Racist 'Justice' in L.A.

When the two Los Angeles police officers returned to their squad car parked in the public housing projects of Pico Gardens, the words "To Protect and To Serve" were faintly visible through the black spray paint that covered them. Some disgruntled and increasingly alienated youths had defaced the LAPD's motto emblazoned on the side of the car. They did this, I imagine, because they knew it did not apply to them nor to their community. "Our motto here is not 'to protect and to serve,' " admitted a local police officer, "but rather, 'get the bad guy.' "

In the March 3 beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers, inner city communities of people of color saw a reflection of their own experience captured for all the world to view. This same scene has been played out in their barrios and ghettos more times than they can remember -- and more often than the police care to acknowledge. In their zeal to "get the bad guy," law enforcement has criminalized the poor and people of color.

In impoverished, urban areas of our country, the "us versus them" mentality of many police departments has translated into a marked disdain and devaluing of the poor. If the operative and controlling principle of law enforcement is "get the bad guy," then the inner city is where the bad guy lives. That single mother walking to the corner store is the bad guy's mother, and the kids playing in the local park are his or her sisters and brothers. Accomplices all; fraternizers with the enemy.

The racist disparagement of the poor and minorities by the police moves from concentrating one's energies in "collaring" the criminal to localizing their "den of activity" within the inner city. The housing projects become "enemy territory." "Us" lives in the suburbs and are white, while "Them" lives in the projects and are African American or Latino. Law enforcement, therefore, keeps intact their prevailing, mythic profile of the criminal, i.e. the poor person of color. Police then become the occupying force and the poor, the occupied.

THE UNRELENTING ABUSE heaped upon Rodney King must be placed within the context of the police's insistent dehumanization and racist demeaning of all people of color, but especially those who live in the inner city. What compelled those officers to inflict more than 50 blows on King's defenseless body also permits law enforcement officials to plant crack on a gang member's person.

The same moral void that spawned King's beating allows officers to humiliate and degrade residents of low-income housing. It is also what permits officers to "rough up" well-dressed black men armed only with the presumption that they are likely crack dealers. Minorities and especially the poor are the enemy. They are all suspect. Anything goes -- no human being involved. Not even the Geneva Convention protects them.

If we as a country have declared war on crime, then we should not be surprised at hearing the inner city poor (and in fact people of color from all income levels) tell stories of police abuse and low-intensity warfare waged against them. My community on the East side of Los Angeles is a war zone not because of its crime rate, but because of the hostility directed toward the people there by the "occupying force." If the enemy must be wiped out at all costs, what regard will the officer in the barrio have for their human rights, much less for a basic civility and courtesy?

The criminalization of the poor and the war leveled against them and all people of color will produce no victors, only more hate, distrust, and alienation. These sad by-products of war will not usher in safer streets nor result in a renewed respect for law and order.

The poor will become "decriminalized" when they are seen in the light of their daily struggle to confront the harsh realities of their existence. People of color will cease to be "the enemy" to law enforcement if the racism endemic to the police's modus operandi is exposed, continually, to the light of public scrutiny.

The motto "To Protect and To Serve" is as fine an ideal to which any law enforcement agency could hope to aspire. Rodney King's savage beating is grim evidence that such ideals do not extend to those on the lower end of our socioeconomic scale.

The brutal "justice" he received at the hands of the police only highlights what people of color have long come to expect and fear from law enforcement. The poor and minorities are not afforded the same service and protection as white people of means. To acknowledge this is but a beginning.

Gregory J. Boyle was pastor of Dolores Mission Church, a Catholic parish in Los Angeles that ran Dolores Mission Alternative, a program for dropouts at risk, when this article appeared.