Books, Arts & Manners: The California Nightmare

Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD, by Lou Cannon (Times, 698 pp., $35 FOR residents of Los Angeles, and perhaps much of the country, the televised beating of Rodney King, the battering of Reginald Denny, and the incendiary rioting that followed are unforgettable images, nearly as vivid as the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Few who were in Los Angeles that terrible day in April 1992 can forget what they saw on their television screens as the fires spread from South Central Los Angeles to Koreatown, Hollywood, and the fringes of the affluent and mostly white Westside. My wife and I left our upstairs bedroom to sleep downstairs for fear that a Molotov cocktail thrown through a window could create an inferno before we could escape. Our friends reacted as fearfully as we did. The country’s second-largest city was engulfed in fear and rage, and the police were nowhere to be seen.

Lou Cannon’s carefully crafted account of these events, their causes, and their consequences tells of a tragedy that could have been prevented. World War II began the transformation of Los Angeles from an almost exclusively white Protestant backwater to a mecca for ethnic minorities. As the city grew, so did crime, and in 1950 Chief William Parker took control of the LAPD, giving it a Marine Corps model of incorruptibility and physical fitness, combined with a mission of aggressive policing, that was much admired around the country. Even so, the LAPD was not prepared for the Watts Riots of 1965, when 34 people were killed and more than one thousand injured before the LAPD, assisted by the National Guard, restored order. Mayor Tom Bradley later did much to calm racial tensions. The aerospace industry and booming real-estate values brought prosperity to the city, and the 1984 Olympics (with O. J. Simpson carrying the Olympic torch) brought pride. But by the late 1980s, the pride and prosperity had crumbled, and violent crime, much of it fueled by cocaine, took over much of the city, especially South Central, which was now 50 per cent Latino. The African-American population that remained there was poorer than ever before, as middle-class African-Americans fled to more affluent areas. While the inner-city population grew poorer and more violent, the police department remained small and perilously underfunded.

RE

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Robert B. Edgerton

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Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD, by Lou Cannon (Times, 698 pp., $35 FOR residents of Los Angeles, and perhaps much of the country, the televised beating of Rodney King, the battering of Reginald Denny, and the incendiary rioting that followed are unforgettable images, nearly as vivid as the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Few who were in Los Angeles that terrible day in April 1992 can forget what they saw on their television screens as the fires spread from South Central Los Angeles to Koreatown, Hollywood, and the fringes of the affluent and mostly white Westside. My wife and I left our upstairs bedroom to sleep downstairs for fear that a Molotov cocktail thrown through a window could create an inferno before we could escape. Our friends reacted as fearfully as we did. The country’s second-largest city was engulfed in fear and rage, and the police were nowhere to be seen.

Lou Cannon’s carefully crafted account of these events, their causes, and their consequences tells of a tragedy that could have been prevented. World War II began the transformation of Los Angeles from an almost exclusively white Protestant backwater to a mecca for ethnic minorities. As the city grew, so did crime, and in 1950 Chief William Parker took control of the LAPD, giving it a Marine Corps model of incorruptibility and physical fitness, combined with a mission of aggressive policing, that was much admired around the country. Even so, the LAPD was not prepared for the Watts Riots of 1965, when 34 people were killed and more than one thousand injured before the LAPD, assisted by the National Guard, restored order. Mayor Tom Bradley later did much to calm racial tensions. The aerospace industry and booming real-estate values brought prosperity to the city, and the 1984 Olympics (with O. J. Simpson carrying the Olympic torch) brought pride. But by the late 1980s, the pride and prosperity had crumbled, and violent crime, much of it fueled by cocaine, took over much of the city, especially South Central, which was now 50 per cent Latino. The African-American population that remained there was poorer than ever before, as middle-class African-Americans fled to more affluent areas. While the inner-city population grew poorer and more violent, the police department remained small and perilously underfunded.