Will the Fuhrman Tapes Unleash Simmering Tensions?

If the taped beating of Rodney G. King is the picture of the Los Angeles Police Department’s bad side, the Fuhrman tapes are the soundtrack.

Retired Detective Mark Fuhrman’s memories--at least the leaked portions--help explain the brutality of the assault on the African American motorist after a high-speed chase. Although Fuhrman had nothing to do with the King affair, the veteran police officer’s purported racist views, no doubt shared by a small, single-minded minority of L.A. cops, provide a motive for the savagery of what happened to King.

The widely watched beating, followed by the acquittal in Superior Court of the accused officers in the first of two trials, touched off the 1992 riots, causing deaths, injuries and widespread property damage.

The explosion had been building for a long time, fueled by widespread unemployment and deep resentment of rough police crime-fighting tactics among blacks and Latinos. The acquittal was just the spark.

Now more tapes, this time audio, part of another trial, this one for murder. Again, race is involved. The defendant, O.J. Simpson, is famous, rich and black; the victims were white. Simpson’s chief attorney, Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., has woven the race theme into a well-financed, highly publicized defense that constantly reminds the public and the predominantly black jury of the LAPD’s long history of abuse toward minorities.

When Cochran played the race card, people were angered and appalled. Still, the trial has reached deeply into the psyche of poor black and Latino communities where jobs are scarce and racial tensions have been exacerbated since 1992 by the Proposition 187 debate over immigration and the developing affirmative action battle.

Could the emotions of the Simpson trial and the Fuhrman tapes spark another explosion?

A reader asked me that a few weeks ago when I was speaking to the Ventura County World Affairs Council.

No, I said.

The reader disagreed. He thought there would be a riot if Simpson was found guilty.

Last week, after the tapes began leaking, I took another look. What I learned was that the situation is complicated. If you are a bottom-liner, demanding a quick answer, stop reading now.

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The trial has whipped up intense emotions. “It is so emotionally laden and opinions are so hard, I have had few intelligent discussions with people who are open,” said Joe Hicks, an African American community leader who heads the Multicultural Collaborative, a privately financed organization that works to ease tensions among the black, Latino and Asian communities.

Yet, interestingly, in the discussions I’ve had, Simpson himself does not emerge as a racial martyr. He isn’t viewed as Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro Boys, the Rosenbergs, Muhammad Ali or other famous figures considered targets of racial or political persecution.

Dr. James A. Mays, an African American physician and author of a book, “Justice on Trial: O.J. Simpson,” made this point when I asked what would have happened if Simpson had been a rich white man accused of the same murders and had the same evidence against him.

“This is one time when being black is to your advantage,” Mays replied. “It is Fuhrman’s racism that may release a black man.”

“He [Simpson] is the most undeserving black man to be freed by racism because he did not exist in the same kind of world the traditional black man must endure. If he’s the murderer, he’s the luckiest murderer in the world. His attorney took advantage of [Fuhrman’s] racism and reverse racism by the African American community”--hatred of a white-dominated criminal justice system.

“He’s lucky he’s black,” said Celes King III, a longtime African American community leader who is state chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality.

The emotion connected with this case, and with the Fuhrman tapes, comes from forces outside the courtroom rather than from the defendant.

I saw this when I visited an African American woman, Brenda Sykes, and two Latinas, Trina Soto-Soria and Heidi Berumen, at the Guadalupe Earthquake Recovery Community Service Center in Canoga Park, where they are staff members. The head of the center, Cliff McClain, thought it would be helpful for me to talk to the women.

“Police set up people,” said Soto-Soria. “I know all police are not bad. I know there are good police. But I know police cover up.”

“A lot of my family is very outraged,” said Sykes. “The young people are saying, ‘They’ve been doing it all the time.’ ”

Berumen didn’t agree. She had bad experiences with the cops while growing up in El Sereno, a Latino neighborhood of Los Angeles. But a lot of the friends of her youth became cops, she said, and do a good job. She wants to hear all the tapes before she makes a judgment.

I could only talk to them for a while. But a few days before, the three of them had stayed way past quitting time, arguing about the tapes, the police and the Simpson case. I could tell from their expressions that it had been a heated argument.

I got the same intensity talking to activists.

It’s a political trial, said African American writer Earl Ofari Hutchinson, author of a forthcoming book, “Beyond O.J.: Race, Sex and Class.” “Their [the police and district attorney] message is: ‘We can win even against a big man. The African Americans must understand that no matter how much money, how much influence, you can’t get away with committing crimes.’ ”

A Latino attorney, Antonio Rodriguez, said the Fuhrman tapes “have deepened the belief in longstanding police abuses. . . . If someone does a history 50 years from now, they will say here [the tapes] was a tacit admission of the presence of fascism in the Los Angeles Police Department, and it has been ignored by public officials.”

Arturo Ybarra, who heads the Watts Century Latino Organization, a community activist group in South-Central Los Angeles, said, “Everyone is aware of [the tapes]. . . . It causes distrust.”

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What will be the impact in the black and Latino communities?

I go along with the Multicultural Collaborative’s Hicks, who said, “It is insulting to say that if O.J. is convicted, African Americans will riot.” I agree with Celes King III, who said: “I don’t think there will be a major disruption in the black community. He is not identified with the black community. He comes over to the black community to get his hair cut.”

But L.A. also has to heed the warning of Watts’ Ybarra, who worries more about economic, social and health conditions than the fate of O.J. Simpson.

“Conditions are worse than in 1992,” he said. The jobs in stores, swap meets and restaurants that were lost in the riots have never come back. The business recession reduced janitorial and serving jobs in hotels, office buildings and restaurants. Competition for jobs is driving the bad pay in the garment industry even lower. The county budget crisis is shutting down the health clinics that provide care for the poorest parts of South and East L.A.

“The situation is volatile,” Ybarra said.