UNDERSTANDING THE RIOTS PART 5 : THE PATH TO RECOVERY : JUSTICE : To Restore Hope to Lost Generation, Talk to the Gangs

A paradox: The smoke clears but it becomes harder to see the actual city. Has the rebuilding begun, or are we in the throes of a counterrevolution? To take the first steps forward, we need to know which images we should heed: the reassuring tableaux on our TVs or the nasty scenes in the streets? The first scenario is almost too good to be true--like an old-fashioned movie--while the second may be too true to bode any good.

Scenario 1: A great metropolis, rushing to its appointment with the future, is waylaid by anger, sacked and half destroyed. But in the rubble, an old neighborly spirit, like that of the pioneers, is reborn. The haves show kindness to the have-nots. Millionaires emerge from tax shelters to teach welfare mothers to be entrepreneurs. Banks become partners with communities they have redlined. The mayor and police chief finally speak. In a stirring finale, Edward James Olmos, Peter V. Ueberroth and Rodney G. King, brooms in hand, lead the entire city forward, to redeem its multicultural promise. (On the soundtrack, George Bush croons, “You will eat, by and by, in that glorious enterprise zone in the sky.”)

Scenario 2: Three hundred demonstrators--an ethnic rainbow of high-school and college kids--are trying to hold a peaceful protest downtown. Riot-helmeted police push them back, block-by-block, from the edge of the Civic Center into the Broadway shopping district. Each time the protesters attempt to regroup, the police declare an unlawful assembly and arrest a segment. The final 20 demonstrators make a last stand on the corner of Third and Broadway. A flying column of 150 riot police, imported from various cow towns, encircle them. Spectators, as well as Justice Department legal observers, are incredulous at the police power deployed against a few kids. An older Latino man, who was wounded at Guadalcanal, sobs and shakes his fist.

For the last 10 days, we have had to live with these two contradictory accounts of what has been happening in Los Angeles. Scenario 1, which corresponds to the smog bank of sanctimonious rhetoric obscuring our view, depicts us all as one big happy cleanup crew. Scenario 2 reminds us that we live in a city where selective suspension of civil liberties has become routine. Far from being brought back together as a community, we are only being pried farther apart.

Eighteen-thousand people, five times the 1965 number, have been arrested in connection with the riots. They are the “weeds” Bush says we must pull from the soil of our cities before it can be sowed with the “seeds” of enterprise zones and tax breaks. But they are also our neighbors and fellow citizens. Some are street people, picked up for curfew violation, or mothers arrested for looting food for their children. Many are pathetic scavengers, caught as they poked through burnt debris. Others are bona fide Crips and Bloods, arrested while attempting to negotiate an end to the city’s gang war.

“Hypocrisy,” as a native son pointed out during the anti-labor hysteria that followed the bombing of The Times in 1910, “spreads like a vast fungus over the surface of L.A.” Today’s mass arrests seem driven forward as much by our leaders’ wide-ranging ambitions as by any consideration of public safety. District Atty. Ira Reiner and City Atty. James K. Hahn, both openly coveting Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren’s desk in Sacramento, vie to be hailed in the suburbs as king of the riot busters. Daryl F. Gates and his feuding commanders sandbag what remains of their fierce reputations with arrest numbers that could rival Gen. William C. Westmoreland’s shifting body counts in Vietnam. Finally, Bush leaves no doubt that Los Angeles is just a campaign stop on the road to reelection.

If repression, fueled by political spoils-mongering, continues at its current rate, it may become as costly--at least in damage to the city’s human and moral fabric--as the riot itself. The Draconian punishments being sought by Reiner and Hahn--with the encouragement of the Bush Administration--are punitive in the most biased sense of class justice. They are intended to re-instill respect for the police baton, not for any “rule of law.”

Yet most of our political and business leaders have suddenly given lip service to portentous ideas like “the war between the haves and the have-nots.” If they are serious, then surely they must recognize what Los Angeles most desperately needs is not a Pyrrhic “victory” over rioters, but a truce between hostile ethnic and economic strata that can become a framework for negotiating a new social contract to replace the faded vision of the Bradley years. Here are some peace proposals:

First, city and county authorities should call off the dogs of war and abandon their vindictive prosecution of petty offenders. Those indicted for crimes against property (not involving injury to other people) should be allowed to volunteer for public service in their own communities. Upon completion, any record of their arrest should be destroyed.

Second, exercise of First Amendment and other constitutional rights should be restored in the city. The Webster Commission will undoubtedly investigate the L.A. Police Department’s misconduct in this tragedy. It must not be allowed to focus exclusively on the shortcomings of the department’s riot planning and implementation, but must include testimony on the many alleged instances of unlawful conduct. Specifically, we need to know under whose authority police suppressed peaceful demonstrations and, in violation of city ordinance, cooperated with the Border Patrol in deporting hundreds of undocumented residents. Equally, every single death attributed to the riot needs to be accounted for in public hearings.

The third proposal is the most difficult but important. We must abandon the LAPD’s unwinnable “war on gangs” and offer gang youth a legitimate podium to explain their proposals for social reconstruction. Like the 1965 Watts riot, this conflict has united warring gangs around a vision of black power and community self-determination. Many young Crips and Bloods have suspended hostilities to explore the possibilities of joining in a “black thing.”

Some are circulating a program (“Give Us the Hammer and the Nails, We Will Rebuild the City”) that makes more sense than anything Bill Clinton or Bush have proposed. The Crips and Bloods offer to eliminate crack dealing and gang warfare in Los Angeles in exchange for $3.7 billion worth of new social investment in the inner city. In their eyes, the fiscal equivalent of a few Stealth bombers is not a lot to spend in return for liberating neighborhoods from their greatest scourges and returning hope to a lost generation.

These kids don’t have a lot of patience. They are in a hurry and want to talk now. They have taken great risks getting this far, and they expect us to take a few risks in return. If we do, they may prove to be the angels the city was named after. If we don’t, they may be our gravediggers.