Yaolee Chen

HIS 370 The Lost Paradise

Dr. Schofield

Downtown L.A.—A Place of Crime

Since World War II, after five decades of steadily increasing values, even nondescript tract houses were selling for fifteen to twenty-five times their original price, and homes were considered better investment than certificates of deposit or mutual funds. Despite air population and crowded freeways, Southern Californians were convinced they lived in on of the best places on earth. But was downtown L.A. a really paradise to live in? The answer is negative. The Korean Town in LA has a clear line between the Korean business owners and the poor unemployed blacks. Rodney King who was discriminated by the policemen was one of the many examples happened to the blacks who lived in LA.

With His blackened right eye swollen half-shut and his right leg in a cast, Rodney King was wheeled out of the Los Angeles County Jail on March 6, 1991, three days after he was beaten. Answering questions from reporters, King denied having led police on a high-speed freeway pursuit. “There was no chase,” he said. According to King, he had been pulled over because he “may have been speeding just a little bit,” may be driving 40 to 45 miles an hour. Then he was handcuffed and beaten.

People V. Powell existed because of the compelling evidence of a videotape that the world assumed had caught LAPD officers committing acts of irrefutable brutality. Without the Holiday video, the beating of Rodney King would at most have prompted an Internal Affairs inquiry in which investigators would have faced a tangle of contradictions and uncertainties. King had been too intoxicated at the time of the beating to remember with any clarity what had happened. The police officers had plausible explanations for their conduct. Civilian witnesses had seen only fragments of the incident, and their accounts conflicted.

Without a videotape, investigators would have known that a physically imposing African-American man had led police on a pursuit of nearly eight miles and behaved in a bizarre fashion after he finally stopped. They would have known that the man was shot by an electric stun gun and charged at an officer who hit him with a baton. They might have concluded from medical reports that they had been stuck numerous times, but they would not have know that he had been on the ground during many of the blows. Without a videotape, they would have been unable to determine whether the officers had behaved unreasonably. Without a videotape, the victim would have been just another black ex-convict who was injured by the police while supposedly resisting arrest, and no one except friends and family would today know the name of Rodney King.

LA was a place of multicultural. In the 1990 census, 40 percent of the city’s population was Latino, 37 percent Anglo (non-Hispanic white), 13 percent African American and 9 percent Asian. Among the black population “25% of prime-working-age young black males (age 18-35 are either in prison, in jail, or probation, or otherwise connected to the criminal-justice system”[1]. Less and less job opportunities were available for the Latinos, the illegal immigrants, the blacks, and the non-skilled labors. The downtown LA was crowed with poor and uneducated youth and the adults, particularly at the nights. When the LA public heard about Rodney King from the media, the residence were angry at the policemen, and were angry at the Korean business owners, and were angry at the decision mad by the Judge Karlin of the Superior Court.

The Chief of the Police Department Daryl Gates was driven north to Brentwood on the San Diego Freeway on April 29,1992. The eyes of the world were focused on the bloody intersection of Florence and Normandie, where in the wake of the LAPD’s withdrawal a gang-led mob took control and attacked anyone who was not African American. Because the police had failed to seal off this well-traveled route through South Central, targets were plentiful. Whites, Asians, and Latinos were hauled from vehicles and beaten or attacked on the streets. Most of the victims were poor, small, or frail. None had any connection with the LAPD or Rodney King.

These racially charged assaults were recorded by television cameras on news helicopters hovering over the intersection as horrified pilots added commentary. “And there’s no police presence down here!” an observer in one helicopter said at the height of the violence. “They will not enter the area. This is attempted murder: Tell LAPD to shut Florence Boulevard Down, and Normandie.”

Mayor Tom Bradley lifted the dusk-to-dawn curfew at 5:15 P.M. on Monday, May 4, officially ending the riots. Fifty-four people had lost their lives during five days of violence, the highest toll in an American civil disturbance since the Draft Riot of 1863 in New York City. Twenty-six of the dead were African American, fourteen were Latino, nine were non-Hispanic whites, and two were Asian. Three persons who died in fires had been too badly burned to determine their race of ethnicity. Another 2,328 people had been treated for injuries in emergency rooms by doctors who practiced what one hospital official called “battlefield medicine.” Property Losses exceeded $900 million, the most ever in any U.S. riot. Eight hundred and sixty-two structures had been destroyed by fire, more than four times as many as in the 1965 Watts riot. Thousands of businesses were damaged or looted, and many “mom-and-pop” stores were gone forever[2].

As the criminal and civil cases spawned by the Rodney King incident dragged on through the courts, change came slowly to Los Angeles. The 1992 riots had discredited high-profile officials, speeding the retirement of Chief Daryl Gates and Mayor Tom Bradley. By the summer of 1993, Los Angeles had a new mayor and Los Angeles County a new district attorney. And many policemen were found guilty for using excessive force on the civilians.

Rodney Glen King’s Life was dogged with difficulties in the five years after the March 3, 1991, incident that made him an international symbol of police abuse. The videotape that aroused “horror and outage… from Paris to Tokyo” also made King an enduring celebrity who attracted the media spotlight, especially when he ran afoul of the law while behind the wheel. These incidents were part of a recurring pattern. King suffered from alcoholism, and he had not learned to take responsibility for his actions. Although usually gentle when sober, King became wild and temperamental when drinking. But despite everything that had happened, King continued to drink and drive. Rodney King was just one of the many similar cases happened in downtown LA. Because of the traffic problem, the poverty, and the racial discrimination, LA was then continued to be a place of crime. “The quality of Life will continue to decline in California with increasing transportation problems, rising crime and social unrest”[3].

[1] Sucheng Chan and Spencer C. Olin. Major Problem in California History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997. page 477.

[3] Quoted in Paradise Lost by Peter Schrag. Page 26. from John Ellwood, Steven Sheffrin, and John J. Kirlin, California Fiscal Reform: A Plan for Action. (Oaklan, CA: University of California—California Business—Higher Education Forum, 1995) p.4