Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (10 page)

Then, in August of 1986, when he was eighteen, Christian got
caught in a gang ambush and was shot ten times. He was in Bounty Hunter territory staying over with a lady. When he left that morning one of his car tires was flat. As he was changing it, a short, thin guy suddenly approached him. Calling out his street name, “Low Down,” the stranger then pointed a .45 and started shooting. Someone else opened up with a .38 as the shooter with the .45 kept firing away.

The ambulance brought him to Martin Luther King Drew Medical Center in South Los Angeles. The complex was known as “
Killer King” as much for its abysmal reputation as an emergency care facility as for the high number of gunshot and knife wounds it regularly treated. The doctors there were so astounded when Christian survived that they pronounced him a medical miracle.

**************

From the perspective of young men like Andre Christian and Alfred Lomas, trapped and segregated in places like Watts, the fifteen or so years from the mid-eighties to the late nineties seemed like a potential gold mine, thanks to the easy money to be made from crack cocaine. The drug gave gangs an organizing principle, a financial raison d’être. If your résumé read “high school dropout,” the length of your rap sheet far exceeded any work experience you may have accrued, and your only option was a fast-food-wage kind of job in a city teeming with immigrants desperate for work and willing to bust their asses for pocket change, it seemed that opportunity had at last come knocking.

And Grape Street, like other black gangs in Los Angeles, was quick to answer the door. Soon it seemed like all of Jordan Downs High School was wearing T-shirts with “Grape Street” written on the back as an accessory to their purple rags. Twenty or twenty-five kids would show up flashing wads of cash at movies, concerts, malls or sporting events,
dominating the scene and doling out beatings. As gang members became flush with cash from distributing and dealing crack,
gang-related killings in L.A. County rose from 205 in 1982 to more than 800 a year into the 1990s.

Similar turf-war crack killings were driving up homicide rates to unprecedented levels in cities throughout America, and nobody seemed to know how to stop it. Conservatives found it impossible to comprehend that four hundred years of unspeakable brutality, a closed economic system, and insidious psychological degradation would have the kind of long-lasting, pathological consequences that were now playing out on a subset of the African-American population. Or that a lot of people segregated into an impoverished, racial subculture that mirrored and amplified the state-sponsored violence that maintained it had been damaged in a way that was simply not going to disappear overnight.

So, embracing their righteousness, conservative politicians demonized an entire class of people. And they successfully demanded and got the only solution they were capable of understanding: crime and drug wars that featured deeply inhumane, inflexible, mass incarceration policies such as
California’s three-strikes law—a law under which hundreds of petty thieves, many from Los Angeles, were sentenced to twenty-five years to life in prison for stealing a steak, $10 worth of sunglasses, a bottle of vitamins, or less than $3 in AA batteries.

Such was the lay of the land when Andre Christian and Alfred Lomas went from hustling to dealing crack cocaine in the early eighties.

**************

The
introduction of crack into Los Angeles started in about 1982, when America’s multibillion-dollar War on Drugs successfully shut down the huge supply of cocaine flowing into south Florida through Cuban distributors connected to Colombian drug cartels. Given the amount of money at stake, a new port of entry for Colombian cocaine quickly sprung up, funneled through already established Mexican marijuana and heroin distribution lines into Los Angeles and Southern California—thus changing the entire dynamic of drug distribution in America. Suddenly
there were huge amounts of money bubbling up inside South Los Angeles. African-American dealers like the entrepreneurial “Freeway Ricky Ross” became local legends, and then the gangs found themselves awash in cash.

**************

Powder cocaine in the eighties was not meant for poor people, not at $100 a gram. But then, as the Southern California coke market started becoming saturated, somebody figured out that by mixing powder coke with baking soda and boiling the combination, you could create twice as much product to sell. And
then
, by cutting it up into small pieces before it dried, you could turn the mixture into a hard, solid, smokable substance—“rock,” or crack cocaine. The altered form provided an immediate, powerful, euphoric rush far more intense than snorting powder cocaine, while in the process creating a whole new class of insatiable consumers of the drug.

A hit or two of snorted cocaine and you’d be up for hours; a pull or two on a crack pipe would last about twenty minutes, and then you’d want another hit—desperately. Customers would come back sooner and far more often. And because it was so inexpensive—
$5, $10, $25, $50, depending on the size of the rock—anybody could scrape up the money to try to keep their high going—making it initially seem to be the perfect ghetto drug.

And Andre Christian, who was nothing if not a son of the ghetto, soon became one of those kids that LAPD sergeant Charlie Beck was trying to bust in crack houses all over South Los Angeles. When he was sixteen, a dealer had set Christian up in a street-level apartment with an opening in the door through which he’d push his $25 or $50 rocks. He began making $300 or more a night, three or four nights a week. To an outsider it might not seem worth the trouble, given the risk. But for a high school kid from the projects, it was a dream come true. He bought new clothes, got a nice car and a regular motel room out by Los Angeles International Airport at the Snooty Fox, one of those rooms with a heart-shaped bed. Suddenly he had so much money he didn’t know how to spend it all, and there he was, still just a kid.

Andre Christian, Wednesday, April 29, 1992, Jordan Downs

By 1993, Andre Christian had grown into a businessman—a part-time criminal businessman, to be sure, but one who was trying otherwise to put the thug life behind him. When he arrived in Jordan Downs on that first evening of the riots with his girlfriend and her kids, he’d been anticipating a demonstration. Immediately, however, he saw how wrong he’d been. Everybody was out on the streets and sidewalks talking about revenge. Nobody was yet rioting. But it was clear they were all just waiting for someone to get angry enough or drunk enough to throw that first chunk of concrete and kick it off—something Christian wanted no part of. So he left with his family to check out what was going on farther west, toward
Florence and Normandie, where things had already turned ugly. Sensing that they were about to get far worse, he got back on the freeway and headed straight back to Moreno Valley.

As it was with the ’65 riots, Watts had become an epicenter of
these
riots as well. That first night, snipers in Nickerson Gardens engaged in deadly firefights with the LAPD, which fired off
eighty-eight rounds in defense. “
It was anarchy, total anarchy,” LAPD lieutenant Michael Hillman told the
Times
. “You had people running in the streets, looting, shooting at and killing firefighters, shooting at the police.”

**************

By 9 p.m. that night the situation had had grown so critical that Mayor Bradley declared a state of emergency, and California governor Pete Wilson ordered two thousand National Guard troops into Los Angeles over the strident objections of Daryl Gates. By 8 a.m. that following Thursday morning they started arriving at local armories. But it would take until late afternoon before they finally hit the streets. The disastrous delay in deployment was the result of ammunition and other crucial Guard equipment having not arrived in L.A. staging areas until seventeen hours after Governor Wilson had activated the Guard; and because the LAPD and the Guard couldn’t agree on where the new troops should be deployed. During that time all hell would break loose across much of Greater Los Angeles.

Alfred Lomas, Thursday, April 30, 1992, Huntington Park, One Block East of South Central L.A.

Like Andre Christian, Alfred Lomas didn’t participate in the first night’s rioting, staying
glued to his crack-house TV instead, watching it all go down. But the next morning, looking to make a profit from the chaos, he hopped into a beat-up, off-white, throwaway Camry with some homeboys and drove down to Pacific Boulevard, Huntington Park’s main shopping thoroughfare.

How could they not? There it was, right there on TV: people looting, people rioting, buildings going up in flames, and no cops in sight.

On the boulevard, they first looked for what gang members wanted more than anything else: guns. But it was too late. Others had already methodically looted pawnshops and stores selling firearms throughout South and South Central Los Angeles. “
On south Western Avenue [alone],” as the
Los Angeles Times
reported, “suspected gang members broke into the Western Surplus store and carted off as many as 1,700 guns, plus ammunition.”

All around Lomas, people were breaking into stores and taking whatever they wanted. But with his right leg encased in a three-month-old cast—the result of a tibia and fibula broken while he was trying to collect on a drug debt—Alfred Lomas couldn’t get out of the car and join in the looting. So he sat back and watched as a
fat, middle-aged Latina suddenly came into view, laboriously hauling away a looted TV.

Similar scenes were playing out in L.A.’s barrios. In Pico-Union—a port-of-entry section of L.A. crammed with tens of thousands of desperately poor Salvadorian and other Central American immigrants—stores were being picked clean. Throngs of looters spilled out of tenements and into nearby shopping strips and malls. “
At four in the afternoon,” the great Los Angeles poet Rubén Martínez of the
LA Weekly
reported from the scene, “flames and smoke exploded everywhere in Pico-Union. . . . We should have expected it. This barrio’s been on the edge of chaos for years, and the enmity between police and youth is almost as strong as it is in South Central.”

Looking at the fat lady, it suddenly dawned on Lomas that this was
her moment, not just the moment for gang members like himself to loot gun stores, but the moment for all the looters—many of whom were ordinary, minimum-wage working stiffs stealing what they needed: baby food, diapers, household essentials—to answer with their actions the utter contempt with which they were daily treated. (Later, a Rand Corporation study reported that
51 percent of those arrested during the peak of rioting were Latinos.) Of course, for others, it was just a chance to gather free stuff.

Thursday, April 30, Across L.A.

That very morning in a shopping center north of South Central, at Western Avenue and 17th Street,
two big-bellied Latino men joyfully exited a drugstore, one with his fingers around four gallons of burgundy wine, the pockets of his red shorts bulging with pints of whiskey; the other wheeling out a shopping cart entirely filled with AA batteries and Ramses condoms. Meanwhile, four black teenagers strolled out of the center’s large Sav-on, each carrying suitcases.

“I got a calculator home,” said one.

“I got some ice cream,” said another.

A balding black man of about forty wearing a gray ski jacket and gold wire-rimmed glasses walked up and said to the tallest of them, “Man, all the shit you take, it’s gonna come back on you. It’s real stupid shit you’re doin’. Leave it and
respect
yourself.”

For a moment the kid looked uncertain, until his friend in a Miami Heat cap told him, “Man, if you feel like you need this, then take it.” “Take it?” The man replied, “And give up your respect?” “
Fuck respect,” Miami Heat shot back as they ambled away. “They don’t give us no respect.”

Meanwhile, exploding out of their South L.A. epicenter, the
riots snaked north and east into similar shopping centers and commercial streets along the Wilshire Boulevard Corridor, into Koreatown, up to Hollywood Boulevard, where sidewalks embedded with bronze stars honoring America’s actors and entertainers were run over by looters ransacking the area’s
cheap tourist-souvenir shops and other stores—including the famed lingerie emporium
Frederick’s of Hollywood. Soon the South L.A. rioting climbed into Baldwin Hills, home to many of L.A.’s middle-class and wealthy African-Americans. There, a bank’s doors were smashed open and thieves stole computers and everything else they could carry. Simultaneously, in the western and southern suburban communities of Culver City, Compton, San Pedro, and Long Beach, the commercial streets were being plundered, as were those inland to the east, in El Monte, Pacoima, and Pomona. “During the day,” as the
Los Angeles Times
later reported, “
the crush of looters trying to get into and out of store parking lots would create gridlock in many areas of the city.”

Michael Yamaki, Thursday, April 30, 1992, Koreatown

Much of the looting throughout the riots was random and opportunistic. But many
Korean-owned mom-and-pop convenience stores in South Central were deliberately targeted. Most were run by Korean immigrant families who’d worked 24-7 to establish their foothold in America. But over the years a profound crash of cultures had developed between them and their black customers. Their shops had been among those first set ablaze, and as the violence raged, one of the oft-repeated scenes would be that of Korean owners using weak-flowing garden hoses in futile attempts to douse the flames engulfing their shops.

Like many urban black ghettos, there were astoundingly few major chain supermarkets, large retail stores, or banks in South Los Angeles. Filling the vacuum in residents’ daily, routine shopping life—in thrift stores and swap meets as well as liquor stores and minimarts—were Korean immigrants, whose presence had become ubiquitous. From the perspective of many black customers the Koreans were prejudiced, abrasive, condescending, and distrustful—overcharging them by as much as 30 percent more than large retail stores, often refusing to extend much-needed credit, and watching them like hawks. “
We trusted them to come into our neighborhoods,” said “Big Mike” Cummings, a
former Grape Street Crip and now a minister. “But they disrespect us and our kids, won’t ever give credit and time to work out paying our bills. You gonna set up a mom-and-pop store, you got to show respect for the community.”