Maria Bustillos remembers the anger after Rodney King and draws a comparison to the current riots in the UK:
[T]here's this materialist idea that a person is to be valued by his possessions, and it doesn't much matter how he acquires them. The "valuable" people are protected by the authorities, and those without "worth," as in "net worth," are not entitled to that protection. "Haves" and "have-nots," we say. … But then maybe you go and grab all this stuff and it's not going to fix you.
Not if you steal it out of a broken window, and maybe not if you steal it in a boardroom either, come to that. We all know this deep down, I believe, and, in 1992, I got such a strong feeling watching this poor kid with his enormous half-wrecked dining table that those who participate in looting understand the emptiness of greed better than anyone. Can the roots of the reduced crime rate in Los Angeles have been set down in those dark days?
The Dish 