Kristian Williams - Our Enemies in Blue - Police and Power in America

In the five years preceding the Rodney King beating, 2,500 claims relatingto the use of force were filed against the lAPDY To describe just one:In Apri11988, Luis Milton Murrales, a twenty-four-year-old Latino man, lostthe vision in one eye because of a police beating. That incident also beganwith a traffic violation, followed by a brief chase. Murrales crashed his carinto a police cruiser and tried to flee on foot. The police caught him, clubbedhim, and kicked him when he fell. They resumed the beating at the Rampartstation; the attack involved a total of twenty-eight officers. One commanderdescribed his subordinates as behaving like a "lynch mob." Though the citypaid $177,500 in a settlement with M urrales, none of the officers was disciplined."Such incidents, as well as the depressed economic conditions of the innercity, supplied the fuel for a major conflagration. The King beating, the video,and the verdict offered just the spark to set it Off.26A LESSON TO LEARN, AND LEARN AGAINRodney King's beating was unusual only because it was videotaped. Thecommunity that revolted following the acquittal seemed to grasp this fact,even if the learned commentators and pious pundits condemning them didnot. By the same token, the revolt itself also fit an established pattern.In 1968, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (commonlycalled the Kerner Commission) exanlined twenty-four riots and reached someremarkable conclusions:Our examination of the background of the surveyed disorders revealeda typical pattern of deeply-held grievances which were widely sharedby many members of the Negro community. The specific content of theexpressed grievances varied somewhat from city to city R11t in gpneral,grievances among Negroes in all cities related to prejudice, discrimination,severely disadvantaged living conditions and a general sense offrustration about their inability to change those conditions.Specific E'vents or incidents exemplified and reinforced the sharedsense of grievance ... . With each such incident, frustration and tensiongrew until at some point a final incident, often similar to the incidents precedingit, occurred and was followed almost immediately by violence.As we see it, the prior incidents and the reservoir of underlying grievancescontributed to a cumulative process of mounting tension thatspilled over into violence when the final incident occurred. In this sensethe entire chain-the grievances, the series of prior tension-heighteningincidents, and the final incident-was the "precipitant" of disorder. 27The Kerner report goes on to note, "Almost invariably the incident that ignitesdisorder arises from police action. Harlem, Watts, Newark, and Detroit-all the majoroutbursts of recent yeanr-were precipitated by routine arrests of Negroes for minoroffenses by white officers."28A few years earlier, in his essay "Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter fromHarlem," James Baldwin had offered a very similar analysis:[Tlhe only way to police a ghetto is to be oppressive. None of the PoliceCommissioner's men, even with the best will in the world, have any6