debbie m. price

Riots mirror ugliness of verdict

LOS ANGELES — If you want to see hell on Earth, look at south central Los Angeles. Burning, smoking south central Los Angeles, ripped open and smashed, just like the mom-and-pop stores along its boulevards.

One day after the not-guilty verdicts in the trial of four white police officers videotaped beating black motorist Rodney King there are more fires, more lootings, more widespread violence than during the Watts riots of 1965. That is what the people say who lived through the rage then and are watching it now.

It is worse, they say, much, much worse, and for many reasons.

The air over Los Angeles is dark with smoke. The new blazes for a time were starting at the rate of three a minute. More than 2,000 in less than 24 hours.

So many dead the first day, hundreds more injured, who knows how many arrested.

All around are the sounds of sirens and breaking glass.

Stores are emptied, cars are charred, motorists have been pulled out of their vehicles and beaten. Basketball and baseball games, plays, concerts, trash collection, mail, bus service — all the niceties of civilization — are canceled.

This is what happens when the most fundamental principles governing our society break down. When justice fails. When the few are raised above the law. When the many are disenfranchised.

You look and all around people are taking what they can get because, they say, the system will not give them what is theirs.

A woman, three tiny children in tow, walks through the mash of broken glass, scattered soap powder and crushed cans in front of Ralph's supermarket to scavenge Pampers and a bar of Zest soap. A man steals the American flag from a pole at McDonald's.

Another man wheels a basket full of wine out of the supermarket.

"I normally don't do this, but they let the cops off and I'm doing it because I'm just mad," he said, sheepish even in his anger.

"These people — me included — can't think of it another way."

This is not to excuse the rioting.

There is no excusing it. It is thuggery and it most hurts the blacks and Hispanics and Asian-Americans who live and work in Crenshaw, Vernon Square, along Wilshire Boulevard.

That is self-evident.

But then, there is no excusing the verdicts either.

You can talk all day about the sanctity of the jury system, but in this case it failed. And what you have now are the verdict and the rioting twinned in mirror images of ugliness.

What this jury verdict says is that it is legal for four men to pummel, kick, beat and curse another man while he is writhing on the ground.

It is legal if the men are wearing the police uniform.

It is legal, at least in Los Angeles. That is what this verdict says. And that is the scariest thing of all, whatever your race.

You can try to rationalize this and deny what your eyes tell you.

Fifty-six blows in 81 seconds is a "controlled action?" Not on your life.

You can debate the "reasonable-man standard" — would a reasonable man in the same situation react the same way?

You can even look — as the defense attorneys assured that the jury did — through the eyes of the police.

And you see all those armed police officers and that lone man and you know that there was nothing reasonable about the number of blows struck that night.

You can listen to the attorney for one police officer describing the melee in terms befitting a sports event and try to forget that what we are talking about here is breaking bones, inflicting pain.

You can try to excuse the jury by talking about the fear of crime, the 25,000 people slain last year, the difficulties facing the good cops, the law and order mindset of a Simi Valley, Calif.

But you cannot ignore the implications of this jury's actions.

If the police are not constrained by the law, who is?

Try answering that question for a 15-year-old African-American kid on Crenshaw Boulevard.

"They beat the brother," he said, "so now the brothers are beating them."

Violence begets violence.

And yes, there is racism.

Four white defendants, an African-American man beaten, a jury without a single African-American. Defense attorneys who reduced that black man to a Willie Horton caricature, an animal, a beast. It was a pure case of us against them.

Racism begets racism.

Many of the stores and businesses burning are owned by Asian-Americans. This is no accident.

There is tremendous resentment of the Asian-Americans, grown stronger still since a judge gave probation to a Korean-American shopkeeper convicted of voluntary manslaughter for killing Latasha Harlins, an unarmed 15-year-old girl.

"It started with Latasha," a 23-year-old man said. "They said a black life don't matter. When they keep telling you that, what's the point?"

There is no point.

Certainly there is no point to the rioting. It grows more violent and senseless by the hour.

And there is no point making excuses for this jury's verdict.

Injustice begets injustice.

Debbie M. Price is a Star-Telegram columnist.

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