We're aghast
at videos of apparent police brutality on YouTube, but silent on the daily war
zones of South L.A.
By Constance L. Rice, CONSTANCE L. RICE, a
civil rights attorney in Los Angeles, chaired the Rampart Review Panel, which
released its final report this year.
November 18, 2006
THERE IS A
place where gunfire keeps children from playing in front yards or going to
school and where 90% of them have witnessed or suffered serious violence. Armed
tribes of unemployed men brutalize locals into silence and cleanse their
neighborhoods of outsiders. And too few trust the police or other government
enough to cooperate in investigations.
I'm not talking about Baghdad but about parts of Los Angeles. In just one of
the city's high-crime zones, the Los Angeles Police Department's South Bureau,
100,000 people have been shot since 1976. The murder rate in that bureau was
five times the national average, according to the Rampart Review Panel's 2006
report. And a single subdivision of that bureau — Southeast — racks up more
homicides than six states combined. Research for a study coming out this winter
found that the risk of being murdered in a terrorist attack in the United
States is 1 in 800,000; in West L.A., the average risk of being murdered is 1
in 78,000; in South L.A., that risk is 1 in 2,000. The Army has sent its
surgeons to South L.A. to learn how to repair war wounds.
South Bureau is a kill zone. Yet its catastrophic violence merits not an iota
of the alarm and attention showered on recent videotapes of LAPD arrests.
Now, I'd be the last to deny that those videos raise serious use-of-force
questions. In one, an officer shoots pepper spray into the face of a
handcuffed, possibly deranged and ranting but apparently unthreatening suspect,
and then encloses him in the squad car as the man screams and writhes in pain
against the rolled-up windows. That an LAPD supervisor stood by like a tree
stump while this was happening raises not just questions but hackles. I'd
start with an inquiry as to what substance a district attorney was on when he
concluded that this use of pepper spray was "compassionate," and why
that supervisor failed to intervene.
And then there's the video that premiered to rave reviews on YouTube.com
showing LAPD officers repeatedly punching a suspect in the face. It prompts the
question of whether a reasonable officer could reasonably view the prone
suspect's reactions as threats that warranted those punches.
Although our collective déjà vu is understandable, the investigations need to
vet all the facts before judgment. The good news is that unlike 15 years ago
when the words "LAPD use-of-force investigation" triggered laughter,
today — depending on who is doing the investigating — there is a good chance
that an actual inquiry and not an automatic exoneration will take place. And
today there is at least a debate in some LAPD echelons about these videos; 15
years ago most of the force would have viewed these tapes and asked, "So
what?"
That's progress, and so is realizing that what outsiders view as excessive
force, many police view as good policing — or survival. One officer said about
the videos: "Police work ain't pretty; get over it." No, we shouldn't
"get over it." As LAPD Chief William J. Bratton said, we should
investigate it, demand reasonable use of force by our officers and punish
gratuitous cruelty.
But despite all that, the fact is that the videotapes are getting
disproportionate attention. A much bigger travesty than these officers' actions
is the fact that we Angelenos seem to ignore L.A.'s kill zones. Videos of two
arrests should not command more public concern and media coverage than the
hundreds of deaths yearly in these neighborhoods. But they do. No civilized
people should accept such violence as the norm. But we do. It is past time to
end that norm. And we know what it will take.
Every sector in L.A., from city and county government to the education,
economic, law enforcement, civic, family and neighborhood sectors, must
coordinate their efforts to reduce violence. It will take saturation strategies
that don't leave children to face gangs by themselves. It will mean the end of
bureaucracy and ineffective expenditures as we know them. And it will require
the end of the gang culture of destruction.
Most of all, it will require guts from political leaders who care more about
ending this deadly scourge than the safe posturing needed for their next run
for office.
We must tell bureaucrats, school officials and civic leaders to change their
missions and how they do their jobs. And we must tell parents and families to
get their acts together.
But above all else, we must stop leaving the children of the kill zones to
dodge bullets and to just "get over it."