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1992 Los Angeles riots

Six days of rioting in Los Angeles after the acquittal, on April 29, 1992, of the officers filmed beating Rodney King. About 775 million dollars insured, the US record until 2020.

Definition

On April 29, 1992, a Simi Valley jury acquitted four Los Angeles police officers filmed the year before beating Rodney King. That evening, the intersection of Florence and Normandie erupted, and for six days South Central, Koreatown and other neighborhoods burned; the National Guard and then federal troops were deployed, and more than fifty people died. PCS put the insured cost at about 775 million dollars at the time, the figure that served as the upper bound for US riot underwriters for almost thirty years. What stands out first is concentration. Claims piled up along a few commercial corridors, among many small shopkeepers, often Korean American, some of them underinsured or insured with weak carriers. The case also sent the market back to the origins of FAIR Plans: created in 1968, after the Watts and Detroit riots, to insure urban property the market turned down, they returned to the debate when reports of trouble getting coverage in the affected neighborhoods surfaced and the redlining question came back. For the underwriter, Los Angeles 1992 showed that an urban riot produces a tight geographic accumulation, closer to a conflagration than to a string of independent losses, and that the limit per zone matters as much as the limit per risk.

Its 5 cross-references, woven across the glossary's 18 categories
1992 Los Angeles riots: Special risks glossary illustration, AlgoPolis
Example

Property Claim Services (PCS) put the insured losses from the April and May 1992 Los Angeles riots at about 775 million dollars, roughly 1.4 billion in 2020 dollars. Only the summer 2020 unrest has exceeded that total.

Read next
Special risks2020 United States riotsCivil disorder that followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, estimated at more than 1 billion dollars insured, possibly over 2 billion, a US record for a riot event.Read the entry →MarketsPCS (Property Claim Services)A service that designates US catastrophes and estimates their industry-wide insured cost, whose figures serve as the trigger for industry loss warranties and many catastrophe bonds.Read the entry →InsuranceRiots, strikes and civil commotion (SRCC)A peril of collective violence, between ordinary crime and political risk, that the French market covers in multiperil policies and that other markets removed from their policies after costly waves of riots.Read the entry →
Sources
  • Insurance Information Institute, "Facts + Statistics: Civil disorders" (PCS figures)
Related terms
Also known as

LA riots 1992, Rodney King riots, Los Angeles uprising 1992

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