About This Case Study

LA 92 (2017), directed by Daniel Lindsay and T. J. Martin for National Geographic, is an all-archival film: no narrator, no retrospective interviews, no expert to tell you what it means. It is built entirely from the record — news broadcasts, police radio, courtroom tape, helicopter feeds, home video. What the record contains: the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers in March 1991, captured on a bystander's camcorder; the killing of fifteen-year-old Latasha Harlins by shopkeeper Soon Ja Du thirteen days later, captured on a store security camera; the trials that followed, including the probation sentence given to Du and the officers' trial moved out of the city to suburban Simi Valley; the acquittals of April 29, 1992; and the six days that followed, with the Watts uprising of 1965 woven through as memory. The film's unusual choice is the puzzle: a documentary ordinarily explains, but this one withholds the explanation. The footage is given in sequence; the causation is left to you.

The historian Elizabeth Hinton argues that events like these six days have been systematically misnamed. The word riot frames them as senseless criminal disorder — spontaneous, apolitical, a matter for police. Hinton's counter-term, rebellion, names the same events as political violence with a grievance structure: patterned rather than random, almost always ignited by a police encounter, and intelligible as a response to sustained violent policing. The analytical move of this case study is to treat the word itself as an instrument: to ask what work each word does, whose conduct it explains or criminalizes, and what response — curfew and prosecution, or hearing and reform — it authorizes. You will reconstruct the causal chain the film refuses to narrate, test both words against it, and then read the commissions that wrote the event's official afterlife.

Before You Begin

Have ready:

• LA 92, directed by Daniel Lindsay and T. J. Martin (National Geographic, 2017; 114 minutes). Watch the film. A companion discussion guide from the distributor is available if you want structured viewing notes.
• The Human Rights Watch account of the Christopher Commission — the independent investigation of the Los Angeles Police Department convened after the King beating. Read the account.
• The Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Report), 1968 — the federal commission convened after the uprisings of 1967. Read the report (HathiTrust). You will need only its summary of findings.
• A note-taking surface — paper, a document, or a shared doc if you are working in a group.

A note on the footage and access: The film includes unedited archival footage of violence, including the beating of Rodney King, the shooting of Latasha Harlins, and assaults during the six days. Take breaks as you need them; the exercise does not require you to re-watch any sequence. Links to full-length films can also move or be taken down. If the link is unavailable, the film is a National Geographic release and can be located through common streaming services and libraries under its title.

Before you watch, write down, in a sentence or two each:

• Recall a moment when you encountered the phrase "the LA riots" — in a class, in family memory, in news or film. What did the word riot lead you to expect about who was involved and why?
• Can the same six days be both a crime wave and a political event? What evidence would you need to decide — and could both descriptions be true at once?

The Exercise

Phase 1: Before the Film (8–10 minutes)

Establish your starting point before the record complicates it. Write a short paragraph of what you currently know or believe about Los Angeles in 1992 — the sequence of events as you understand it, and where that understanding came from. Then note the film's method: everything you are about to see is archival, assembled without narration. That means the film will not tell you what caused what. Your job in the next phase is to build the causal chain yourself, from the fragments the film gives you in sequence.

For groups: Each member writes their starting paragraph independently and sets it aside unshared; you will return to these at the end of Phase 3.

Phase 2: The Causal Chain (114 minutes of viewing, plus 15–20 minutes of notes)

Watch the film. During or immediately after viewing, reconstruct the chain as an ordered sequence in your notes:

1. The incidents. The King beating and the killing of Latasha Harlins — what happened in each, when, and what a camera captured. Note that both entered public life as footage: what difference does it make that these events were seen?
2. The trials. The sentence given to Soon Ja Du, and the officers' trial moved from Los Angeles to Simi Valley. For the change of venue: who decided, what reason was given, and what did it change about who would sit on the jury?
3. The verdicts and the six days. The acquittals of April 29, 1992, and what followed: where the uprising ignited, where it spread, who bore the losses, and how the response — police, National Guard, curfew — unfolded across the days.

The film gives you fragments in sequence, not a narrated argument. Note where your chain has gaps the footage does not fill — the gaps are part of what you are reading.

For groups: Before viewing, assign each member one link of the chain — incidents, trials, verdicts-and-days — to log closely during the film. Assemble the full chain together afterward, flagging the points where your logs disagree.

Phase 3: Two Words (12–15 minutes)

Now write the six days twice. First, a one-paragraph description of the event as a riot. Then a one-paragraph description of the same event as a rebellion, in Hinton's sense — political violence with a grievance structure, ignited by a police encounter. Use only material from your causal chain. Then work through the following:

• What does each word select from your chain, and what does each omit? Who appears as the protagonist of each paragraph?
• Listen back to the language in the film itself — anchors, officials, residents. Which word do they reach for, and does the choice track who is speaking?
• What response does each word authorize? If it is a riot, the answer is policing and prosecution; if a rebellion, the answer would have to address the grievance. Where in the footage do you see each response, or its absence?
• The strain test. Where does rebellion fit the evidence well — and where does it strain? Consider, in particular, the losses borne by Korean American merchants, many of them immigrants with no part in the King case: does a grievance-structure frame account for where the harm fell? Note honestly what each frame cannot absorb.

For groups: Split the group — half drafts the riot paragraph, half the rebellion paragraph. Exchange and annotate: mark what the other paragraph selected, omitted, and implied about response. Then run the strain test together.

Phase 4: The Paper Afterlife (10–12 minutes)

Uprisings are answered with documents. Two matter here. The Christopher Commission investigated the Los Angeles Police Department after the King beating and reported in July 1991 — a year before the acquittals and the six days. The Kerner Commission investigated the uprisings of 1967 and reported in 1968 that the country was, in its words, moving toward two societies, separate and unequal — findings a president shelved. Read the Human Rights Watch account of the Christopher Commission and the Kerner Report's summary of findings, then work through:

• What did the Christopher Commission document about the LAPD — about force, about the handling of complaints, about discipline? Which of its findings does the footage you watched corroborate?
• Set Christopher beside Kerner, written twenty-three years earlier about other cities. What repeats? Be specific: name at least two findings that appear, in substance, in both documents.
• The Christopher Commission's diagnosis was on the table a year before the six days. What does that sequencing — diagnosis first, uprising after — teach about what commissions can and cannot do? On the evidence of these two documents, what do documents do?

For groups: Pairs take one commission each and brief the group on its findings; build the side-by-side comparison together on a shared page.

Closing Reflection

In two or three sentences, complete this thought:

Watching the acquittals become the uprising, what surprised me most was __________. Calling the six days a rebellion rather than a riot changes __________. The part of this analysis I find hardest to hold steady is __________.

Write the most specific version you can; the value is in naming exactly what the record showed you and exactly where the words for it gave way.

A Note on Modes

Solo mode. Work the phases in order, treating the viewing as Phase 2's core. The two artifacts to keep are your causal chain and your pair of paragraphs from Phase 3 — together they are your record of what the evidence supports and what each word does to it.

Group mode (3–6 people). Designate a timekeeper. The film can be watched individually before the session; Phases 1 and 2's logging are individual, Phases 3 and 4 are collaborative. The closing reflection works well as individual writing after the session ends.

After the Case Study

• The city-scale history behind the film's six days: Felker-Kantor, Max. Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Publisher page. The book converts the documentary's six days into the endpoint of a twenty-seven-year institutional story, from Watts to 1992; it appears in the unit's Key Scholarship.
• The book that grounds the rebellion concept: Hinton, Elizabeth. America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s. New York: Liveright, 2021. Publisher page. Hinton documents nearly two thousand Black rebellions between 1968 and 1972 alone and extends the analysis to 2020; it appears in the unit's Key Scholarship.
• The commission genre's modern federal form: U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division. Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department. 2015. Read the report (DOJ case page). A pattern-or-practice investigation — the instrument that succeeded the blue-ribbon commission — documenting a police department page by page; it appears in the unit's Further Readings.