Exactly four months after the fires of the Los Angeles rebellion seared their way through the national consciousness, The L.A. Times (9/3/92) reported that "normalcy" had returned:
Sharply contradicting the popular assumption that the 1992 riots were a "wake-up call" for Los Angeles, a UCLA survey has found that the cataclysmic events of this spring did very little to alter residents' attitudes about economic, ethnic, political and social life....In the aftermath of the most destructive civil disturbance in the United States in this century, the survey found county residents had no renewed commitment to addressing poverty, racial inequality or prejudice.
Indeed, media fascination has moved on to other apocalypses (the devastation of Hurricane Andrew, starvation in Somalia). As the dreaded "long, hot summer" yields to autumn, politicians have ceased to seek photo ops in "the heart of South Central," and national organizations are no longer sending delegations to "understand what happened in LA."
While many agree that LA is the future tense of urban America, few wish to pay attention long enough to engage the structural issues that led to what social critic Mike Davis calls the first great "post-modern bread riot." Nevertheless, a variety of reconstruction and reparation battles by local community activists have begun to map the new political terrain facing all those struggling for inner-city justice.
Predictable in an image-conscious city, initiatives by the official "Rebuild LA" committee have been largely cosmetic. Led by businessman Peter Uberroth and widely perceived as representing the interests of the downtown power structure, "RLA" has concentrated upon high-profile fund-raisers, token community projects and summer jobs programs, and building a diverse 50-member board with uncertain powers. It even has an official song, penned by David Cassidy (!). Quietly, however, Uberroth pursues traditional redevelopment strategies: free enterprise zones, HUD-financed refurbishing of public housing, and large infrastructure projects such as the Century Freeway Corridor.
This tendency to funnel resources to outside interests is also typified by federal aid. Of a $10 million commerce department grant, for example, $5.6 million is going to local defense firms to convert to peacetime production, while $1.5 million of the balance is earmarked for the LA Convention and Visitors Bureau--to help revive the city's largest industry, tourism.
COMMUNITY-based groups have seen all this before and are countering with demands for a greater role in the planning, allocations, contracting, and jobs associated with private and public reconstruction efforts. Notable has been the militance of the Brotherhood Crusade's Danny Bakewell, who has led shutdowns of a number of demolition and building sites around the city where African-American workers were absent ("If we don't work, nobody works").
Grassroots "victims associations" have sprung up among several Asian-American groups, focusing upon getting city, county, state, and federal agencies to deliver on their promises of relief/reconstruction help. In both cases a variety of nonviolent protest tactics has been effectively employed (for example, the noisy importunity of traditional Korean petition-prayer drums beating relentlessly at City Hall eventually got Mayor Bradley's attention).
Sadly, in a city where multiculturalism is both indicative and imperative, intergroup relations have deteriorated noticeably under the pressure of post-rebellion race-baiting. Gulfs between blacks, Latinos, and Asians have widened due in part to a retreat to the politics of self-interest and in part to the incentive for competition engendered by the divide-and-rule tactics of government-administered aid.
Even "intraethnic" differences have deepened, such as that between the new immigrant Central American community of the Pico-Union district (heavily affected by the rebellion) and the established Chicano communities of East LA, which experienced minimal disruption. The media have contributed to the fracturing by playing up differences and tensions.
Over the summer new Latino and Asian political coalitions were formed to try to overcome internal splintering, so far with limited success. Class and race tensions promise to worsen as a result of larger economic factors. The recession is now hitting California harder than anywhere in the country: The state's August unemployment was a staggering 9.8 percent--despite summer job programs.
Things will deteriorate further as a result of draconian cuts in health, education, and welfare spending, thanks to Gov. Pete Wilson's successful political blackmail: His "balanced" state budget simply dumps many public responsibilities upon already inundated city and county governments.
ANOTHER DISCOURAGING sign that little has changed is the continuing pattern of police abuse followed by legal acquittal--the very issues that triggered the spring violence. In late June Kenneth Moore, a 16-year-old African American, was shot and killed by LAPD officers near the University of Southern California campus; witnesses angrily disputed police claims that the boy had a gun.
Less than a week later John Daniels Jr., a 36-year-old African-American tow truck driver was gunned down in Hyde Park in South Central while slowly driving away from a verbal confrontation with police, instigating a tense stand-off with local residents and onlookers. The two LAPD officers involved each had a history of misconduct, having been suspended four times in six years.
On May 20 a Superior Court jury deadlocked on 1991 manslaughter charges against a Compton police officer accused of firing 19 rounds at and killing two Samoan brothers, Pouvi and Itali Tualauleli. Despite this outrageous miscarriage of justice so close to the Simi Valley verdict, the Samoan community, through the intervention of the local Council of Chiefs and other leaders, kept the peace.
A month later four LAPD officers were cleared by the district attorney's office in the fatal shooting of Henry Peco last November at Imperial Courts. Police claimed Peco was armed, and fired a total of 43 rounds, five of which found their mark; relatives assert Peco was unarmed. Tensions at the project between residents and police in the wake of that incident were so strained that a federal mediator was dispatched.
But criticism of law enforcement continues to mount as well. A General Accounting Office report criticized the lack of controls in the LA County sheriffs' new computerized database gang tracking system, dubbed "GREAT." According to the criteria used by GREAT for identifying gang constituents, some 47 percent of the county's young black males qualified as members or associates!
At the end of June, Amnesty International released its long-awaited human rights report, titled Police Brutality in Los Angeles. The report, based on a review of 60 civil lawsuits against the LAPD and county sheriffs and researched before the Simi Valley verdict, concluded that there was a "serious problem of excessive force" by officers, which in some cases "has even amounted to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment." To no one's surprise, it noted that blacks and Latinos bear the brunt of such abuse, that white officers commit a majority of the offenses, and that misconduct is rarely punished.
PERHAPS THE MOST significant new and hopeful development in the aftermath of the rebellion, however, has received only spotty and ambivalent media coverage: the Bloods/Crips gang truce. Though African-American gang peace negotiations predated the Simi Valley verdict, the truce took firm hold afterward throughout the most ravaged neighborhoods of South Central LA.
Like the "original gangs" of the 1970s, the truce of the '90s was spawned in the city's toughest public housing projects: Imperial Courts, Jordan Downs, and Knickerson Gardens. And though mediated and supported by more established community leaders, it is fundamentally the work of gang members themselves.
There is ample local solidarity in South Central neighborhoods experiencing unprecedented freedom this summer as a result of the peace. The black-owned LA Watts Times called for the truce to be "given support, guidance and direction for the benefit of us all." Said one resident: "I'm praying it stays together. I see them walking together with blue and red rags. A few months ago, whenever you saw a red rag he was looking for a blue rag to kill."
The gangsters modeled the truce upon the 1943 cease-fire agreement between Egypt and Israel (a treaty also negotiated and drafted by an African American from Watts, Nobel Peace Prize recipient Ralph Bunche). There has been other sophisticated and creative political thinking as well, such as the anonymous document circulated just after the rebellion under the title "Bloods/Crips Proposal for LA's Face Lift." While never officially endorsed by gang leadership, this impressive manifesto reflected grassroots concerns about community-oriented policing and locally controlled economic development.
Those with a sense of history understand that there is precedent here: The Black Panthers, Brown Berets, and other community movements of the late '60s and early '70s grew in large measure from the politicization of street gangs in the wake of the Watts rebellion and Chicano Moratorium. It appears that the downtown powers also understand this history, however, and are determined to prevent these seeds of community empowerment from germinating.
Before the embattled tenure of Chief Daryl Gates finally groaned to a halt at the end of June, there was a clear pattern of harassment of the truce. Truce parties, taking place every weekend during the early summer, were repeatedly broken up by police, provoking several near-conflagrations. The Ministers' Coalition for Peace, working with the truce leaders, warned the police commission that this harassment--which has included towing gang members' vehicles, false arrests, and yelling insults and racial slurs at gang members--could lead to renewed violence.
MEANWHILE THE district attorney's office, which could not convict the four LAPD officers accused of beating Rodney King, managed to issue a May report on gangs and crime that blamed much of the city's violence on the gangs and offered absurdly speculative and inflated statistics on gang membership citywide. Whether or not the city intends, under the leadership of new LAPD Chief Willie Williams, to establish a new era of more cooperative police-community relations remains to be seen.
Federal collaboration with local law enforcement in riot-related and gang prosecutions has intensified the "law and order" environment. A June report of the National Chicano Human Rights Council of Los Angeles detailed the ways in which Drug Enforcement Agency, Immigration and Naturalization Service, and Border Patrol agents deployed during the rebellion conducted wholesale deportation sweeps. Now the FBI is coordinating the largest, multijurisdictional arson investigation in U.S. history (862 buildings were damaged or destroyed in the city of LA, causing an estimated loss of $750-900 million).
The FBI has also dispatched almost 100 agents to the LA gang detail--more than most U.S. cities have assigned to all federal crimes. And the U.S. Attorney's office has brought in "expert" gang prosecutors from Chicago who intend to use federal racketeering laws--a major weapon in high-level indictments of eastern Mafia--enabling them to put entire gangs on trial.
For all this only one case of owner-arson insurance fraud has been filed. At least 10 of the 58 persons killed during the rebellion were shot by law enforcement (all of them black and Latino males under 40)--yet investigation has been slow. Clearly, prosecution of riot-related crimes has disproportionately targeted those with criminal records and suspected gang members.
A good example is the widely publicized case of the "LA Four"--the suspects in the videotaped assault upon trucker Reginald Denny the afternoon of the Simi Valley verdict--who are now charged with attempted murder, torture, aggravated mayhem, and robbery. This case has every appearance of being treated by authorities as an "object lesson"; many in South Central, however, perceive it as one more instance of double standards in the justice system.
It may well be even more than that. Media coverage implicitly portrays it as a mirror image of the King beating case. The white power structure no doubt feels that by depicting violence as symmetrical, the racial politics of both cases can be obscured. But that only plays in the suburbs: Many in the black community fear that a conviction of the LA Four would be the next trigger of violence born of frustration.
Despite it all, the gang truce has held and may spread. While Latino gangs continue to war in South Central and East Los Angeles, resulting in a skyrocketing death toll, there are signs of hope. At the end of August some 500 Latino gang members from around Orange County met in Santa Ana to sign a peace treaty in a summit organized by the United Gangs Council.
The spiral of violence has hardly been broken in LA. August saw a new county record of 263 homicides, two-thirds by gunshot--more than were killed that month in the warring Yugoslav republics! But in response to this news, a special meeting was called by truce leaders, local politicians, and clergy, and an appeal was made for a "no-killing" Labor Day weekend. Amazingly, though targeted for prosecution and vilification, those with least to lose and most to feel angry about have nevertheless become a vanguard of peace in the violent inner city.
The gang truce is a phenomenon that neither churches nor traditional peace and justice groups have had much to do with but have everything to learn from. To fail to listen to these new voices is to refuse to face the real issues at the root of both the "ordinary" violence of this August and the "extraordinary" violence of last spring: entrenched economic and racial oppression. We must keep reminding ourselves that the old way of doing business in urban America will not work. A return to "normalcy" will make future fires inevitable.
Ched Myers, a Sojourners contributing editor, was program director for the American Friends Service Committee in the Pacific Southwest when this article appeared.
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