Racial Paranoia Infected Media After Staples Melee

Wait. Don’t turn the page yet. I know you’re sick of hearing about the glorified Lakers and the lumpen revelers who celebrated a basketball championship by trying to get police cars to bounce.

Cynics said last week’s burning and looting were too small potatoes to qualify as a riot. I won’t argue that. Or bore you with more talk about why some sports fans love to smash things and start fires.

I’m more concerned about the quiet riot that rippled through the media--and the minds of many Americans--in the wake of the rowdiness outside Staples Center.

Call it the race riot of the right-wing commentators.

From local talk radio to national television, conservative pundits pounded on police for supposedly showing excessive restraint in quelling the disturbance. The cops are skittish about cracking down on blacks and Latinos, their theory goes, for fear of lawsuits and bad publicity.

To some pundits, these weren’t just troublemakers. They were troublemakers with dark skins. The scariest kind.

Now I ask you, who does more harm to our society? A mob of morons who can’t control their own aggressive impulses? Or the influential analysts who calmly persuade millions of Americans that their most paranoid racial fears are coming true? That blacks and Latinos run wild in our cities and police are too afraid to stop them!

Sound hysterical? Sure, but that was the tenor of the talk show hosted by Dennis Prager on the morning after the L.A. melee. In case you missed the show--or couldn’t believe your ears--the preachy pundit reasserted his race-based theory in an opinion piece published June 21 by The Times.

There it was in black and white: Prager claiming that police fear enforcing the laws against minorities. That’s why, he argued, officers in New York did nothing to help those women assaulted by packs of barbarians in Central Park during the unruly aftermath of this year’s Puerto Rican Day Parade.

Wrote Prager: “Unless . . . directly threatened, police officers know it would be best not to be seen confronting blacks or Latinos.”

As if on cue, a similar theory was espoused by Jack Burkman, a stuffed-shirt Republican strategist, during his June 20 appearance on Bill Maher’s “Politically Incorrect.” Burkman blamed leaders like Jesse Jackson who “created this culture of fear” that cripples police.

Never mind that many rioting sports fans in Tucson three years ago were white. That mob also was shown on TV last week during a news magazine that explored the crazed fan phenomenon without a racial lens. The blond, blue-eyed hooligans overturned cars and danced around bonfires, acting just like those menacing minorities.

Tucson police also were criticized for going too easy on rioters following a championship by the University of Arizona. I guess cops must be terrified of rambunctious fraternity types too.

There’s no evidence to suggest that police have turned timid with minorities, experts say. In fact, the persistence of high-profile abuse cases shows cops still aren’t cautious enough. A 1998 study by Human Rights Watch found that police departments have been slow to weed out rogue cops “because the accountability systems are so seriously flawed.”

The fact is that minorities still are disproportionately harassed and arrested by police, says Christopher Slobogin, a University of Florida law professor who studies police practices. Abuse is so common, he said, that some people no longer bother to complain.

“If police did to whites what they do to minorities, you’d see suits up the wazoo,” Slobogin said. “They wouldn’t stand for it.”

I don’t think reason could reassure Stacy Polk, a TRW worker who last week fired off a snarling, racist message to La Voz de Aztlan, an online Whittier-based Chicano magazine. The administrative employee mistakenly used her company’s e-mail to dispatch her hateful message to the Web site.

“Citizens of this country are watching,” warns Polk. “Central Park in New York City, Staple [sic] Center in Los Angeles and we’re sick of the immature, violent behavior of the ‘newer’ citizens.”

A TRW spokesman later apologized for Polk’s “intolerant opinions.” In a letter also posted on the Web site, Daniel J. McClain of the firm’s Space & Electronics Group wrote: “Because of our long-standing commitment to Latino employees and the Latino community, it is particularly disheartening that this individual’s misuse of company property in such an inappropriate manner reflects unfavorably on TRW.”

Fine. Now who’s going to apologize for the paid pundits?

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Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com.