Watts rebellion was the work of Parker, the recent explosion owed much to the tireless efforts of Chief Daryl Gates.
The nomination of Gates as police chief, which took place under the Bradley administration in 1978, has allowed the citizens of Los Angeles to relive the Vietnam War in their own neighbourhoods.
The spiral of violence
The spiral of violence, which began with the official justification of the murder of a 39-year old widow, Eulia Love, in
1979, continued with the excusing of the death of several young Blacks in police custody at the start of the 1980s; Gates put forward the theory that the anatomy of Blacks made them more likely than others to die from the co-called "choke hold".
Further milestones were the police charges at the Los Angeles Street Scene Festival in 1986 and Halloween in 1988, and, finally, "Operation Hammer"
This involved interrogations and destruction and the establishment of "strategic hamlets" — districts which were systematically patrolled by 400 police who stopped and interrogated anyone suspected of belonging to the youth gangs. The police searched houses suspected of sheltering people "in the course of committing a crime". These districts were then sealed off - only those who lived there were permitted to enter after passing a police check. In two years, Operation Hammer led to 50,000 arrests, of which a mere 10% were found guilty of any crime.
The LAPD disposes of the most sophisticated electronic surveillance system on the planet, including 50 military helicopters carrying out permanent controls who fly more hours over Los Angeles than does the British army in Belfast, as well as a range of elite commando units — since 1988 authorized to use explosive bullets, prohibited by the Geneva Convention -who carry out secret operations. A huge private security market has also developed with more than 75,000 poorly trained vigi-
USA lantes on patrol.
This development has been made possible by the political support of right-thinking members of society. In 1989 Chief
Gates organized the capture of a house in a ghetto by a SWAT team to show Nancy
Reagan how it was done.
The demonization of youth and the minorities has been supported by the reformist leaders of the 1960s generation, who, powerless in the face of economic crisis, the crack economy and the gangs have been unable to come up with anything other than police repression. The Democratic prosecutor Hahn has been among the most zealous - in 1987 he disintered an anti-worker law from 1919, the "act against criminal unionism", to allow the sentencing of youths simply for belonging to a group.
There was, therefore, nothing out of character in Gates' reaction to the assault on Rodney King. At first he defended the police reaction, on the pretext that King had tried to get away in his car. Even faced with the outcry from the munity, which had forced Mayor Bradley to complain, Gates continued to defend the LAPD's actions up until the trial and acquittal of the four officers
It took four days of rioting and more than 60 deaths to budge Gates.
Los Angeles' history of systematic social conflict is reflected in the topography of the city. Every visitor sees it and it is reflected in many police or apocalyptic films, the best of which is perhaps Grand
At the end of the 19th century, Frederich Lam Olsted sought to avoid social polarization, through the building of public parks, promenades, big avenues and museums to create an inter-class land-
In the new California of the Second World War the beaches, cinemas, leisure parks and yet more grand avenues, full of young people in their cars, had the same social objective.
However, from the 1970s onwards the trend has been towards the fortress city. Segregation reigns between neighbourhoods, drawing up lists of rules for the neighbors to maintain speculative housing prices - the middle class is thus increasingly forced to mortgage itself to finance its lifestyle. The old struggle between Downtown and Beverly Hills, between the Anglo-Saxon and the Jewish bourgeoisie, 1 5 has been resolved by an alliance, reinfor-
International Viewpoint # 229 • May 25, 1992 class paranoia world witnessed brutally beating up Black motorist The architect of the moment is Frank Rodney King on March 2, 1991 had been acquitted by a Gehry. In the Samuel Goldwyn Centre he white suburban jury on all but one charge of excessive has built in Hollywood, massive walls force and officer misconduct on Wednesday April 29, 1992. support iron doors with a panoply of electronic surveillance devices. It is no accident that one of Gehry's recent constructions has been the US Embassy in Damascus.
The city is closing in on itself in guarded air-conditioned industrial centres where the clients are listed according to their purchasing power. The paroxysm is reached with the public seating, which is semi-circular to prevent the homeless from sleeping on it. As the Urban Land review explains: "The city centre must be conceived so that the visitor feels himself in an attractive place, frequented by respectable people like himself. The activities on offer will determine the type of people who walk in its avenues; we have to work so that middle and high income residents install themselves in the neighboring zones, so that there is a high percentage of passers-by who respect the law"
The social infrastructure and the shape of the city - its medical services, but also the whole network of small grocery stores — have little by little disappeared. After the Watts rebellion all the big supermarket chains pulled out of the center-south. The void was filled by small shops controlled by South Koreans, isolated in the middle of the Black ghettos, often selling at high prices. They are also often involved in small-scale lending.
They were the target of popular frustration in these riots and defended themselves against the youth with guns. Apart from the South Koreans, the only other person to return to the ghettos is the promoter Alexander Haagen, who, using municipal subsidies, has developed a new concept in shopping centres, the King
Center Watts, inspired by Jeremy Bentham's panopticon prison: this is a circular edifice closed to the outside and internally monitored from a central tower.
The social explosion provoked by the
King case shocked the United States, although the basic economic figures and underlying social situation were well-known. The presidential campaign is being carried out against a background feeling that the American Dream is evaporating and a saviour must be found. But it is one thing to know figures and another 16 young people in the strets, which it took to look on at a rebellion with thousands of
DOLORES TREVISO
W HILE to many whites the
not guilty verdict was shocking to the senses, for most non-whites it simply affirmed what has been known for some time: there is not even formal democracy for African-Americans in the country that is willing to spill the blood of soldiers of color on foreign soils in the name of demo cracy.
It is well understood by working class people of color that the "democracy" the United States is so ready to kill for abroad is not guaranteed at home for a large segment of society. Indeed, in the past year alone, four minority youth were "legally" murdered, shot in the back that is, by law enforcement agencies in the African American and Latino communities in the County of Los Angeles. Countless other members of minorities are stopped, searched and harassed, often illegally, but always with the blessing of the state which has declared a war on drugs — in fact a battle cry in the war against minority youth.
Under the guise of ridding the streets of drugs and crimes, the state can suspend many of the judicial rights of individuals 16,000 police and soldiers to suppress -like a rerun of the invasion of Panama.
The growing dualization of the economy and immigration have created a Latin America in the heart of the United States, which expresses itself, in the absence of other means, by uprisings of the kind seen in several Latin American cities recently.
It is not yet clear what the impact of these events will be on the forthcoming presidential elections. But, given the fact that the poor tend not to be registered to vote, we will probably see a wave of law-and-order reaction among conservative
But in any case neither of the parties is proposing anything that resembles the Keynesian programmes of Kennedy's new frontier and Carter's "war on poverty".
- individuals, it should be emphasized who are invariably working class boys of color. The state can, for example, legally shoot an unarmed 15 year old Mexican American boy in the back, or a mentally retarded Black youth lying face down on the pavement, if the officers in their "line of duty" deem the situation to be "life threatening". These are the scenes in some of the cases of officer murder last summer.
Where is the justice?
The growing threat of legal violence against minorities by the police and the unwillingness of the state to check the most extreme actions of its representatives has publicly underlined the question that Black and Brown mothers have long been asking — where is the justice?
The verdict that so shocked the nation came as no surprise to the African-American community, still angered by a case in which a white judge sentenced a Korean merchant, captured on video shooting 13 year old Latasha Harlins in the back, to a mere six months probation. In both these cases, separated by a time span of six Bush and Clinton have zero credibility in the ghettos and neighbourhoods; the social transmission belts which guaranteed the promises of politicians some kind of a hearing have disappeared in the 1980s. Furthermore, unlike in the 1960s, the crack economy has created a cultural void which facilitates violent explosions and at the same time makes it more difficult to articulate demands politically.
The Watts rebellion gave rise to the Black Panthers. We do not yet know what will result from Los Angeles. However it is clear that it is becoming increasingly difficult to govern the United States. The central pillar of the New World Order is showing big cracks. *
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USA ced by massive buying up of buildings by Japanese enterprises, to create a buffer zone between the center-south and the east -the best example of this is Bunker Hill. The architecture of middle The fire this time OUTRAGE was the reaction throughout Los Angeles as many Angelenos struggled with the reality: the four Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers who the
months, it was obvious that if the racial line up had been reversed, the white courts would have found in favor of the victims.
This juridical double standard stems from the fact that the state has steadily and systematically criminalized the African
American and Latino communities of this country and recognizes only one criminal: the Black/Brown male. The statistics are indeed revealing: fully
46% of African Americans and 12.6% of Latinos compose the population of state and federal prisons.
Indeed, Black males in the
United States are incarcerated at a rate four times that of Black males in
South Africa. As many as 25% of Black men between the ages of 20 and 29 are under the control of the criminal justice system. These figures, moreover, have little to do with increasing crime. In fact, while the crime rate has dropped by 3.5% since 1980, the prison population has doubled in the same period.
Thus the violence of the "dark masses"
that the world has witnessed as a response to the racial injustice of the King verdict, the violence that has claimed 58 lives and caused 2,383 injuries, the violence that set ablaze 5,383 structures, has been matched by a far more powerful violence on the part of the state.
Illegal mass arrests
By the Monday following the King verdict the state could rest assured that the
City of Angels was pacified and that it was to "return to work". This pacification was made possible by the incarceration, very often illegally, of some 14,000 people, picked up en masse at peaceful political demonstrations and most without the possibility of what was until May 5 the right to a speedy arraignment.
And after many of those who are currently detained get released (now, legally, as long as seven days after their arrest), their voice will have been silenced and their form of political protest crushed by the militarization of the city. Over 12,000 federal troops, composed of "Desert
Storm" trained national guardsmen, marines and others, occupy posts in those parts of Los Angeles that other white
Angelenos have only read about.
Indeed, so severe and yet so hidden has been the state's response that the media has totally failed to report the sweeps of at least a couple of thousand Mexicano and Central-American immigrants by la migra, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), deployed in Los Angeles as part of the national troops sent in by Bush.
In essence, INS agents were strategically placed in Latino communities where they would be free to round up and rough up non-English speaking "illegals". But just as no official reports have emerged about the deportation of 2,000 immigrants captured by INS agents through invasions of apartments and the like, the local police reluctantly admits only to having turned over 263 of the 1,044 "illegal immigrants" currently held for riot and related activities to the the INS. The secrecy of the local police stems in part from the fact that turning over these undocumented individuals to the immigration officials violates police department policy.
The international camera
While this wave of quasi-legal state violence was underway, the international camera was focussed on what appeared on the surface to be indiscriminate acts of looting and arson by the Black and Brown masses. But in fact most of these incidents were by no means as arbitrary as they were presented in the media. On the contrary many of the acts of arson followed a pattern dictated by the politics of race. While Korean owned liquor stores and Koreatown as a whole were targeted by the youth engaged in arson, some of the Black and Latino owned small businesses were spared, and for definite racial reasons: the Black and Latino owners had posted signs on their small shops that read "Black owned" or "Spanish owned".
The reasons for the targeting of Korean
USA owned establishments are numerous and complicated but suffice it to say that the parasitic relationship petty merchants have, of economic necessity, with the members of their "host" community, is under most circumstances experienced and understood through the prism of racial difference. In the United States these differences are seen as matters of color and race and so what are cultural clashes in the context of an exploitative economic relationship are mutually understood as race relations. The looting, meanwhile, obviously has economic origins. The severe economic deprivation of the inner city, the fact that the majority of Black and Latino adults that live in it are either unemployed, under-employed or simply excluded from the labor force explains why the masses of the inner city - young and old, male and female - participated in the widespread act of taking commodities from the local merchants. These commodities ranged from high-priced status symbols such as Reebok shoes (priced at $150 per pair) and high tech CDs to basic necessities such as milk and cereal. Crimes against property
While the capitalists were shocked by the magnitude of these "crimes against property", these same capitalists, both through direct economic means and through the state, have pillaged and looted this community for years. The capitalist assault on the working class, primarily through the restructuring of the economy, has hit the African-American community the hardest. According to sociologist William Julius Wilson, "as late as 1974, 48% of all Black males aged 20-24 were working as semiskilled machine operators or in craft positions that paid enough to support themselves and their families. By 1986, only 25% of that group of Black males worked in such jobs, while the others were forced to take the most low-paying positions or go unemployed" (LA Times, May 6, 1992).
At the same time the state has cut back on all social spending on health, education and welfare, while at the same time reducing all property and income taxes for business and the wealthy.
The net effect has been a doubling in the gap between rich and poor in the last 15 years. The divisions of society into two 1 7 camps of haves and have-nots has concenMay 25, 1992 # 229 International Viewpoint
• May 25, 1992 strike if negotiations fail to produce a satisfactory settlement. He said the union seeks to improve the package offered by Caterpillar but made no mention of the UAW's traditional position strikes in the farm implement and construction equipment industry, provoked and sustained by the anti- union strategy of Caterpillar Inc., the giant manufacturer of heavy construction machinery, 12,600 members of the
United Auto Workers (UAW) who had been on strike for months and had refused Caterpillar's "final offer" were sent back to work on April 14 by UAW negotiators without a union contract and under conditions dictated by the company.
FRANK LOVELL
HIS precipitate decision by top
T
UAW officials sent shock waves through other AFL-CIO unions and stirred resentment in the ranks of the strikers. Even Caterpillar management at the factory level seemed surprised and claimed to be unprepared by the sudden turn of
This came less than one month after