Images from the same spot, 20 years later…

For more than two weeks in the spring of 1992, L.A. Weekly photographer Ted Soqui put his life at risk as he drove from one ravaged neighborhood to another to document the fallout of the Los Angeles riots, also known as the Los Angeles Uprising. He spotted torched buildings by following plumes of smoke in the sky. “And there was no shortage of smoke,” Soqui says, “dark smoke.”

He rephotographed those sites 20 years later, standing in the very same locations where he’d stood in 1992. Soqui’s before-and-after imagery gives silent testament to how much has changed – and how little.

The riots erupted after a police brutality trial in which a jury acquitted Los Angeles Police Department officers Stacey Koon, Theodore Briseno, Timothy Wind and Laurence Powell on charges of excessive use of force against Rodney King. The previous year, a videotape broadcast around the world had shown a belligerent King, pulled over after a wild chase in which he drove up to 80 mph on surface streets, fighting officers as they’d tried to pin him down – and the officers whacking him with their batons more than 50 times.

When the mostly white jury let the officers off at 3:15 p.m. on April 29, the first violence erupted at the intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues in South L.A. In a harrowing video seen by millions on TV, white trucker Reginald Denny was driving by in his big rig when he was yanked from its cab by a group of black men, then bashed in the head with a claw hammer, a brick and an oxygen tank, nearly killing him and leaving him with permanent brain damage.

Yet when Police Chief Daryl Gates got word of the growing violence, he refused to leave a police political fundraiser in Brentwood. LAPD was unprepared and lost control of the streets in South Los Angeles, Koreatown, Hollywood, Mid-City, Pico-Union and the Civic Center itself. Rioters ran into the Los Angeles Times’ building to rip equipment off desks, palm trees blazed in the night skies near Dodger Stadium, and iconic shops such as Frederick’s of Hollywood were looted until bare. The U.S. Army, Marines and National Guard were called in. The toll: some 2,000 people injured and more than 50 killed; more than 1,100 buildings damaged; more than 3,000 fires set. Property damage was set at $1 billion.

The California Economic Development Department had at the time painted a bleak picture of L.A.’s labor market as “experiencing one of the most severe recessions of the postwar era.” Between April 1991 and April 1992, 108,000 local jobs vanished. Black and Latino communities were hard hit, with a combined 29.7 percent in poverty and more than 13 percent unemployed.

Perhaps worse, L.A. was in the throes of a vicious era of street violence, and a years-long bloodbath was unfolding in U.S. cities. Driven by armed gangbangers and violent crack and PCP dealers, the mayhem in L.A. produced 1,025 murders in 1991 and 1,092 in 1992 (there were 612 in 2011). It wasn’t safe to walk in South L.A. in the afternoon – that’s when armed teenagers got out of school.

The aging mayor, Tom Bradley, widely seen as tired and burned out, nevertheless worked hard with top business leaders after the riots to create Rebuild Los Angeles, a group that hoped to lure billions of dollars of corporate investment to South L.A., the worst-hit area.

Few of Rebuild L.A.’s plans came to be, but its most clear achievement was that it managed to clear away the vast, depressing rubble left by hundreds of destroyed buildings. The biggest private success story was thanks to Lakers basketball star Earvin “Magic” Johnson, who in 1995 built a movie theater complex in South L.A.

It wasn’t just businesses and investors who rejected South L.A. after the riots. As L.A. Weekly reported in 1993, black families ramped up the “black flight” from L.A. that had started in the previous decade. Some 56,000 African-Americans fled L.A. between 1980 and 1990. Cal State Northridge researchers found that the exodus was driven by racial displacement – the mass movement of mostly illegal Latino immigrants into the city’s affordable black neighborhoods.