THE KING CASE AFTERMATH : Residents Don’t See Themselves--or Neighbors--as Racist

Nikki Eastwood is a nurse and mother who has lived in Ventura most of her life. She takes pride in the flower garden she is planting and the help she provides for people of all races at the Oxnard hospital where she works.

David Macgregor is a tax preparer who lives nearby. He moved into his home when the 60-foot palm tree outside his modest yellow house was not much taller than a man.

And Lee Noyes is a homemaker and grandmother. She raised her family in the shady corner home where she still lives. And now she gets visits there from her daughter, her grandson and the boy’s Australian sheep dog.

These are some of the neighbors who live on the tree-lined streets of a mostly white and middle-class area near Junipero Serra School in east Ventura.

Along with most of the residents of predominantly white Ventura County, they now also fit into a larger community in the eyes of some people. In the aftermath of the Rodney G. King case, the entire county has been portrayed by some as racist.

But Eastwood, Macgregor and Noyes are united in their belief that theirs is not a racist community.

“I think the verdicts make us all look foolish and redneck, and I don’t think we are,” Noyes said as she sat outside on her front-yard veranda. “I don’t think that jury was representative of the people in this county.”

Nearby, Eastwood looked up from her gardening to discuss the King verdicts.

“I don’t think Ventura County or racism had anything to do with the verdict,” said Eastwood, a diminutive woman who leaned against her garden hoe as she spoke. “I think the verdict came in from a jury who deliberated with all the facts.

“Just viewing the tape, you see brutality and too much force and that’s what (the media) wanted us to see.”

Eastwood said she sees no racism in her work or around her home.

“We take care of all kinds of people at the hospital,” she said.

Macgregor, who had raced home for lunch at midday, was thoughtful as he finished chewing a bite of lunch.

The county is not racist, he said. Instead, he said, it is culturally diverse, with people of many heritages who live and work together.

“We have lots of Mexicans and Spanish people in Oxnard, and a lot of them are my friends and customers,” he said. “There are colored people here in the neighborhood. My dentist is a Korean. Color doesn’t have a bearing on the verdicts.”

Still, Macgregor made it clear that he shares the view expressed by some members of the King jury that King could have prevented a severe beating by obeying the police who had stopped his car.

“When the police tell you to do something, you do it,” Macgregor said. “It doesn’t matter what the reason is.”

Pat Railsback, a homemaker who raised her children in Ventura, interrupted cleaning at her well-kept home to answer the ring at her stained-glass front door.

“It almost makes me want to cry,” she said of the violence and deaths that have followed the verdicts. But Ventura County residents should bear no shame for the actions of the jury, she said.

“I feel they must have known a lot more about it than we know from watching the videotape because 12 people voted against (guilty verdicts),” she said.

Victor Colon, an east Ventura maintenance worker and laborer who was riding his bicycle through the neighborhood Friday, said he does not believe that the verdicts mean that the county is racist.

His own view is that the jury should have included six black people, he said. And the police should not have used the force they did, he added.

But that does not make Ventura County racist, Colon said. With the exception of one incident eight years ago, he said, he has not seen any racism in the county. And even that personal experience did not make him draw conclusions about the county as a whole, he said.

In that incident, Colon, now 33, was walking along Ventura Avenue when he was stopped by a white police officer, who told him to put his hands behind his back. When Colon asked why, Colon said the officer clubbed him across the back of his legs.

“He shouldn’t have done that because I wasn’t doing anything,” he said. “I felt like I wanted to take him to court for what he did. It made me wonder, ‘What type of police do we have here?’ ” But he said he got over the pain and went on.

Michael Malloy, a 23-year-old salesman who grew up in Simi Valley then moved to Ventura, was at the Simi Valley Courthouse when the jurors were released and the four defendants left. He said he went there to protest the not-guilty verdicts.

It wasn’t just blacks who were upset, he said, adding that white Ventura County residents also thought that the verdicts were wrong.

“Not just black people, but white people, were chasing them and throwing things at them as they left,” he said of the four police officers.

John Krieg, a computer programmer who lives in a neat condominium complex off Clinton Avenue, said the jury should have included at least a few blacks to make it more racially balanced.

“But how can you do that?” he said. “You can’t be race-selective when you’re choosing a jury. That’s why we have a problem.”

He favorably compared the racial attitudes of people in Ventura County to residents of Germany, where he lived for 10 years before he moved to Ventura one year ago.

“This place strikes me as very open-minded,” he said. “In Germany, they don’t like certain foreigners, including Americans.”

Jeanne Gilbert, a physician’s assistant who has lived in the county only a few months, said she was delighted with her new community.

“I have three mixed-race kids and we’ve had fewer problems here than we had where we came from in Denver,” she said. “I don’t think this county is any more racist than Los Angeles County.”

Bruce Silvey, an accounting student at UC Santa Barbara and a Ventura High School graduate, said the verdicts are not a reflection on the racism of Ventura County residents; instead, they are testimony to a judicial system that needs to be revamped.

“There is something fundamentally wrong with the system that would allow them to go free,” he said.