Be honest: You're looking at this story thinking what else is there to add to reports on the 1992 riots that rocked LA , right? NPR has done anniversary retrospectives before, including a huge look-back on the 20th. But in the past five years, the issue of policing — how it's done, whether it's equitable, what happens when deadly confrontations occur — has become more urgent than ever. And what happened in Los Angeles that April night 25 years ago is a critical part of the current national conversation on policing and race. For the LAPD, there have been huge changes. "I can honestly say the LAPD of 2017 is not your grandfather's LAPD, and it's not the LAPD of Daryl Gates, that 25 years ago, plunged this city into the biggest riot in (modern) American history," says civil rights lawyer Connie Rice. Rice spent a lot of time from the late 1980s through the mid-90s challenging police aggression in the city's communities of color, especially people in poor parts of the city where policing
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