What We Should Have Learned: Police Must Put Down Violence Immediately and Without Apology
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Could it happen again? That is the taboo question on the 20th anniversary of Los Angeles’s murderous Rodney King riots, just as another racially charged prosecution—this time in Florida—captures headlines across the nation. Sadly, the answer is yes. As the Oakland riots in 2009 and 2010 following a transit officer’s fatal shooting of a parolee made clear, the threat of riots—what Fred Siegel has called “riot ideology”—still hangs over interracial incidents of violence when the victim is black. And just as the press cynically manipulated the facts in the Rodney King beating in order to increase racial tensions, it has done so again in the Trayvon Martin shooting in Sanford, Florida.
The best hope for avoiding a repeat of the L.A. mayhem, should blacks not be satisfied with the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case, is that police forces across the country have learned the lesson of the Rodney King riots: that outbreaks of civil anarchy must be immediately and unapologetically suppressed.
Anniversary coverage of the 1992 riots (or, as the New York Times is still willing to put it, “civil unrest”) has whitewashed the violence and imposed a predictable storyline: that the riots were caused by the Los Angeles Police Department, not by the individuals who viciously assaulted motorists and shot Korean storeowners. “The reason we had this riot was because we had the total emasculation and humiliation of an entire community,” civil rights attorney Connie Rice declared at theLos Angeles Times Festival of Books last Sunday. “It was kindling built on kindling built on kindling.” And not only did the LAPD’s alleged racism cause the violence, according to the official narrative, but its failure to practice community policing also prevented the department from anticipating the violence. Had police officers in South Los Angeles “been plugged into their neighborhoods,” writes Los Angeles Times columnist Sandy Banks, “the city might have seen [the violence] coming.”