ure local gun stores (one of which lost 1,150 firearms during the first night of the riot). Not until 6:43, an hour after the police retreat, did LAPD dispatchers even issue a tactical alert for south Los Angeles, which finally freed supervisors to assign emergency calls to units from other parts of the city (Henderson, 1995, p. 30).
It is unlikely that a rapid and decisive response by the 77th at Florence and Normandie would have prevented some kind of disturbance from evolving in Los Angeles that day; isolated incidents of blacks assaulting whites and looting of stores started popping up on a small scale at several locations in South Central about 15 minutes before Denny was beaten. In fact, no riot-related fires started in Los Angeles until after the Denny beating and more than four hours after the acquittals were announced; and the number and location of lootings mushroomed immediately following the attack on the trucker.
The fact that the riot could have turned out differently was illustrated at the LAPD Foothill divisi
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