Race rioting a ‘time warp’ trap
The cycle of violence, civil disorder, angst, commissions, reports – and inaction – can be traced back nearly a century.
BARBARA ARNWINE was 14 when the police barricades went up around Watts and the National Guard tanks rolled in.
‘‘I remember being horrified,’’ she says, ‘‘and trying to go home and being told ‘you can’t enter this city’. My people, my family, everybody I loved was there.’’
The August 1965 riots in Los Angeles were raging, incited by the arrest of a young black motorist by a white highway patrolman, and a violent clash between police and the community.
Today, as Arnwine, who leads the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, watches escalating protests and police crackdowns in Ferguson, Missouri, she has an overwhelming sense of history repeating itself.
‘‘We’re in a time warp,’’ she says. ‘‘Watts was bad, but this is the worst thing I’ve seen.’’
In Ferguson, where a police officer killed an unarmed young black man last weekend, community anger has been stoked by a vacuum of information and the use of militarised police units.
There are always specific conditions that lead to racial disturbances, but a broader question might be: why do they keep happening? Are lessons ever learned?
Sometimes, but experts say that enduring racial inequality and police failings practically guarantee more of the same.
‘‘It’s a darn shame,’’ Fred Harris says. ‘‘There’s too much of this going on – police shooting Credibility gap: New Yorkers show solidarity with residents of Ferguson, Missouri, where the shooting death of Michael Brown has focused attention on relations between police and the communities where they enforce the law. people.’’
Harris, an 83- year- old former Democratic senator from Oklahoma, has a unique perspective on recurring racial tensions and police violence in America.
He is one of the last living members of the Kerner Commission, which examined the social inequalities that led to rioting in black communities in Detroit, Newark and 21 other cities in 1967. It also made recommendations to reduce police overreaction to protests, build trust within communities and increase the racial diversity of police forces.
But across the country, experts say, many police forces have yet to adopt some of the most basic techniques to curb the possibility of police brutality and subsequent unrest. These strategies include having police live in the communities where they enforce the law and building connections with the residents.
‘‘ The only way to stop these situations is before they happen, not after they happen,’’ said Chuck Wexler, a law-enforcement expert who has studied federal civil rights investigations of local police departments.
‘‘ It’s particularly important to establish credibility with the com- munity, and particularly with the black community, because there isn’t a built-up reservoir of trust.’’
With 18,000 police departments in the United States, achieving a conformity in training and community relations is impossible.
‘‘ However, so much has been accomplished in the past 20 years and written about that today no department should have to learn the lessons that Ferguson has,’’ Wexler says.
Mary Frances Berry, a former head of the US Civil Rights Commission, oversaw several reports on police and minorities, including one titled ‘‘Who is Guarding the Guardians?’’, which was revisited after four New York City police officers shot and killed Amadou Diallo, an unarmed immigrant from Guinea, in 1999.
‘‘We did all of these hearings on police issues. The police said they were always afraid and – no matter how much training they had – that a natural reaction was to think about reaching for the gun.’’
A questionable shooting is certain to cause questions and anger, but some academics also point to a broader context of inequality for blacks: more poverty, lower education and income rates, continued residential segregation.
‘‘Any photo in which you’re seeing unarmed young black folks on one side, and on the other side you see police officers in riot gear, that immediately causes you to think about the dogs and the hoses that were prominently deployed against protesters in the civil rights era,’’ says Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of black popular culture at Duke University.
Those protests and later race riots spawned a library of books and reports. But, Berry said, ‘‘nothing changes’’.
One of the first witnesses called by the Kerner Commission was a distinguished scholar named Ken- neth B. Clark. He told the panel that he read several reports on past disturbances, including one on the 1919 race riot in Chicago, ‘‘and it is as if I were reading the report of the investigating committee of the Harlem riot of ’35, the report of the investigating committee on the Harlem riot of ’43, the report of the McCone Commission on the Watts riot.
‘‘It is a kind of Alice in Wonderland,’’ Clark added, ‘‘ with the same moving picture re- shown over and over again, the same analysis, the same recommendations, and the same inaction.’’