A Couple of Days in Compton

Life is so sweet and full of friendliness in Compton these days that a guy has to work hard to start a fight.

In L.A. it’s easy, because all of our post-riot, pulling-together euphoria has vanished like smoke in the wind, and raising hell is about the best thing we do. Not so in Compton.

They’re still troubled by that videotaped beating of a Latino kid by a black cop and making every effort to be kind to everyone, just to show they’re not as full of tension as the tape might indicate.

I noticed it first at a gas station along Rosecrans Avenue when I got into an argument with an attendant over a pump I didn’t think was working right.

He let me holler and stamp my feet for a while, then left his little booth, walked to the pump and showed me where I hadn’t lifted a lever to activate the thing. He even pumped the gasoline for me.

All the time he called me sir and never raised his voice and said he was sorry there had been confusion. My own kids aren’t that polite.

I got the same kind of response from people I badgered to answer questions about the mood in the city, and from those I stopped on the street to ask dumb directions, just to test their patience.

No one told me to shove off, or words to that effect, and no one took the opportunity to beat me and steal my wallet. “We’re all too busy reaching out,” a Catholic priest told me later, and he didn’t mean reaching out to punch someone.

*

Not that Compton is a little hunk o’ Paradise. Two cops were shot to death last year during a routine traffic stop, an ex-mayor has been indicted on charges of taking bribes and 17-year-old Felipe Soltero is still smarting after a beating at the hands of Officer Michael Jackson.

The latest incident is particularly unsettling because it was videotaped by a neighbor and clearly shows Jackson laying into a defenseless, much-smaller Soltero. The tape revived memories of the beating of Rodney G. King by four L.A. policemen three years ago, and the chaos that followed. The memory rests heavily on our conscience.

Beatings like that strike at a community’s soul. You look to police officers for help and patience and maybe a little good judgment, not for the kind of force a guy would use against a marauding grizzly.

It doesn’t really matter what Soltero did before the tape was running. Unless he had a shotgun to Jackson’s head, the beating was excessive. “You don’t treat a kid that way,” a neighbor said, and he’s right.

I heard that sentiment repeated several times in different ways, which manifests the very level of concern that’s responsible for an attitude of healing when trouble comes to town.

A police spokesman, Capt. Steve Roller, pointed out, and rightly so, that there are enough investigations going on to choke a bureaucrat and any blame in the beating incident ought to be left up to them.

But then he went on to say that the media stirred the whole thing out of proportion, and there wouldn’t have been all that fuss if they had just stayed the hell out of it. What’s a little beating between a cop and a kid anyhow?

*

That priest I was talking about calls the assault flat-out police brutality, but insists it wasn’t racially motivated. Presumably, he meant that Jackson would have beaten Soltero no matter what race or color he was.

But, still, the Rev. Clif Marquis--Father Clif to everyone--has organized a rally for tomorrow in the Courthouse Plaza that will emphasize the city’s unity in the wake of divisions crystallized by the beating.

He called Compton a city of neighborhoods where all kinds of people live together in peace, and the image of a police baton held over a teen-ager lying on the ground shouldn’t be its eternal logo.

“We’re working hard so the situation won’t turn ugly,” Father Clif said. “We don’t want to end up burying our children.”

I spent two days wandering through Compton and found a town so serene it was damned near asleep. Summer days were made for just such a place. Women walked their babies on tree-shaded streets and men washed their cars in the driveways of well-kept homes.

They mowed their lawns, shopped for groceries, went to lunch, bought clothes, paid their bills, filled their gas tanks, picnicked in a park and stopped for a cold beer in a quiet bar.

I sensed the “reaching out” Father Clif was talking about, and the kindness that came of it, and tested it one last time. As I left Compton, I honked madly at a guy crossing the street against the light. He stopped in the middle of the street, turned and very deliberately gave me the finger. But even then he was smiling.