Good News from Watts

My dad worked in Watts back in the day. Things were tough then, but they're tougher now. Here's a post from the Los Angeles Times Homicide Report, written by Jill Leovy, which I've written about before.

"Watts United": "A crowd of at least 100 gathered Thursday for a candlelight vigil to mark the driveby-shooting death of 15-year-old Dovon Harris in the Nickerson Gardens housing project. LAPD Southeast Capt. Rick Jacobs announced a suspect was in custody. The crowd cheered and clapped."

Some folks wrote nice responses to the post. Some others took an opportunity to comment on the reporter's note about lack of cooperation among witnesses in some urban neighborhoods. Here's part of what Leovy wrote:

It works like this: Witness reluctance affords killers impunity, and gives them power to essentially become underworld lords, ruling lawless ethnic enclaves created by the inexorable calculus of housing segregation and poverty. Within such enclaves, violence becomes a kind of currency that people ignore at their peril, and formal legal protection does not exist. Men and boys, in particular, experience extreme pressure to demonstrate they too are capable of violence. If they appear weak, they risk falling on the wrong side of the violent transactions that organize this underworld. They must walk tough, talk tough, and cultivate a reputation for being dangerous if provoked.

One snarky commenter wrote, "It is called an ANONYMOUS POLICE TIP LINE. Perhaps the people of South LA have heard of it! Pick up the phone and help the detectives out."

I'd bet that the commenter has never lived or thought about life in a place like New Orleans, Watts, or Iraq. Of course you can tip police anonymously. But that doesn't hold in court. Police need someone to stand up and point to the perpetrator. It's not the only admissible evidence, but it certainly helps to convict. I've seen it personally, and plenty of other people have seen it on TV or read about it in print. It takes enormous courage to do such a thing. You risk your life if you testify. To be so flippant about life in a war zone is just plain insensitive.

Blotter Buzz

I work on a small college campus in a small college town. The school newspaper and the local fish wrap each publish a police blotter—a collection of police activity for a given time period. Nothing much happens in town. Maybe a DUI or domestic disturbance. Anything more would be highly unusual and make headlines. At the college, the typical blotter item is, "3:35 AM. Campus security responds to fire alarm. Toaster is found smoking with forgotten toast. Intoxicated female student is taken to emergency room." All in all, there is not much ado.

In yesterday's Native Intelligence blog (one of the fine LA Observed contributor blogs), TJ Sullivan wrote about the lack of a comprehensive police blotter of LAPD operations. This idea was inspired by reading a column by Mariel Garza in the LA Daily News about Cal State Northridge journalism students meeting information gathering obstacles while trying to report on the LAPD. Garza's column prompted a terse response from LAPD Chief William Bratton on the LAPD blog. (Yes, they're bloggers too.)

All in all, there are interesting questions on both sides of the plate. Would the LAPD benefit by publishing more information about its proceedings? (Garza and Sullivan think so.) Does the LAPD offer some kind of comprehensive information about its operations and statistics? (Bratton thinks so.) The information sources Bratton points to are the blog, the media relations department, and LAPDonline.org (which is worth looking at from time to time, if only for the crime map).

It would be interesting to shed more light on the LAPD, but is that a practical objective?

Would such a blotter be citywide? I doubt that residents of Playa Vista are much interested in reading that officers responded to a car accident on Laurel Canyon.

Then, would it be by neighborhood? Would that local information source be redundant? (Many neighborhoods have Yahoo or other online groups where they disperse this kind of blotter-relevant information.)

I'd read such a thing, but I have an addiction to news that is bordering on unhealthy.

A Deep Look at the Rodney King Beating, the LAPD, and the LA Riots

I lived in San Jose during the '92 Los Angeles riots. I learned of the verdict late in the day, and I decided to walk with some friends in what we thought would be a peaceful (impromptu) demonstration. When I left the dorms that evening, the mayhem had begun in Los Angeles. I had not yet seen the video of the Reginald Denny beating, so I was not aware of the mood that was mixed with the movement on the street. Our scene began to turn ugly at the edge of campus. We heard glass shatter, a palpable tension reverberated, and I looked up to see a phalanx of SJPD rolling toward the crowd.

Years later, while doing research on what went down in LA, I came across Lou Cannon's exhaustive book, Official Negligence : How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD. Some of the questions I had at the time were: where was Daryl Gates, why didn't the LAPD react with force, and why didn't the rioting spread to wealthier neighborhoods? Obviously, there are other questions relating to the riots, but I had in mind this vision of (what I thought at the time was) the outsized response of the SJPD. Why didn't the LAPD respond similarly at Florence and Normandie?

Cannon, a Washington Post reporter and biographer of Ronald Reagan, provides the answers. Quoting the Sunday Los Angeles Times Book Review (from Amazon.com): "...the definitive work of modern Los Angeles, a massive effort to see the nation's most dynamic city at its most important crossroads.... Official Negligence is a vital contribution to the city's history."