UNDERSTANDING THE RIOTS / PART 3 : WITNESS TO RAGE : IN CHARGE : ‘The people who saved us were the Highway Patrol.’

Flying over the riot area in a Fire Department helicopter I thought back to almost 40 years ago when I visited that area. My first paying job was as a census taker in South Central L.A. and in Watts in 1964, the summer before the Watts riot. For 3 months I went into every home and apartment building asking very personal questions. I walked all around by myself from noon to 8 at night, and during the mornings I was an assistant teacher of third-grade kids in one of the schools in Watts. That’s something I couldn’t do now, my daughter couldn’t do it. The crime rate is so high, drugs are everywhere, our society has completely deteriorated. We have abandoned our central city for most of the last two decades.

During the riots I wanted to get more involved, so I volunteered as a Spanish translator for the Red Cross working in a shelter at Dorsey High School, next to the AME Church. There were 100 people there who had lost everything. They had literally the clothes on their backs. Some of them didn’t even have those because their clothes were so badly damaged when they tried to escape from their burning buildings. And I remember particularly this one Spanish-speaking family where the father had died a month before and there were five kids--four boys, the oldest was 9, and a baby who was 9 days old, and the 9-year-old was literally functioning as the head of the family.

The mother was in shock and extremely depressed and this kid was taking care of all his siblings including the baby. The kids had a hard time sleeping and he would cuddle with them and comfort them until all were asleep. During the daytime he took charge of them too and I thought to myself, this kid is just amazing. He spoke English fluently, he was very bright and then I wondered what is he going to be like when he is 18? If he continues to live in our city the way it is today, what is he going to be like, what is he going to be able to teach his siblings when he’s 18 years old?

The television media has come under a lot of criticism that they encouraged the riot. In some ways their coverage helped the Fire Department know where the major crises were occurring because our lines were so overloaded and a lot of the fires weren’t called in. A lot of the fires we saw on television we responded to.

The breakdown of the police function impacted the Fire Department because we had to have escorts to perform our job and those escorts were not provided until much too late. Very frankly, the people who saved us were the Highway Patrol. They worked out of our fire stations, escorted our fire trucks; they did a phenomenal job in terms of protecting us. And there’s tremendous gratitude toward them. When they left the fire stations everybody was hugging each other and there was a real camaraderie between the firefighters and the CHP.

The breakdown of the system affected all of us. I think it made all of us feel like our society could totally break down. That if these problems aren’t addressed more forcefully, you could have a riot in the city which could literally destroy the city.