So last week this video pops up on YouTube, posted by an outfit called “In the Line of Duty.” Apparently these cats produce training videos for law enforcement officials, and one of the topics was the St. Pete riots. It looks like they just post a few minutes in order to entice law enforcement agencies to buy the full videos, so unfortunately we only get 4:44 of awesome 80s 3D animation and music. It still blows my mind to think this was only a tad more than 10 years ago and further blows my mind when you stop to think how far we nave not come since then. I’d say we may have made things worse in those 10 years since and an incident like this probably wouldn’t be that far fetched today.

What’s interesting to me was scanning Wikipedia for information and realizing there is only a very short entry for the riot, which reads very much like it was written by the police department. Scan the main list of riots, list of race riots and list of incidents of civil unrest and we get pretty good billing. It seems a little strange that there isn’t more documentation of the riot on the vast internets, is it a good cover up job or lazy St. Petersburg public? Also, in case you didn’t look at it, yay to America for kicking every other country’s ass combined on the list of race riots. We score an 89 compared to the UK’s totally pussy 23 and the rest of the world can only muster 41 all working together. We sure know how to not get along!