I think the intensity of the riots was as it was precisely because it took place in Los Angeles in the End of the Cold War. It went viral and inspired more outrage than usual because Los Angeles was already a tinderbox. Even putting aside the Harlins case, you had a vision of at least two LAs - one was the LA of Hollywood, of glamor, the cultural capital of the Western world. The other LA was an LA of recently-shuttered defense factories, of ethnic tensions between black, Latino, white and Asian, of soaring unemployment and dislocation (no real peace dividend in LA). The place was a tinderbox waiting to explode, but the fire would not have been so bad if not for the Holliday tape.
The riots, in a way, was the shattering of the barrier, even if only for a few days, between the two LAs. And then, until 2020, the barrier went back up (to a certain extent, Los Angeles has never really recovered from the collapse of the defense industry, as most new jobs went to those with college educations, which is cold comfort to a welder who only finished high school.)