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 andgun-totin
’ strategist and enforcer of
Florencia 13’s
drug deals in the Age ofCrack Wars and easy money, although not a black man, had understoodthat 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 ownpathological impulses -- on the head of Reginald Denny.But Lomas and the others now watching the scene on a crack-house TVbalanced atop a cluster of milk crates and ignoring the pitiful, broken-downlocal crack-whore giving blow jobs in the bathroom, were not
down
withwhat 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-lengthaway and then point and spit on him solely because of his skin color, thatwas just
wrong.
Not to mention the guy
–
allegedly a member, like theothers, of the 8-Trey Gangster Crips --
who’d then stepped up and
methodically rifled through Denny
’s pockets, before robbing his wallet andtaking 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, itturned 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 andcrack 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 aBaby Huey image on the street, and petty-ante criminal aspirations that hadlanded in prison for a year over a $200 robbery of a 99 Market
—
a robberyin which he was chased out of the store by its irate Korean owner beatinghim 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
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Excerpt from "Road to Reckoning: The Collapse and Reformation of the LAPD" by Joe Domanick
Excerpt from "Road to Reckoning: The Collapse and Reformation of the LAPD" by Joe Domanick
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