Kicking Off the 2005 Riot Season

I'm old enough to remember both the 1965 and 1992 riots in Los Angeles, and I can't seem to shake a creeping feeling that we're about to run that playbook all over again. While I was in Washington there was a tragic shooting in LA in which a small child was killed while being held hostage by her father. It was a police bullet that killed the girl and her father, and from the coverage I've seen, the media is doing its best to whitewash the father's responsibility and place all the blame on the cops. This is a recipe for a riot.

Writer Jack Dunphy (not his real name) is an LAPD officer who addresses some of the problems of the press coverage in National Review:

A Los Angeles Times editorial published Thursday took LAPD Chief William Bratton to task for being “insensitive, even callous” in his remarks following a July 10 police standoff in Watts, a section of South-Central Los Angeles. The standoff ended in the death of 19-month-old Suzie Marie Peña, who was being held hostage by her father, Jose Raul Peña. Both were killed by gunfire from SWAT officers making an ill-fated attempt to rescue the child. Video images from a security system inside Peña’s used-car dealership show him using his daughter as a shield, holding her in one hand while firing a semi-automatic pistol at officers with the other. A police officer was also wounded in the gun battle.

With the mayoral campaign and its demands for decorum now in the past, Bratton is once again the blunt-spoken man he was as commissioner of the NYPD and in his first two years with the LAPD. Speaking at a July 12 news conference, the chief was unreserved in his condemnation of Peña, whom he labeled a “cold-blooded killer.”

“Mr. Peña is not a good man,” Bratton said. “He is not a loving, caring father under any circumstances. You don’t threaten to kill your wife. You don’t attempt to kill your 17-year-old daughter. You don’t threaten to kill your . . . baby and hold that baby as a shield. So all this nonsense — how loving and caring this individual was. He was none of those things.”

Such talk falls hard on the delicate sensibilities at the Times, where apparently no one is so malevolent as to merit a harsh word from the chief of police. “Bratton had good reason to say what he did,” the editorial allows, “[b]ut his statements made a difficult situation worse, forcing Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to try to ease tensions by uttering soothing words without defending either the chief or the protesters.”
Indeed, Villaraigosa’s comments were saccharine-sweet, enough to make a man gag. “We've lost a child,” he told reporters. “A family has lost a daughter. A police officer has been shot. All of us are caught up in this tragedy. All of us are devastated. But, that's why it's important we step back a moment and allow the process to take place. We are going to get to the bottom of this.”

This kind of media coverage plays into the hands of the 'community activists' whose role in society is to stir up trouble. It doesn't help to have a mayor who feels he can't support the cops without creating resentment from the local troublemakers.

In chiding Chief Bratton for his remarks, the Times editorial invoked memories of events from the LAPD’s troubled history: the 1965 Watts riots, the Rodney King beating and subsequent riots, and some controversial police shootings from the past few years. By trotting out this laundry list of past sins, the Times only serves the interests of a small handful of self-appointed “community activists” who spend their days waiting for some incident that allows them to go before the cameras and proclaim their outrage at the perceived faults of the LAPD. These people owe their livelihoods to perpetuating a culture of complaint, in which life is viewed through the distorted prism of accumulated grievances, whether real or imagined.

LA is in the midst of a very hot spell, both in terms of the weather and in terms of racial politics, and I'm not sure if the city is going to survive the summer unscathed. All it would take is another 'questionable' shooting, or a televised police action showing what the activists decide is police brutality, to light the fuse on the whole place.

I hope I'm wrong, but I think the 2005 riot season is about to kick off.