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During the 1992 riots, Chang Lee stood on the roof of his family’s mini-mall in Koreatown holding a borrowed gun he didn’t know how to use.
When he spotted people emerging from a store with stolen cellphones, he could only yell helplessly.
His stomach dropped when he saw a gas station burning on television and recognized it as one of his family’s businesses.
“Where the hell is everybody? Where is the police? Is this for real? Where is America?” Lee recalled thinking. “There was anger. There was a big question how could this happen?”
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Lee’s views of the LAPD have dramatically shifted since then. In 2009, the department opened a station just outside Koreatown with some officers answering their cellphones in Korean to respond to concerns large and small.