Road to Reckoning:

The Collapse and Reformation of the LAPD

by Joe Domanick

(Advisory: This excerpt contains descriptions of sex and violence)

Alfred Lomas, U.S. Marine Corps veteran, Chicano son of Los Angeles and
gun-totin’ strategist and enforcer of Florencia 13’s drug deals in the Age of
Crack Wars and easy money, although not a black man, had understood
that rage. Understood it in the way that one underdog understands another.
So he should have been primed to vicariously feel the thrill of the brothers
who’d been acting out their hatred of the LAPD -- along with their own
pathological impulses -- on the head of Reginald Denny.

But Lomas and the others now watching the scene on a crack-house TV
balanced atop a cluster of milk crates and ignoring the pitiful, broken-down
local crack-whore giving blow jobs in the bathroom, were not down with
what was happening to Denny. All that dancing around as if it was cool to
smash a brick into some utterly innocent guy’s head from an arms-length
away and then point and spit on him solely because of his skin color, that
was just wrong. Not to mention the guy – allegedly a member, like the
others, of the 8-Trey Gangster Crips -- who’d then stepped up and
methodically rifled through Denny’s pockets, before robbing his wallet and
taking off. What kind of shit was that? And the cops? Weren’t they watching
along with the rest of the world? Where were the cops? Come and gone, it
turned out. Pulled from the action by a field commander who ordered them,
as the Los Angeles Times later put it, to report “to a secure, cinder-block-
walled bus terminal – an emergency police command center 30 blocks from
where Reginald Denny lay.”

Nevertheless, what the 26-year-old Lomas and every gang banger and
crack head in the room could relate to was the farce that was the acquittal
of the cops who’d beaten Rodney Glenn King. A high school dropout and
learning-disabled semi-illiterate laborer at Dodger Stadium, King had a
Baby Huey image on the street, and petty-ante criminal aspirations that had
landed in prison for a year over a $200 robbery of a 99 Market—a robbery
in which he was chased out of the store by its irate Korean owner beating
him with a three-foot metal rod. They could feel for King, a guy still on
parole who’d downed a 40 ounce Olde English 800 malt liquor, and was
speeding on the freeway in the outer reaches LA’s San Fernando Valley,
lost in the music on the radio, lost in the heart of the night, when his reverie
was suddenly interrupted by two highway patrol officers ordering him to pull
over. Startled and scared of being sent back to prison on a parole violation,
the 25-year-old King took them on a high speed chase instead.

Finally pulling over, he peacefully exited his white, economy-sized Hyundai,

only to be twice zapped with 50,000-volt Taser darts, hog-tied and brutally
beaten by the four LAPD officers from the local Foothill Division who’d
arrived on the scene and decided to take the collar. Meanwhile, 27 other
responding cops had casually stood around and watched the show while
rubbernecking passengers in cars and buses and drifted by, and a plumber
named George Holliday wielding a hand-held video camera, stood on his
balcony and recorded it all.

The crack-house crew, in short, understood exactly what had happened to

Rodney King. They weren’t black, but they weren’t white either. They were
Mexicans, Mexican-Americans who grew up hard on the gang-infested
streets in a dump of a neighbored in pastoral- sounding Huntington Park,
just across Alameda Boulevard from the vast, impoverished, black Los
Angeles area then known as South Central. They knew about LA cops, and
did not need some guy on TV droning about how what was happening now
was related to what had happened to Rodney King fourteen months ago.
They knew.

© 2011 Joe Domanick/Simon&Shuster