Simple justice? Whoever coined the term failed to capture the full complexity of the law. Only a year earlier a jury with no African-Americans in Simi Valley had acquitted the four officers. The paroxysm of violence after that decision left 53 dead, upwards of $1 billion in damage and the country’s second largest city Balkanized with ethnic fury. This time a more diverse panel applied common sense to the evidence and reached a Solomon’s choice that offered something for everyone. The split decision respected the nuances of the case, convicting the two men most clearly responsible for King’s beating while letting the other two go. It upheld a constitutional duty to defend the civil rights of all citizens, not just those from the top drawer of society but also those, no matter how raffish, at the bottom of the heap. Steven Clymer, the chief prosecutor, said the message for the police was simple: “They can use force that is reasonable and necessary-and no more.”
The outcome defused a city that had been sitting on a bomb of its own construction. Weeping, holding aloft a Bible, Jesse Jackson led prayers and hymns of thanks at the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in South L.A. Korean-Americans bore the brunt of the last riots, yet community activist and liquor-store owner Steve Cho, whose shop burned down a year ago, could now say, “Justice was done. This is a time for healing.” Throughout the trial, a case of nerves bordering on hysteria dogged a proud, polycultural town struggling across inner fault lines of race and class. Frightened citizens of all races bought so many guns that Los Angeles was beginning to feel like Manila on Saturday night. On the day of the verdict, the police force was on tactical alert and 600 fully armed National Guardsmen were in the wings. Not since the murder trial of Charles Manson had it been necessary to protect a jury so carefully. The court referred to them by numbers, never using their names, and smuggled them out of the courthouse at the trial’s end.
The verdict vindicated the 20-20 vision of everyone who had seen King’s civil rights mutilated on videotape. Charlie J. Parsons, the FBI’s top agent for Los Angeles, pointed out that the “pain, also the strength of due process in the law,” is to settle disputes like the King case “in the courts, not the streets.” Still, the spectacle of cops in mug shots remained depressing. “Justice is not a circus,” said Ira Salzman, Koon’s defense attorney. “Stacey Koon is not some kind of sacrificial animal to be cast aside for peace and order in L.A.” Koon and Powell, now facing 10 years in jail and fines of $250,000, will not be sentenced until August; their appeals will probably take at least a year. To those who were celebrating last week, Salzman said angrily, “I cry for them.”
With the trial over, the questions were how much the city had learned about itself, how strong its sense of redemption really was, how resilient its powers to heal. Throughout the city deep pools of fear remained. Willie Williams, the new chief of the LAPD, emerged as the hero of the hour, overshadowing the squabbling pols contesting this week’s mayoral primary to replace Tom Bradley. Ministers, community workers, even gangbangers formed fragile alliances to cool the city during the trial. But could they hang together to pull the city out of its anxieties in the months ahead? In South-Central many African-Americans complained that only partial justice had been done. Those feelings were sure to become even touchier at the next round: the trial of three blacks for beating white truckdriver Reginald Denny during the last riots (page 28).
Instead of celebrating, President Bill Clinton urged the country to re-examine its conscience and search for the larger meaning of the King case. In Pittsburgh, he broke off a speech in support of his economic program to announce the verdict to an early-morning crowd. “All across the world people are fighting and killing each other because of religious and ethnic differences,” he said. “Our country has always been about something different than that.” Summoning up “a core ideal in everyone given by God,” the president called on Americans “to respect differences and to rejoice in what unites us as human beings.” The proper legacy of the King trial, he said, should be to strengthen “our determination to reaffirm our common humanity.”
The president’s moving sermon brought the King affair to at least a temporary pause. Those who expected an acquittal or mistrial badly misread the judge and jurors. They spent six weeks listening to 61 witnesses, studying more than 100 exhibits. The political issue before them was as tough as the finer points of the law: were the four cops “bullies with badges” or a “thin blue line” of sacrificial lambs served up after last year’s riots? “There is no middle ground,” said Michael Stone, Powell’s attorney. Briseno’s lawyer, Harland Braun, warned the jurors they were on trial as surely as his client. The proceedings in Courtroom 890 were like the case of Jesus before Pontius Pilate, he said, demanding that they ignore “the howl of the mob and the waffling politician.” If they failed, he went on, “no one will be safe: we won’t have a trial by jury, we’ll have a trial by public-opinion poll.”
On April 10, one day before Easter, Judge Davies said, “You may retire to the jury room.” In the days that followed, the jury was heard from only three times. At one point the jurors asked for a copy of the testimony of Melanie Singer, an officer from the California Highway Patrol, who broke down on the stand and cried when she remembered seeing Powell beat King. At another, they asked if they could take their notes back to their hotel rooms to review them. The judge said no to both requests: just remember and think it all through. To break the tension, Powell played poker with his family using sunflower seeds for bets. Koon and his attorney Salzman arrived at the Federal Building one day wearing Groucho Marx noses and glasses. The long wait, Salzman said, was “tougher for me than the trial.”
Among the jurors, the mood was sometimes relaxed, sometimes strained. Out of court they were able to go deep-sea fishing, visit Universal Studios, attend a basketball game and go to the mountains to see the snow, all without being recognized. Despite the camaraderie, some grew to dislike one another. “There were some personality conflicts,” a juror said afterward on KNBC-TV. “Tension only heightened it.”
Within the jury room, the hardest job was to weigh the motives and intent of the four police officers. “Police are just like people,” said the juror. “You can’t expect every police officer to be a good guy all the time, and then again you can’t assume he was a bad guy.” The jurors disregarded the conflicting testimonies of expert witnesses on the severity of King’s beating. In the end, they chose to believe what the entire country had seen on videotape. “We went through the video forwards, backwards, frame by frame, fast motion, slow motion, regular motion,” the juror recalled. “I think the tape basically speaks for itself. I would have to say that is what basically convicted them.” At 3:35 on Friday afternoon, juror number 5, the foreman, informed Judge Davies that they had reached a verdict. The jurors asked for permission to return to their hotel, shower, change and return to court. The judge decided to seal the verdict overnight.
The pause was a blessing for Mayor Tom Bradley and Police Chief Williams. It gave them 15 hours to prepare the city for the verdict. When Williams put the LAPD on tactical alert, Jesse Jackson, overreacting, attacked a “de facto state of martial law.” In fact, as evening fell, Sgt. Danny Contreras, out behind the 77th Precinct, said everything looked more or less normal to him. At Florence and Normandie avenues, ground zero last year, people were out calmly washing their cars. An hour later Bradley went on the radio. “Let’s all take a deep breath,” he said. “To those who may be itching for an excuse to harm our neighborhoods, I have this warning: you will not get away with it.”
At 7 the next morning, the jurors somberly filed into the jury box. Not one looked at the defendants. The chief court clerk called out the verdicts one by one. The defense attorneys requested that the jury be polled. Had each juror’s decision been accurately recorded? “Yes,” answered each of the 12.
Once the verdicts were delivered, downtown Los Angeles stirred to life. A fleet of news helicopters buzzed the skies. Upstairs in Parker Center, headquarters of the LAPD, Williams looked out the window and said “Are they supposed to be flying that close together? Just don’t let them crash into each other: I don’t need another emergency on my hands.” Otherwise, the police chief looked relaxed. He sat in a dark gray suit, peering at reports through gold-rimmed glasses. It had been exactly a year and a day since he took the chief’s job. “This is a happier way to begin my second year,” he said. And how should the citizens of L.A. begin? “Go back to their daily lives,” he said. “Go to school, go to movies, go shopping, get in the pool-if the sun comes out.”
In black neighborhoods, the sense of vindication was palpable. “It was a beautiful verdict, a helluva plus for America,” said Jamil Shabazz, owner of the Crenshaw Cafe, where the breakfast crowd hummed with the news. At Florence and Normandie, members of the Community Youth Gang Service in maroon Windbreakers and baseball caps cooling the intersection found that the job was easy. There were more reporters and community workers around than ordinary citizens. Leonard Weaver, a member of the Men of Bethel AME Church, one of many churchmen who hit the street at 6 a.m. on “keep cool” missions, said, “There’s nothing going to go on. The reaction is positive in a lot of ways because you got the two main culprits. This is a million-dollar-plus joke on all the press. They wanted something to happen and right now everybody’s laughing.”
The immediate challenge was for Los Angeles to get past the sense of suspicion that possessed the city as the trial drew to a close. Before the verdict, rumors of violence flew across the neighborhoods: ganghangers would torch gas stations in Brentwood, Bel Air and Beverly Hills; hatreds would leap over the mountain range dividing the city, searing Sherman Oaks, Encino and Tarzana out along Ventura Boulevard. Urban terrorists would set brush fires in hills dotted with multimillion-dollar houses. Out in the Porter Ranch section of the San Fernando Valley, an hour’s drive from South-Central, nerves got so frayed that a white homeowner turned up in olivedrab combat gear to tell Chief Williams that he didn’t feel safe. “Well, I hope you don’t have to wear your helmet and flak jacket,” the top cop replied mildly. But his real message was far more serious: “What I’m saying is have a little faith.”
That may be L.A.’s larger challenge: faith in the city itself has dangerously eroded. At a Porsche showroom in Beverly Hills, Carl Wilson, 35, an air force veteran, conceded that the four cops had beaten King senseless; that the LAPD could have and should have stopped the last riots; that the looters comprised a hodgepodge of whites as well as blacks, Latinos and Asians. But fragmentation, not racism, he argued, was the real point. “How can people in this city know each other when neighbors don’t talk to neighbors?” he said. “We used to think we were the Great American Melting Pot.” Now, forget it: Wilson’s short-term goal was to get his wife and two little kids out of Los Angeles; in the meantime, he had bought two guns for his house.
Would the hair-trigger mood last? Could the alienation and rage of the past year be overcome? “Everything’s out of control,” said Karen Holt, who works for a carpet dealer in Sherman Oaks, has dated Latinos and plays golf with an exercise coach who is an African-American. But when she found three young black men behind her at a cash machine recently, she pantomimed a transaction to make it look as if she were broke, and fled. “There’s too much freedom. I don’t want to become a Nazi state or anything-but we need something.” In West Los Angeles, Bill Greer, a shoe salesman, turned grim. “‘I want to get’ has replaced ‘I want to earn’ in America,” he said, forgetting how hard it is to earn when you have no job. “There are people, it’s sad to say, who aren’t fit to live here anymore,” he added. Didn’t that sound extreme? “I can’t help that,” he said. “I believe it. That makes me a racist-and I don’t like that.”
The issue now is whether Angeles can devote itself to repairing the social divisions that afflict the city. Among the more enlightened is Terri Hartman, 32, who sold antiques in a Yuppie neighborhood on La Brea Boulevard. After last year’s riot Hartman joined other civic-minded whites and blacks in a cleanup organized by the Reverend Cecil Murray’s First AME Church. When she first moved to Los Angeles 15 years ago, she saw a city that was less segregated, where classes and races mixed more freely. No more. “A lot of white jitteriness can be attributed to guilt,” she says. “I feel guilty that this is not a better city, that I personally have done nothing to make this city more livable, to change its problems.” She still thought class divided Los Angeles more deeply than race. “I want the melting-pot ethic to be true,” she said. “But at the same time, I don’t want to endanger myself or my [future] children-it’s a real dilemma.”
In Koreatown, relief over the verdicts did not exorcise the profound sense of disillusionment and fear that followed last year’s riots. At the Korea Times newsroom, young journalists craned forward to watch a Korean businessman being interviewed on TV. “The despair and pain in our community will now be converted to hope,” he said cautiously. “But it will take time to restore faith in the police and the American people.” At a rumor control center established by a group called the Korean Young Adult Team, volunteers were operating a 12-line hot line to calm residents. “This is a long-term operation,” said one of the volunteers manning the phone bank. “We can’t rest until after the Denny verdict. People might be upset and we want to tell them we’re here.”
While the verdict seemed likely to improve the mood of South-Central for a while, it could not and did not change the deeper sources of distress afflicting the black community of Los Angeles. On turf where random violence is the rule, not the exception, where there are few jobs, little money and less hope, the workings of a courtroom do little to help. The murder of Denzel Range, 16, provided one case in point. The young man’s body lay under a transparent canopy in a blue steel coffin at the Harrison Ross Mortuary on Crenshaw Boulevard last week. Three days before Easter, he had gone to see the dentist. Then he set off to visit his father in South-Central. Along the way he met and argued with a girl. Shortly afterward, she left, a car sped up, a gangbanger jumped out and shot him several times in the back. Range was dead before the ambulance arrived. “For a young black man, this is a city that doesn’t care,” his mother said. “Either you’re branded, in prison or dead. All you can do is turn to drugs. This system sucks, excuse my language. It brands you.”
At the peak of the riots last year, Boston’s Mayor Raymond Flynn, head of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, went to Los Angeles. When he asked Bradley, “What’s the one thing that would get you out of this?” the beleaguered leader looked at him gloomily and replied, “Ray-jobs.” A year later, estimates put the unemployment rate in South-Central at about 16 percent. Studying the numbers, Bernard Kinsey, a former Xerox executive who is cochairman of Rebuild L.A., observes that what the desperate of South-Central are saying is, “We’re going to get into the game-or we’re going to break into the game.” The nonprofit group, headed by Peter Ueberroth, has raised $500 million to help out. But that is only a drop in the bucket. In self-defense, Kinsey says, “We’re talking about an area of 2% million people. What they’re asking us to do is to fix a state like Arkansas in 10 months.” In some ways R.L.A. may have become a scapegoat for all who have failed to turn things around. Gloria Molina, a city-council activist, now calls the group “the dumping ground for the city’s woes and worries.”
The brightest point of light on the scene was Chief Williams, a morale-boosting improvement over his predecessor Daryl Gates. The new chief’s approach is to charge out of his office to meet almost daily with community leaders-those from riot-scarred neighborhoods and those from the well-tended zones of the middle class and the rich. He preaches a kind of civic empowerment and tells all who will listen that he’s treating the LAPD like a business and the citizens as customers. The city council, initially skeptical, now respects him. He’s impressed most white suburbanites. Williams argues that the city’s future lies in a new partnership between cops and the public. Taking notice, Mike Woo, a city councilman running for mayor, slipped a photo of himself with Williams into a TV ad. The campaign spot made all the other candidates furious-and proved the chief’s strength.
Even so, Williams’s job has only just begun. He argues that “at a minimum” he needs 9,800 to 10,000 officers, 2,000 fewer than he has, to carry out the community policing measures proposed by a reform commission a year ago. Last November he supported an initiative to add 1,000 new cops to his undermanned force. The city’s voters turned him down. The measure us back on next week’s ballot during the mayoral race; once again there is no certain sign that it will pass. “We are becoming an invisible force,” he told one nervous group of residents out in the Valley. “I cannot stand here and tell you everything is OK.”
Nor could anyone else. After the verdict, Terree Bowers, the U.S. attorney for the district including Los Angeles, made an unusual personal aside on the case. He pointed out that he lived in the city, not Washington. He said that like so many others he had arrived knowing the virtues of the town. “Our renaissance, if it is to be one, must come from each of us,” he said. He conceded that the transformation could take years. The best hope, he said, was that the Rodney King trial would one day be “remembered as a footnote in the renewal and recovery of Los Angeles.” Everyone of good will hoped the same thing.
