UNDERSTANDING THE RIOTS PART 1 : THE PATH TO FURY : CHAPTER 5 : ‘At last they <i> see </i> we’re not lying to them.’

Art Washington’s pest-control products business at 20th Street and Western Avenue was prospering. He had started it part-time 15 years ago, while working as a molding-ma chine operator. He would go house to house in South Los Angeles, asking people if they had ants or roaches. Recently he bought a pair of computers and entered the names of 7,000 customers. And now he was starting to think of a way to get rich.

He would start selling his products to stores in the neighborhood. Why, he figured, for a dollar you could package a bottle that would sell for $10.95. He began to target stores that would take his insecticide on consignment and return a profit to him.

In the midst of this, he turned on the television news one night in March, 1991, and saw the tape of Rodney King getting the hell beat out of him.

“Well, at last they see we’re not lying to them. They see that this stuff actually happens,” he said to himself. “Now the world sees. They always think we’re making it up.”

Basiliso Merino read about the beating in La Opinion. It perplexed him. Sure, the beating looked bad. It was wrong. But the paper said King had filed a civil lawsuit against the LAPD. “Someone is suing the police department? How is that possible? In Mexico, you can’t do that. What a strange country this is, where you can sue anybody.”

The tape got Steve Frank’s attention in Simi Valley. “When you look at the videotape, without knowing any more, you think these guys should be shot,” he says. But you never knew the whole story.

For Washington’s nephew, Tim Howell Jr., a UCLA student, the tape was an education. Your parents can tell you all the stories in the world about what police do to black people, but until you see it you don’t understand.

“I was messed up when I saw it,” he says.

It reinforced the constant tension of being categorized as a Young Black Male, America’s most negative stereotype. Howell was dating a young woman who lived in Windsor Hills, one of those fashionable white communities that had become a fashionable black community in the wake of the Watts riots. Unlike his father, who preferred staying close to home, where he ran a cake-baking business, Howell traveled throughout the city. And yet he felt its racial creases, the places where he was plainly uncomfortable, without a word being said. Sometimes he would go to dinner with his girlfriend and her parents, to a nice restaurant, and you could feel the stares when you walked in: What are they doing here?

It was only March and life already felt strained, what with the Persian Gulf War and water rationing and a recession that was finally hitting California--hard. The first weekend after the King beating, hundreds of youths rampaged through Westwood Village. Some looted stores and vandalized cars, angry after many ticket buyers were turned away from a new movie, “New Jack City,” about the violent rise and fall of a Harlem drug lord. The rioters yelled, “Fight the power!” the title of a popular rap song. Others made angry references to the King beating.

You could have written that off if you chose; there had been similar disturbances in Westwood. You couldn’t write off what followed.

The next week, four Los Angeles police officers were arraigned on felony charges stemming from the King beating. A day later, a black teen-ager named Latasha Harlins walked into Soon Ja Du’s grocery store in South-Central Los Angeles and got into a fight with her over whether she was trying to steal a bottle of orange juice. As the 15-year-old walked away from the scuffle, the grocer fatally shot her in the back of the head. Black outrage, the product of years of tension with Korean grocers, grew stronger. By summer it would lead to a full-scale boycott at another Korean-owned store in the area.

A mile away from the Soon Ja Du’s Empire Liquor Market Deli, at the Florence Avenue mini-mall where they operated two stores, Myung Lee and William Hong soon felt the angry vibrations.

Lee occasionally was confronted by the comments of angry young black men and women, anger that seemed to be directed at her race, anger she did not understand.

Hong, too, was afraid.

“Sometimes, you feel kind of scared,” he says. “Especially at night. But no one ever did anything violent to me. But you still feel this fear. I don’t carry any guns. For what? If they knew I had a gun, they would shoot first.”

Lee learned a few words of Spanish to communicate better with her Latino customers, who made up about three-quarters of her clientele. She gave free coffee and doughnuts to police officers from the 77th Street station. They made her little doughnut shop a law enforcement hangout. During the year, she would suffer only one act of violence: Her purse was robbed at gunpoint inside the store. In all, she felt fortunate. She knew her customers and they knew her.

Besides, she had something more tangible to worry about: money. The shop was barely generating enough to pay the rent. She was physically and emotionally racked. She opened the store at 4 every morning, closed at 10 at night and returned to her North Hollywood apartment an hour or so later, exhausted.

Sometimes, alone late at night, she would cry. “I hate this business. I hate it,” she would say. “I’m too tired. I can’t go on like this.”’

The world surrounding these people was becoming increasingly inhospitable. This recession was wiping out white-collar jobs, not just industrial ones. Their tax bases depleted, Mayor Tom Bradley, Gov. Pete Wilson and Los Angeles school district officials were planning large budget cuts that would result in fewer teachers, lower payments to mothers with dependent children and less after-school child care at school campuses.

City government was in crisis. Bradley, supported by black community activists such as Kerman Maddox, was pressuring LAPD Chief Daryl F. Gates to resign, while the City Council was backing the chief. The city was paying record amounts to settle excessive force cases against the department. The Christopher Commission, appointed in the wake of the King beating, was putting the finishing touches on a report that would challenge the fundamental assumptions of law enforcement in Los Angeles. Members of street gangs were killing each other--and innocent neighborhood residents--at nearly double the rate of a few years earlier.

Whatever it was that had seized the city, Nancy Silverton could feel it from her restaurant on La Brea Avenue. It made you numb. It was everywhere. The car thefts on Sycamore Avenue. The homeless people in front of the businesses. Sure, it had all been there before, but now there was more.

In June, a black man named Lee Arthur Mitchell entered Chung’s Liquor Market near Western and 79th Street and tried to purchase a wine cooler. The owner’s wife refused to take a piece of jewelry in trade for partial payment. Mitchell then pretended to point a pistol and ordered the cash register emptied. The owner, Tae Sam Park, produced a handgun. A struggle ensued and Mitchell was mortally wounded in the chest.

The district attorney’s office concluded that the shooting was justified. Many black residents concluded otherwise. Daily picketing began, coordinated by the Brotherhood Crusade.

A month later it was still going on. Yet customers trickled in. Evelyn Smith, a 35-year-old black woman who had shopped at Park’s store for two years, strode in.

“Wake up. Wake up,” one picketer called out.

Later in the afternoon, a young black gang member walked in and asked for a bottle of malt liquor and two cans of baby formula. He watched Kum Ock Park ring up the items and then told her to cancel the sale.

“The next time you want to sell this,” he said, his speech punctuated with obscenities, “think about the (person) you killed.”

A couple of weeks later, the economic ax fell on Jake Flukers. On July 19--after all the years of worrying about whether General Motors would close the Van Nuys plant, after community protests and compromises by union leaders, after a thousand false alarms--the 2,600 workers who remained were called into a conference room. They were told that the work was moving to Canada; they would be finished here by the summer of 1992.

Two more weeks passed. Arturo Jimenez, a gang member in East Los Angeles, was shot dead by a sheriff’s deputy. Sheriff’s officials said Jimenez had grabbed another deputy’s flashlight and knocked the officer unconscious. Residents weren’t buying it. They said Jimenez simply had argued with deputies, and never struck anyone.

Then, in rapid succession, there were three more controversial, fatal shootings involving sheriff’s deputies. In Ladera Heights on Aug. 13, a mentally disturbed man was shot eight times in the back and once in the shoulder. In Artesia on Aug. 28, a 15-year-old boy was shot to death. In Willowbrook Park on Sept. 2, another man was shot to death. The district attorney’s office took the Jimenez case and the three other shootings to the grand jury, seeking criminal charges against the five deputies involved.

In September, Fred Williams took a job as a “dropout retrieval” specialist with the Compton Unified School District. By then he was something of a local hero. His willingness to walk into dangerous neighborhoods and demand that parents pay more attention to their children’s education had led to national television exposure. One of the first things he did in Compton was set up a meeting with 100 high-risk black and Latino students in an auditorium.

In the news that morning, Mayor Bradley was proposing job training and classes in self-esteem at Williams’ old stomping grounds, the Jordan Downs housing project. The week before, five Latino residents of the project had died in an arson fire that appeared to stem from a racial dispute with a group of blacks.

That was the level of disaster it now took to get the government’s attention, Williams figured. It was a reality that Williams wanted these kids to understand this morning: In this society, you walk a tightrope, and there is no net, not for poor people. Look at the education they were getting here. Compton had the worst test scores in California.

Inside the auditorium, Williams looked out at the children.

“If you expecting somebody to fall in love with you because you’re young, you can forget it,” he said. “Ain’t nobody taking care of us at all. We got to come up with our own ways of taking care of business. If there’s anything you remember after today, remember that. And don’t expect them to.

“I was just like y’all. I was 14, and I shot a boy smooth in the middle of his head. Back then, when you killed somebody, you don’t do no time. I did a year and six days in jail, and that boy died. Now you kill somebody, you a lifer. . . . I still see his family. And it hits me, you know what I’m saying? The shit’s real . Have any of y’all ever killed anybody? You got no idea how it feels. You got to understand, boy. You ever heard the old saying ‘Count your blessings’? I’m telling you. Telling you. . . .”

Two months later Joyce Karlin did some telling. The Los Angeles Superior Court judge told a hushed courtroom, guarded by extraordinary security, that this was not a time for revenge but for healing, and she sentenced Soon Ja Du to five years’ probation--no jail time--for the killing of Latasha Harlins.

“Latasha’s death,” said the judge, “should be remembered as a catalyst, to force (blacks and Koreans) to confront an intolerable situation and . . . create solutions.”

It would not be.

If there was an award for pessimistic prescience that day, it went to Diane Watson, the state senator who represents South Los Angeles. “This might be the time bomb that explodes,” she said.

Laura Price was horrified.

“If that girl had shot that woman, she would’ve gone to the gas chamber,” Price said, her voice filling with emotion. “A black boy can’t walk down the streets of Los Angeles without being harassed. And he’d better not drive a nice car. Black people are tired.”

Her own 26-year-old son had been handcuffed for jaywalking. “I said, ‘My son is not a gangbanger. His pants aren’t down to his knees.’ ” But she said that police told her son, a student at UC Santa Barbara, that he fit a criminal profile.

When the riots finally came, many of the people who burned and the people who watched the burning approvingly would remember three transcendent reasons: Rodney King, Latasha Harlins and Baby.

Baby is a cocker spaniel puppy. On June 30, Glendale authorities found her with three broken ribs and a broken pelvis. Neighbors had called police after seeing her 26-year-old owner, Brendan Sheen, allegedly kick and jump on the dog repeatedly. Sheen, facing a maximum sentence of three years in state prison, pleaded guilty to felony animal cruelty. Five days after Soon Ja Du got probation, Sheen got 30 days in jail.

“For beating a dog!” Art Washington exclaimed.

News accounts of Sheen’s sentencing were not prominent, but in black communities the word filtered around. The symbolism was agonizing.

“That’s not justice for all,” thought schoolteacher Onamia Bryant.

The confluence of the two cases stirred not only outrage but memories of past indignities at the hands of law enforcement. So often, particularly for black men, the suffering involved a traffic stop.

Marcus and Cletus had their memories. It happened to Marcus in Torrance. He was taking a friend home. They were sitting in the car talking when a sheriff’s black-and-white rolled up.

“You know the routine,” he says. “The thing that gets me is that they always say the same thing: ‘We’ve been having a lot of robberies in this neighborhood and you look like the suspect.’ ”

Cletus remembers being stopped by police after he ran a stoplight. The brakes had failed on his cousin’s car, he says.

“They had us all out of the car, spread-eagle. They searched the car and everything. I told him what happened. He said, ‘Well, you should have tried to stop sooner.’ I told him that I wasn’t familiar with the car. He was with this young Hispanic officer, and he told him, ‘I’m going to show you how to get some practice.’ Then he started cursing me out: ‘I could take your ass to jail right now.’ I started getting mad, then my friend said, ‘If he’s going to jail, then I’m going to jail.’ He said he did that because he could see that the cop had a throwaway gun in his waistband. He figured they’d just go around the corner somewhere, shoot me and then plant a gun on me.”

It wasn’t just this war of nerves with police that strained life in South Los Angeles. It was the violence that imprisoned you and the high prices that impoverished you. By 1991, Nettie Lewis had lived on East 89th Street in South-Central for 22 years. While the complexion of the neighborhood had changed--the whites were long gone, and most of the neighbors were Latino--the poverty endured and some of the maltreatment stayed the same.

Her daughter said she purchased a large bag of potato chips at an Inglewood market for 79 cents, and found the same size-bag cost her $1.79 at a market in Watts. If you didn’t have a car, and many residents did not, you paid the going price.

“I’m in Watts. I know what’s going on,” Elijah Johnson, Lewis’ next-door neighbor, would say. “People are out of work. People don’t have money to take care of their families.”

Johnson’s wife, Beatrice, said many blacks resented the way they were treated in local stores, where owners--especially Koreans--followed them down the aisles, apparently worried that they were shoplifters. “It was insulting. They were treating us with no respect, like we were thieves,” she said.

Lewis was hopeful that the bitterness exacerbated by the Harlins shooting would not last.

“I don’t have no qualms about no nationality--none,” she said. “If you’re nice to me, I’m nice to you. I don’t have no hang-ups about races. I don’t believe that’s the way we’re supposed to live. Your skin might be different from mine but that don’t make you any better than me, and as soon as people realize that, the better off they’ll be. . . . All of us are here in a society, and we got to try to make it in this society.”

Nine days after Brendan Sheen got 30 days for beating his dog, Los Angeles police officers fatally shot a 28-year-old black man, Henry Peco, in the Imperial Courts housing project in Watts. They said he had ambushed them while they investigated a power outage. The shooting prompted a confrontation with more than 100 residents.

In December, the Los Angeles County grand jury refused to bring criminal charges against sheriff’s deputies in connection with the four fatal summertime shootings that had triggered allegations of abuse of lethal force.

Little of this was felt in the small apartment building on Florence Avenue where Leticia and Anna lived. Politics was not their concern. Indeed, for many Latino immigrants in South Los Angeles, the Rodney King affair stirred none of the passions it had inflamed in their black neighbors.

As the new year came and the trial of the officers accused in the King case began, Leticia and Anna went about their business, unaware they were about to be drawn into insurrection. A few days before the riot, Anna was preparing to send $700 in savings back home to her family. “They depend on us,” she would explain. “We have to send what little we can. Even if it means we have to sacrifice.”

Many residents of the building bought their money orders at William Hong’s liquor store next door.

Everyone seemed to get along pretty well with Hong. The Latinos called him “Chino,” a generic term in Spanish-speaking Los Angeles for anyone who is Asian. Chino is a good guy, he gives you credit, they would say. He kept the running tabs on thin strips of paper tacked to the wall behind his cash register. You need some milk for the baby? You don’t have any money? No problem--Chino will let you have it. He even spoke a little Spanish, saying gracias to his customers.

Trucking company owner Richard Breen was equally unconcerned about the Rodney King trial. Didn’t read about it, didn’t care. If there was any mounting tension in the South Los Angeles community surrounding his Daylight Transport last month, Breen didn’t notice as he sped through the narrow streets, headed for the freeway and his home, a world away in the Hollywood Hills. Breen was isolated by wealth. He had become immune.

On the afternoon the Simi Valley jury announced its verdicts, Breen was playing tennis. By the time he got back to his Laurel Canyon home at 10 p.m., his answering machine was filled with messages from frantic employees.

“Get back here,” they said. “There’s a riot going on!”

The Mean Streets of Los Angeles

In 1991, Los Angeles found itself torn between high crime and serious doubts about the tactics of its police force. The Christopher Commission, formed to investigate the LAPD in the wake of the Rodney King beating, found the ethnically diverse city increasingly alienated from the police. Steady Rise in Crime

City’s total number of murders, aggravated rapes, attempted rapes, robberies, aggravated assaults, burglaries, larcenies and motor vehicle thefts

Source: FBI Crime Index

Inquiry Cites Racism, Excess Force

Headed by former Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher, the Christopher Commission opened a window on the working life of Los Angeles police. Among the Findings

A problem group of officers who use excessive force and racially motivated violence exist within the department and apparently are tolerated by supervisors.

The system of disciplining officers has suffered a debilitating breakdown.

An unwritten “code of silence” among officers acts as a barrier to citizen complaints. Among the Recommendations

Revamp the Police Department’s citizens’ complaint system and create offices of inspector general, ombudsman and community relations liaison.

Overhaul the Police Commission, giving it a larger staff and new powers to oversee and terminate the police chief.

Limit the police chief to two five-year terms and require that the appointment be made by the mayor.

Shift to more “community-oriented” policing with an emphasis on restraint and prevention rather than physical force.

Require psychological screening of officers, both when they are hired and periodically throughout their service.

Set up cultural awareness courses for officers.

Source: Christopher Commssion report