20 Years Later

Twenty years ago today an all-white jury acquitted the cops in the Rodney King beating. The decision was just the ignition that the racial powder-keg that was LA needed to burst into an orgy of destruction, fire, looting and release.

The riots weren't necessarily about race it's been said recently, more of the general injustice about a world that seemed for Koreans, Latinos, and blacks, way out of their control. Police brutality was a standard operating procedure. Conditions had only gotten worse since the Watts Riots. The groups of men that had as children been excluded from recreational organizations like the Boy Scouts during the fifties had, during the sixties, formed their own groups of street brawlers that had, after the Watts Riots, become a united front of Black Nationalism, and were then systematically jailed or killed. In those intervening 27 years, the Crips, and soon after the rival Bloods, took over that leadership vacuum, and began a long and protracted street war that claimed upwards of 30,000 people.

In any other country in the world the UN would be staging peace talks and the best diplomats would be making appearances like Belfast or Sarajevo. Nearly ten times as people were killed in the Crips/Bloods feud than in the entire IRA driven conflict in Ireland/Northern Ireland.

That was the situation of a forgotten slice of America that got exposed in the weeks following the verdict,the simmering level of angst, fear, anger...when you're treated like your life is meaningless by the authorities, you tend to believe that narrative, and killing becomes so much more easy and natural.

Then the footage of the Rodney King beating becomes a national sensation, all the while the citizens in central and south LA say that kind of thing has been pretty regular during the last fifteen years. Nevermind that Rodney King drunkenly sped away from the police and recklessly drove through residential neighborhoods at 80 miles an hour. The beating that appears on that clip was excessive, right? Can we agree on that?

That type of beating should be reserved for very special circumstances, and I imagine we could probably agree on for whom we should reserve them.

Nearly a year later, after the trial of the police officers, the verdict comes back not guilty, and we expect the group of forgotten and shunned citizens, left alone to kill themselves for decades as long as they didn't pass Norwalk Blvd, to accept that farce as justice being served? How are supposed to explain what justice is in the world to the young people?

Twenty years later some things have changed. Some for the better, some for the worse. The Korean business owners learned that they had to become part of the community instead of insular business folks. The black flight really took a hold after 1992, and in their wake the Latinos swooped into the affordable neighborhoods. The strangle hold that the gangs had on the neighborhoods has waned, and the fear of being shot simply because you're on the wrong block have disappeared. Jobs, though? Think there are any more careers for the 18-35 year-old black man in south-central LA than there were in 1992?

That economic prison isn't going anywhere without better schools (good luck with that currently), better crisis intervention, better training programs, and better understanding of the various communities.