Can’t believe it’s been 20 years since the L.A. riots. I know many of you weren’t born yet, but it was a pretty tense and weird time in Southern California’s history. Whether you were White, Black, Latino, Korean… for a few weeks, you were keenly aware of your race and the others’ around you. Racial tensions had been simmering for a while, especially under a corrupt police department that was acting under the public radar (we didn’t have the Internet to rally together and call authorities out for abusive brutality). So when all that resentment and anger spilled over into the streets of Los Angeles after an unsavory Rodney King verdict, no one was that surprised. Speaking of the web, between this, the North Hollywood shootout, and the O.J. Simpson chase, L.A. brought some of the most riveting and sensational helicopter news footage to the rest of the world, pre-Youtube.

Could this happen again? Most definitely. Thank God we have Youtube to remind us why it shouldn’t: