Journalist and historian Joe Domanick takes Off-Ramp listeners to Parker Center, the L.A. Times building, and the new LAPD Headquarters building – three places he sees as crucial to understanding why the 1992 L.A. Riots happened.

According to Domanick, author of "To Protect and To Serve," a narrative history of the LAPD and the forthcoming "Road to Reckoning: the Collapse and Reformation of the LAPD," says Parker Center embodied the glory years for the force, which Chief Darrell Gates viewed as America's police force. But it was through the back door of Parker Center that Gates slipped out on the night the riots started. Astoundingly, so he could attend a Brentwood fundraiser aimed at fighting an initiative to limit the chief's power. But, Domanick says, Gates had no plan to implement that day; he didn't seem to think the people would rise up against him....