A time to riot: L.A. uprising 1992; a decade has passed since Los Angeles bore the nation's largest social upheaval of the 20th century, it's a time most of the city would rather forget. This writer included. (To the Point).

Although I've long since tried to come to terms with the riots, a resolution has yet to present itself. A recently transferred reporter in the Los Angeles Times' San Diego edition, I was dispatched back to L.A. in 1992 to cover disturbances that broke out in two of my old beats--Koreatown and south Los Angeles. In hindsight, I can say that experience led directly to my departure from mainstream journalism a few months later.

In the spring of that year, Los Angeles shook in anger and fear. Following not guilty verdicts in the trial of four white LAPD officers who beat into submission an African American motorist named Rodney G. King, an enraged few in south Los ...