a hard time one night - maybe day 3.  We were all at the scene of a downtown pawn shop break-in.  A crowd started to form around it, and I asked the camera guy why he was hanging around after he got his footage.  He said he was there because of the people and wanted to see what they would do.  I told him that he had it completely backwards - he was the reason the people were there.  I was in total shock when he stopped taping and left right then and there.  And you guessed it - no camera, no show.  They dispersed themselves immediately.  The real story about the break-in never got out.  If not for sharp patrol officers who quickly interrupted the burglars, they might have finished their attempt to get into the higher security area inside the pawn shop and relieve them of literally hundreds of firearms.  This location had the biggest stash of used guns in the area.

We didn't see any shop owners in the downtown area protecting their shops.  The shops have metal roll-down gates at the front and back, which are pretty effective.  I know from pictures and video that the Koreatown shop owners to the west of downtown got some trigger time, but I never saw any of that.

A few months before the riots, I was in some advanced officer class at the regional police academy (Rio Hondo).  The instructor was telling us that we would see National Guard on the streets of LA in our careers due to racial "unrest."  Most disturbingly, he told us that LAPD had been very self-critical of their mistakes during the 1965 LA riots: overdeployment and staying too long.  They concluded that these factors acted like a magnet to bring in and provide local malcontents a cause.  The instructor predicted that the result of their analysis was that they would let things get out-of-hand due to their fear of media and public criticism.  Damn, was he right.  LAPD's slow response was so concerning to the Sheriff's Department, that they were massing deputies nearby and were about to come in to take control - invited or not.  LAPD started their lame, ineffective operation just in time.  

BTW, the National Guard units didn't have any ammo until into their second or third day out there.  The commanding officer over their logistics, Gen. William Stewart, took it in the shorts for that one.

It sure is interesting that both LA riots started the same exact way: a black DUI suspect led Highway Patrol officers on a pursuit, LAPD officers took over, and the bad guy chose to resist.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I had just graduated high school a year prior to the LA Riots and was living in Pasadena, CA. I remember watching that stuff unfold on the TV and stepping out my front door and seeing the smoke looming in the distance over Los Angeles. Best way to avoid being caught in a situation such as the LA Riots, don't live/work in a generally poor area with a disproportionate percent of poor black and Mexicans. Problem solved.

Koreans with Guns

 The only TV I had access to at the time was watching raw sat feeds so it was both interesting and confusing to essentially be a first hand witness but without any commentary,didn't have any idea how large of an area was affected and so forth.

Me thinks this guy hoped to be the FerFAL of LA...


–– John

That was............... AWESOME  

I anxiously await the author's first hand account of the chaos following the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.

This is my public service to you, Arfcom.  I've snipped out the relevant parts and added commentary



I won't comment on this yet.  Just remember it for now.



I had to Google Pia Zadora because I'd never heard of her before now.  Apparently, according to Wikipedia, she's a softcore B-movie actress and a popular singer in Europe.  I lived in Europe for quite a while and never knew she existed.



Cellphones of the time were either bags or bricks, and they were not something a security guard could afford.  Nor were they in common use.



Not common at the time, but the only type of pistol a video gamer knows about.  Anyway, this is gun #1.



Gun #2



30 day waiting period.



Little Trotsky.  Gun #2 or #3, a .22 pistol.  Ninety day waiting period.



How convenient to have a roll of barbed wire, animal traps, thick padlocks, nails, and wire in a small, urban house.



A .203 rifle.  Gun #3 or Gun #4.  We're up to at least three guns and this guy doesn't know shit about them.  Also, what the hell kind of rifle can you fit in a gutter and cover with leaves?



This is getting stupid.  Did they even make liter bottles of Coke back then?



A convenient deus ex machina.  I find it hard to believe that any man or woman could be this much of an idiot.  It sets up the confrontation with the mexicans, though.



It begins to turn pornographic here.  He has a fascination with crotch grabbing.



Can any of you security guards tell us what he's talking about?



So now we find our protagonist is a 6 foot plus ubermensch with combat skills honed by a year and a half as a tactical security guard.



More crotch grabbing.  But this is one bad hombre.  Yes, I know mexicans do the crotch grabbing thing frequently.



How many hands does this guy have again?



60 oz?  Pretty big pockets.



A seasoned veteran here.



Apparently no such intersection exists.



Yeah.



Must have been one hell of a belt.



Again, we've been told in this thread the intersection doesn't exist.  Also, multiple people have said that no rioting happened in this area.



Multiple people have stated that this WalMart did not exist at that time.



Two more mentions of the nonexistent WalMart.



Droplets of blood through his shoe?  From a nail puncture?  That were large enough so the guy could see them from his roof?



Gun #4 or Gun #5.



More crotch grabbing.



More crotch grabbing.



Ok?  Polychoke on a riot gun?



Is "porky pig" common slang used by mexicans in California?



A little comedic relief.



Already discussed and dismissed as bullshit.



Well, that loose end was conveniently tied up.

By the way, the real stories and videos posted in this thread are interesting.  Keep that up.

C'mon... back in the day ya gotta admit you would have knocked the bottom out of that..

Read the story, not the posts. Fiction.

I was 15 and lived in Anaheim Hills. We could see LA and the smoke from the backyard. My Dad and grandparents lived in South West Torrance. They have all been armed to the teeth since the first watts riots.

Some friends of mine lived in riverside and had riots started by black kids at their school. The best way to avoid this whole mess is to not live around ignorant moron poor people. Particularly wanna be black gangstas. Many times I'd hang out with friends at Tyler mall in Riverside and hear all the "mutha fukin white boiy" comments. I learned early growing up in Socal that living in the right area is more valuable than a gun.

Sorry if some of you everybody's the same folks get butt hurt over my comments. These are my observations from growing up in Socal. The racial tension in Socal is always there if your paying attention.

I understand your point, (spent A LOT of time with semi's––-not driving them, but supervising unloads, which often required assisting drivers in backing in to locations), but that sentence is just so. . . awkward and odd. . .I mean if he said, "I could hear the roar of the engines as they backed up. . ." that would have made more sense. . but if an engine is "idling in reverse". . . . that's just an odd way to put things. . . if the truck is backing up, the engine is, by definition , not idling. . . small thing, but it bothered me, and adds to my BS meter. . .

Definitely reading this whole thing later. Sounds just like a zombie apocalypse.

Don't think everyone who owns a gun gives a shit about being able to continue owning it. Very few people would put "you can't own certain guns" in their top 10 list of reasons not to move somewhere with strict gun control. I know quite a few people who shoot a lot more often than I do and who couldn't tell you the caliber of their ONE gun.

In reference to #2 above. I think that in 1992 it was still in the days of cash and carry for all rifles in CA.

History repeats itself

Very true on the racism. What part of west Torrance did they live in?

Hell, let alone throw it, how did he manage to fit a 60 oz jar of babyfood in his pocket?  but let's say it was a 'normal sized' jar of baby food (6oz?) how do you grab it with one arm when both arms are being used to hold a midget wannabe gangbanger hispanic as a human sheild combined with a dozer blade?

Yea Desert Eagle was my first clue of BS.

I also like how he conveniently had a shotgun hidden he bought months before.  If you are going to make nail caltrops and 'small animal trap' boobie traps,  I think you'd at least have all your firearms from their hiding spots, fully loaded, and located in easy to reach locations.

Stopped reading when he mentioned Desert Eagle. Why are non-shooters so obsessed with those things?

It was once 30 days, but only for handguns IIRC. There was a referendum to ban handguns that lost, early 80s. It wouldn't ban guns already in the state, but new sales.

I recall that the looting was mostly done by Central Americans who came over in the 80s. Not the Mexicans.

Yup, every day stupid made up shit gets posted on the internet.

Writer's lifestyle does not match his job/income.  House off of Sunset, cell phone in 1992, Desert Eagle, etc...

Important messages, though.

QFT.



 

.203? That's a pellet gun, ain't it?  

This dude's as full of shit as a Thanksgiving turkey.

Let fly the BS flag!

I like how he keeps insisting he's not embellishing.