Riot Revisionism
One of the overarching themes running through media coverage of the 20th anniversary of the Rodney King riots has been the transformation of the Los Angeles Police Department, with said theme being summed up thus: The cops were bad guys then, but are good (or better) guys now.
The constant regurgitation of this theme reflects an ignorance of conditions in Los Angeles as they existed in the years leading up to the riots, and as one who has served with the LAPD for somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty years, I find it more than a bit tiresome.
Reason.com’s Tim Cavenaugh, in an otherwise commendable piece on conditions then and now in South Central Los Angeles (yes, Mr. Cavenaugh, people still call it “South Central,” despite what people at City Hall might wish), can’t resist a backhanded slap at the LAPD. “It would be more accurate to say,” he writes, “the trouble of 1992 came from a mixture of extremely volatile identity politics and a police force more focused on terrorizing the citizens than on solving crimes.”
To the extent the citizens in South Central L.A. were terrorized in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, it wasn’t by the police but rather by the gangsters who besieged the area’s decent people and made them fearful of leaving their homes, and sometimes of staying in them. South Central L.A. is patrolled by officers from four police stations: Southwest, 77th Street, Southeast, and Newton Divisions. I worked at all four of them through the 80's and into the 90's, and I recall that it was fairly routine to field five or six two-officer units on P.M. Watch at each division, with perhaps two additional units on Mid-P.M. Watch. In other words, on a typical night in the entirety of South Central L.A. there were but 50 to 70 police officers on duty during the busiest hours of the day. And this was at a time when all four of those divisions were handling a hundred murders or more – sometimes a lot more – each year. The crack cocaine epidemic and the gang activity it spawned was simply beyond any hope of control for the paltry allotment of officers the city saw fit to assign there.
But we did our best, working overtime most nights and spending most of our days at the Criminal Courts Building or the Compton courthouse, all in the effort to help the decent people we encountered every day. To ridicule those efforts, to ridicule those of us who worked in the most troubled of neighborhoods in the most troubled of times by saying we were “more focused on terrorizing the citizens than on solving crimes” is as insulting as it is erroneous.
But insults and errors are even harder to bear when they are accompanied by sanctimony, such as can be found in this piece, by Los Angeles Times editor Jim Newton. “The Los Angeles riots represented the culmination of many failures,” he writes, “the failure to provide hope for young people; the failure to supply education and jobs in the numbers that would stabilize communities; the failure to engage those communities in their own protection instead of relying on harsh and coercive law enforcement.”
Putting aside the pap about providing hope for young people and the rest of Newton’s utopian laundry list, one could argue that in a city where more than a thousand people were murdered and more than 45,000 assaulted, as was the case in both 1991 and 1992, the police were neither harsh nor coercive enough.
And note that Mr. Newton, in assigning blame for the riots on the LAPD, offers not a word of judgment on those who took to the streets and pulled innocent people from the cars before beating them nearly to death. No, that we have to understand.
But one expects as much from the Los Angeles Times, so there’s no disappointment in reading such a piece. The real disappointment comes in seeing that people who should know better have bought into the lie that the LAPD of twenty years ago was a festering nest of racists. In an article at the Neon Tommy website, LAPD Commander Andy Smith told an interviewer about the demands he faced as a young officer at Newton Division. “Pretty soon,” he said, “everybody in the community looks like a bad guy and heck, most people down here, even though they aren’t wealthy, are law-abiding, hardworking citizens that just want the same thing for their families as you and I want for our family: Live in peace, be able to have a job and work, take care of your family. We didn’t recognize that for a while.”
Commander Smith is a good man, and among his peers in the LAPD's upper ranks, one of the best, but if he truly believes that today, and if he acted that way as a young cop, I fear I've overestimated him. Every cop I worked with twenty years ago recognized very well that even in the most crime-ridden neighborhoods, most of the residents were decent and law-abiding. If he assumed otherwise, more’s the pity, but that’s on him.
While I was disappointed to hear Commander Smith demeaning his former colleagues, I can’t say I was surprised to see LAPD Chief Charlie Beck join the self-flagellating in Monday’s Los Angeles Times. Chief Beck tips his hand in the piece’s fourth paragraph, when he euphemizes the riots as “civil unrest,” and later when he opts for the benign term “uprising,” as though the riots were something more than criminal behavior on a massive scale. He closes the piece with a wish for his family members who serve as police officers:
My two children and my son-in-law are all LAPD officers. Like any parent, I want their future to be safe, secure and happy. But I also want to leave them with a legacy: I want them to belong to a Police Department that is a force for positive change, and one that brings communities together instead of tearing its city apart.
So it was the LAPD that tore the city apart, not the people who committed all those murders and assaults. This is politically correct revisionism at its worst. Sure, crime was bad because the cops were mean. How utterly false, how utterly nauseating.
- Comment (15)
- · Quote
- · UnfollowFollow (1)
Comments:
Jul '11
Re: Riot Revisionism
Although nowhere near as close as you, I share your disgust at the demeaning of all the good honest officers who put themselves through hell in those days . I am also incredulous as to why people just let rioters off with a shrug. The whole lot of them are no better than a zombie horde.
Dec '11
Re: Riot Revisionism
Thank you for your service. I don't think most people can imagine how police are put in "no win situations". Police can only do so much. My guess is the decision was made to allow minor crimes to have a pass. (I am not being critical as trying to state the facts.) These petty crimes hurt the fabric of the community and are the breeding ground for bigger crimes.
From your experience, what "petty" unenforced crimes lead to a destruction of a community? If my premise is wrong please correct me.
Thanks
Dec '10
Re: Riot Revisionism
Jack Dunphy:
Reason.com’s Tim Cavenaugh, in an otherwise commendable piece on conditions then and now in South Central Los Angeles (yes, Mr. Cavenaugh, people still call it “South Central,” despite what people at City Hall might wish), can’t resist a backhanded slap at the LAPD. “It would be more accurate to say,” he writes, “the trouble of 1992 came from a mixture of extremely volatile identity politics and a police force more focused on terrorizing the citizens than on solving crimes.
Statements like these are why I don't give much stock to libertarians when they talk about the police--or foreign policy for that matter.
Reason can be right on some issues and just completely wrong on others. They and those like them have a tendency to misplace blame and confuse the victims with the criminals.
Thank you for your service.
Jun '10
Re: Riot Revisionism
If liberals want to solve the "root causes" of crime, they need only look in the mirror. Honest labor and commensurate reward give people a vested interest in their own lives. The welfare state bestows on people a livelihood without reciprocal obligations to good citizenship. The result is social pathology: dependence, broken families, and crime. Then the left has the audacity to blame the cops for their own policy failures!
There is no substitute for civic virtue. It's up to the citizenry to support the government and not the other way around. We expect to pay reasonable taxes in exchange for a government guarantee to life, liberty, and property. A vested interest in our own lives and communities ensures a law-abiding populace. Community standards are better at maintaining law and order than all the coercive powers of the state.
South-central LA will continue to fester until the city and state are bankrupt. Then it will burn. And deluded leftists will blame the cops for a crisis of their own manufacture. You have a thankless job, Mr. Dunphy. Best of luck.
Aug '10
Re: Riot Revisionism
It's not like there were gang members exacerbating and escalating the violence during the riots. Never mind that defendants in the Reginald Denny beating got off relatively scott free.
LAPD is tremendously understaffed today and was even more so in the 80s and early 90s. While I applaud their efforts at community policing and engaging with the public since the riots, I don't know that those strategies would have been possible during the crack wars. The crack epidemic occurred so rapidly, as did the spike in violence, that I don't think they could have trained enough police fast enough to keep up.
My entire life, I have never had a bad experience with a police officer. I've had many good ones. Including in South Central Los Angeles. One time when I was returning home from grad school, I lived in Crenshaw at the time, cops were in a foot chase in the parking area behind my apartment. When they asked me who I was and where I was going, all I could hear in there voices were stress and concern for my safety.
I am grateful everyday to the hardworking officers who serve and protect.
May '10
Re: Riot Revisionism
Jack, I agree with you about LAPD being understaffed and overworked. While my husband was "slaving away" in a lush OC PD in the late 80's and 90's, we observed the beleaguered attitude of many LAPD officers who would request transfers to that department. For such a large institution, why on earth is the retirement system so much more inferior that many other cities? Why is the pay generally lower? I've always wondered over the years if the LA area would be better served if it were to break up into smaller communities and thus each community would be responsible for their own law enforcement.
Aug '10
Re: Riot Revisionism
Mr. Dunphy, thank you very much for giving your thoughts on this article.
Aug '10
Re: Riot Revisionism
Nathaniel Wright:
My entire life, I have never had a bad experience with a police officer. I've had many good ones.
Define "bad".
When I was a teenager, my mom had a Mustang convertible, which she would sometimes let me drive.
If I was out in the convertible with my friends, I would often get pulled over for a "routine check". The cop would run the license and registration to make sure that I was who I said I was and that the car wasn't stolen. He'd also remind me to be extra careful driving, considering that my friends generally behaved like a bunch of howler monkeys on Red Bull spiked with amphetamines.
At the time, I thought it was the worst human rights violation in the history of history itself. I wan't doing anything wrong! Why right does he have to pull me over?!
Today, I'm much more mellow about it.
Also, what about times when you're pulled over because you actually are guilty of speeding, or running a stop sign, or forgetting to renew your license plate (oops!). No matter how polite the cop is, it's a "bad" experience.
;-)
Aug '10
Re: Riot Revisionism
Aug '10
Re: Riot Revisionism
Michael Horn
Statements like these are why I don't give much stock to libertarians when they talk about the police--or foreign policy for that matter.
Murray Rothbard was a libertarian.
Michael Horn
Reason can be right on some issues and just completely wrong on others.
So, in other words, they're human beings.
Jul '10
Re: Riot Revisionism
"How utterly false, how utterly nauseating."
I see why you must write under a pseudonym. As in "1984," certain truths must never be uttered.
Aug '10
Re: Riot Revisionism
Mysthio,
The only time I have been pulled over and ticketed was when I was speeding on 395 while trying to outrun an erratic driver who was clearly -- to me -- driving under the influence. I was near Independence, but in an open stretch. I was speeding. I was doing so because a driver was passing me, driving in and out of lane integrity in a wavering manner, then slowing down behind me. I was scared.
The officer who pulled me over gave me a ticket, told me what I had to do to get the ticket cleared (driving school online), and asked for a description of the other vehicle.
Not a pleasant experience in that it gave me a ticket, but it wasn't a bad one either.
Bad would be if the officer had berated me when I explained my speeding and then proceeded to arrest me or something. Bad would be an officer abusing, not merely exercising, his/her authority.
Aug '10
Re: Riot Revisionism
Nathaniel Wright: Mysthio,
The only time I have been pulled over and ticketed was when I was speeding on 395 while trying to outrun an erratic driver who was clearly -- to me -- driving under the influence. I was near Independence, but in an open stretch. I was speeding. I was doing so because a driver was passing me, driving in and out of lane integrity in a wavering manner, then slowing down behind me. I was scared.
The officer who pulled me over gave me a ticket, told me what I had to do to get the ticket cleared (driving school online), and asked for a description of the other vehicle.
Not a pleasant experience in that it gave me a ticket, but it wasn't a bad one either.
Bad would be if the officer had berated me when I explained my speeding and then proceeded to arrest me or something. Bad would be an officer abusing, not merely exercising, his/her authority. · 5 minutes ago
If we agree with each other, why are we arguing?
;-)
Re: Riot Revisionism
Many thanks to all for the kind words expressed above.
May '10
Re: Riot Revisionism
Nathaniel Wright: Mysthio,
The only time I have been pulled over and ticketed was when I was speeding on 395 while trying to outrun an erratic driver who was clearly -- to me -- driving under the influence. I was near Independence, but in an open stretch. I was speeding. I was doing so because a driver was passing me, driving in and out of lane integrity in a wavering manner, then slowing down behind me. I was scared.
The officer who pulled me over gave me a ticket, told me what I had to do to get the ticket cleared (driving school online), and asked for a description of the other vehicle.
I had that same experience late one night driving home from work (which happened to be a police department). I was scared out of my gourd by what seemed like an aggressive driver tailgating me with his brights on. In my case, however, the driver who was terrifying me was the CHP officer. I realized who it was when the lights started flashing, and he punched the siren. Upon being stopped and explaining why I was speeding, he actually apologized for scaring me and sent me on my way.