Police Story : In Living Color: Life On the Other Side of the Thin Blue Line

The pain was real.

For a week after the videotaped beating of Rodney G. King aired on television, friends and family called from around the country. “What is going on in L.A.?” they asked.

No matter how many times I tried to come up with an explanation, every time I saw the videotape I realized the question was purely rhetorical, because there was nothing believable I could say.

As the crisis in city government and race relations intensified in the wake of the King beating, it seemed that the nightmarish future of Los Angeles depicted in the movie “Blade Runner” had come to pass several decades too early--a city of victimized and restive minorities politically controlled by a detached Anglo business Establishment and physically held in check by a technologically advanced, armed-to-the-teeth paramilitary police force.

One reality quickly became clear: Some in Los Angeles could not comprehend the depth of the hurt and outrage felt by the city’s people of color as a result of the King beating. They accused the civil-rights coalition of playing racial politics, of attempting to polarize the city, of using the videotaped beating as a pretext to go after Chief Daryl F. Gates.

No single incident more dramatically illustrated this lack of understanding than the incredible notion put forth by Gates and some of his supporters that the city, as a first step, should offer the public “lessons” in how to be safely arrested.

No one with even the slightest awareness of what it is like to live as a minority in America could possibly think that citizens of South Central or the Eastside or Chinatown need lessons in how to be arrested. In African-American families, the lessons begin at home and just soon after those on how to ride a bike, as did mine: “Geoffrey, if you are ever stopped by the police, I don’t want you saying anything but ‘Yes, officer’ or ‘No, officer.’ If you have anything to say, come home and say it to your father and me. The most important thing is that you get home in one piece.”

The Christopher Commission seemed a possible catalyst for change. Yet, depending on the commission--like so many of the city’s other institutions disproportionately Anglo and male--also seemed problematical.

Again, it was the question of perspective. I knew that when the Anglo commissioners see LAPD red lights in their rear-view mirrors, they would probably wonder if they were exceeding the speed limit. When black and brown Angelenos testifying before the commission see the same red lights, we wonder if we are moments away from the hospital.

For me, the turning point came May 8, the commission’s first community hearing. In a hot, tense, packed auditorium in South Central, the commission sat through almost four hours of dramatic and sometimes tumultuous testimony. Earlier that day, a sound enhancement by KCET of the King videotape had proved that the officers beating King had called him a “nigger” while delivering their baton blows.

The commissioners listened intently as they saw the effect the use of that word and other slurs, not to mention the beatings that so frequently accompany their use, could have on a besieged community. When I left the auditorium that night, I knew that the gap of understanding between the commission and the community had been bridged. The LAPD’s computer messages soon took care of the evidence gap.

The Christopher Commission’s report is a landmark, not only for its vindication of the longtime cries of so many communities, but for its revival of the one set of hopes that we all must cling to if a multicultural Los Angeles is to live with itself: that downtown can respond to the neighborhoods; that the everyday lives and long-term aspirations of black, brown and yellow can be understood by white, and that the institutions of this city can be made to work.

The calls are coming again, from all over the country. Once again, they are unanimous--”I can’t believe that the commission came out with a report like that!”

By transcending the boxes of race, gender and class that many in Los Angeles had placed them in--by understanding that the pain was real--the members of the Christopher Commission have, if only for now, restored the image of Los Angeles as a city that leads this country toward the future. Because the commission looked at this city and did not blink, today we are all able to see each other a little more clearly.