Civil Disturbance Related Deaths

The Los Angeles County Coroners Office defined a riot related death by asking the following question: "Would this death have occurred had the riot not been in effect?" (Los Angeles Times, June 2, 1992) Lack of police officers and deputy coroners to conduct an investigation hampered early efforts to determine the cause of death. Sometimes fire obliterated the death scene. In other cases it was difficult to clearly assign the death to the riot. At one point LAPD detectives felt that as many as fifteen of the 60 reported deaths as of June were unrelated to the riot. After careful examination of the causes of death, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner determined that as of August 1 1, 51 deaths occurred during the Los Angeles Civil Disturbance (Los Angeles County Medical Examiner, 1992). Appendix B contains a table that identifies most of the causes of death. Table I reports the civil disturbance deaths by ethnicity. The largest number were African-Americans, followed in order by Hispanic, Caucasian, and Asian. Of these, 88% were male (45), and 12% were female (6). The ethnic data on injuries and deaths should be compared to the ethnic composition of the community. As noted earlier, 46% of South Central Los Angeles residents are Latino. The data suggests that relatively more African Americans were killed than might have been expected based on the proportion of the community that they represent. This pattern is consistent with that reported for civil disturbances and riots occurring in the 1960s. According to the Kerner Commission: "...83 deaths were reported. ...The overwhelming majority of persons killed or injured in all of the disturbances were Negro (Kerner, 1968).

Medical Care for the Injured

Continue to Day and Time of Occurrence of Injuries and Deaths

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