Original subtitles

Everyone knew

years ago that the Negro would have to be given equality.

But in the South, knowing Negroes as we think we do,

we realize it would take time.

That's.

It's been compared to the straightening teeth.

It takes a slow, steady pressure.

You can't do it with a hammer.

It's too hasty.

What did you think we were before you began to think of us as human beings?

Well, you know, in a way,

we thought of you almost as a very superior pet.

Something we had to take care of.

Now. What are.

Black country refugees

feeling about?

The time.

We're here to keep the niggers in place.

At this time,

police killed three of my fellow that we

be very job.

Well, what made to be

not go.

And if you think I'm going down there

and playing with a bunch of who let us to obey the law. No.

The United States government

ought to systematically commit genocide on the Black Panther Party.

So when we have God, we feel.

Between. You.

We shot to a game.

That's

begins.

To war.

In the film you radio can we revolution

a modern day nation with the best two days in my fucking life.

And tell me.

We gonna be.

We going to burn the goddamn city that.

Goes.

On. You. Oh!

Oh my God!

God damn it!

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah,

motherfucker! Oh!

You motherfucker!

Oh my God!

Oh, my love, what y'all?

Motherfucker!

Motherfucker!

Y'all gonna take

Robert, take my dog.

Take his.

Life back.

Down!

Who's.

So, do you know much about the history of the Los Angeles Police Department?

You know, I, Sasha.

I do know, a little bit about it.

La, actually, out of the West Coast is really bad about keeping its history.

So, you know, some of it is some of it's a little bit lost.

We we're an organization with about 145 years of history.

You know, this was a small pueblo, Los Angeles,

built on a river not very far from where we sit right now.

Originally, it was, it was a very western town,

and it had a very violent beginning. And.

The homicide rates in early

Los Angeles were much higher than they ever have been, since.

And so, it was, from the start, a violent place.

I'm still terrified by the LAPD, the institution itself.

It's a fundamentally evil institution

that is only in this state, partially reformed.

It was rebuilt explicitly after the Second World War to enforce racial restriction.

When I was 17

years old, Los Angeles Police Department changed my life.

This man was a symbol of the finest police officer in the world.

It was at a Halloween dance and, fight broke out.

LAPD came and I guess I wasn't moving fast enough

or whatever, but the guy hit me with Billy club.

Remember, as police officers, we may only use that amount of force

necessary to make an arrest.

I was beat

by maybe nine police worse than Rodney King.

I must have stayed in the hospital

for maybe a couple of months before I even went to court.

They didn't want any judge to see the condition that I was in.

When I got out of, juvenile hall, I was saying, yes, sir.

No, ma'am.

Thank you.

My my family didn't recognize me.

You know, it changed me. I was wrong,

so I got what I deserved.

But you think you deserve

to get beat worse than Rodney King for moving a little bit slow.

Well, no, I don't, but I was resisting.

Let us remember that we are not brutalized because we're Baptists.

We're not brutalized because we're Methodist.

We're not brutalized because we're Muslims.

We're not brutalized because we're Catholics.

We're brutalized because we are black people

in America.

In the spring of 1962,

a gun battle between Negroes and police outside the Los Angeles

Mosque of the Muslim was shack built around the belief

that complete separation of the races is the only hope for America.

In that gunfight, one negro was killed, 14 wounded.

In the early 60s, friends of Malcolm X set up a mosque in Los Angeles,

one of the leading members of the morning sports in the laundry,

so he would bring clothes into the trunk of his car,

is parked about a block away from the mosque, and he was getting out

and somebody came over to help him, and the LAPD stopped him,

harassed them, and,

began to knock them around.

More cops came.

The cops invaded the mosque itself,

and one cop was shot by another cop accidentally.

Cops went mad.

They lined the Muslims up, and they shot them in the genitals.

And people were killed, including one of the witnesses, a Malcolm X.

Malcolm X wanted to retaliate and take that cop's

Elijah Muhammad thought that the nation would lose everything if it did.

That 75 police

came over to kill all that they could.

My followers and most number 27.

Right? Right.

They go over that, right?

Some Los Angeles citizens believe the Muslim shooting so crystallized

Negro feelings that from that point, April

1962, big trouble was inevitable.

Two of the brothers were shot in the back.

Two of them were shot.

Excuse me.

Expression through the penis.

And I, for one, as a muslim, believe that the white man is intelligent enough.

If he were made to realize how black people really feel

and how fit up we are

without that compromise and sweet talk, stop sweet talking him.

Tell him how you feel and let him know that if he's not ready

to clean his house up.

If he's not ready to clean his house up,

he shouldn't have a house

should catch on fire

when burned down.

All right, panel a brilliant beginning, Alex.

See what you can do with that second challenge.

Will you sign in, please, sir?

Bill?

Bill.

Parker, is that right, sir?

One man who has played an important role in raising the Los Angeles

police officer to a professional status is Police Chief William Parker.

He has been able to create divisions within the department

to deter the Los Angeles rising crime rate.

William Parker, who was the law and order chief of the LAPD,

was probably one of the most racist police chiefs that the LAPD has ever had.

If you go way back to the beginning of the LAPD,

it started out with that southern and racist mentality.

We're here to keep the niggers in place.

Parker imposed a military culture,

the Los Angeles Police Department, through years

of self-evaluation and constant improvement,

has raised itself to a high professional standing in the community.

But in militarizing them, he didn't get rid of the racism.

And so the racism took on an occupying force quality.

The white deputy chief who got assigned to Watts,

his unofficial title is Nigger Inspector.

He recruited officers that were from the South.

He recruited officers that he knew hated black people.

And he didn't care about

policing the black community in a way to make everyone safe.

He just wanted to police the community,

to keep them there and to keep the whites over here safe.

Los Angles is the finest place in the world for the Negro,

because he has the greatest opportunity here on a broad basis.

Then he will anywhere else in the world.

Los Angeles had a reputation

at one point of being a good city for black culture.

For instance, late 1940s Central Avenue, the center black culture,

the totally integrated scene, central Avenue was the drag for us.

I mean, that's where you had all the entertainment.

That's where all the entertainers came, and they live

because they couldn't live anywhere else.

You're talking about Billie Holiday, you're talking about

Nat King Cole, you're talking about Sammy Davis Jr.

When Parker became chief of police, he launched a campaign.

He would arrest white women going to clubs on Central Avenue for prostitution.

When I was a young teenager, the center of the world was a place

called Dolphin's of Hollywood, greatest record store in the world.

Everybody came there.

Parker actually laid siege to it.

He had cops stationed outside to turn people away.

If they were white.

Compton was all white.

South gate was all white.

Huntington Park was all white.

Veil was all white.

Vernon was all white.

That was on the other side of Alameda.

The track on this side of the tracks is where they allow black people

to live from Central to Broadway,

back to Imperial to Alameda,

and when the highway system gets built up during the 1950s and the 1960s,

they're meant to be able

to allow people to get into the downtown and out of the downtown area.

The suburbs are increasingly built up all along these different arteries.

White flight basically begins during the 1940s and what that means

is that who's left in the inner cities

are basically people of color.

Which is a ghetto, but not a slum, as the term is known.

In older cities.

There are streets of prim, lower and middle class homes

and a squalid areas of condemned houses with people living in them.

Two thirds of the adults have less than a high school education.

1 in 8 is illiterate, which has the lowest average income rate

in Los Angeles County $4,000 per year, compared with more than $8,000 per year.

Well, the white community they crowd together.

These Black Country refugees, a thousand new ones every month,

pouring into Los Angeles, and they find in the land of Golden Promise

that there still are white black men, white merchants, white landlords,

whites in the mid 60s is fully overcrowded.

And what you see is Los Angeles police literally trying to figure out ways

to contain black folks and people of color in their neighborhoods.

There was this ideal that African-Americans

can migrate to LA and escape the racism from the South.

But what would they didn't realize was that whites were immigrating

to Los Angeles from those same cities, from those same communities.

They wanted to keep black folks in our place.

We couldn't go off of this barrier, this boundary.

And the police were basically used to keep us under control.

Gangs were formed, in a sense, to protect us, you know, from those

who would come in and prey on the community, like the spook hunters,

you know, which was a group of white boys out of Compton.

You know, they used to come down and prey on folks in the neighborhood.

Spook hunters is the one that's the most infamous one,

because they had that leather jacket with the African-American

on the back of the jacket with a noose around his neck,

which seems pretty crazy, but that's what a lot of the guys from the 1950s tell us.

They would catch us by cell and jump out and Rat Pack.

So that was the start of the sloughs.

And the businessmen, rabble rousers, the gladiators.

It was protection for fun for our black people.

One day I was

driving down the street and I saw they had these six young

African-American men, you know, maybe 16 to 18.

They had them just standing on the sidewalk,

hands on your head, you know, put your hands on your head.

Sometimes they make them put their hands on the hot car or lay down.

Lay down on the ground. Lay on your belly.

You know, that racist behavior.

So I pulled over.

I get out my car, I see this happening.

And the police said to me, who are you?

Are you their mother?

I said, yes, and and so the kids looked at me,

you know, and they and they were like, why did you get out your car?

You know, are you related to them?

I said, I'm a mother of a nation in the universe.

You know, I'm all of their mothers.

And he said, shuffle your feet and move on.

Are you going to jail for loitering?

When I was in with the Los Angeles

Police Department, I worked in South Central L.A.

I knew a lot of the people who lived there,

and they they depended on the Los Angeles

Police Department to have any kind of decent quality of life.

It was a horrible time.

You didn't see the lynchings of the sort that we were sort of familiar

with and outraged about in the South,

but it was the same thing as it was the dead black man.

I was a violated black woman.

We weren't on the plantation, but you were, you know, you were in your car.

I mean, I can remember a time when they put me and my wife and my son

over and just treated as awfully.

So the question is, how many slaps in the face can a community take?

The complaint that you hear everywhere is that the Negro is not getting

the same treatment from the police as well?

I think, and I know, but I'm getting a little bit weary of that.

And I think perhaps the best thing to do is just to pull the police

out of the area.

I've offered to do that again and again, but you see how quick they are

to come back and say, we can't afford to have that, because what you must remember,

and this is the thing you must think of when you get this vicious come on,

is that the great majority of the victims of crime are Negro.

August of 1965.

It was hot.

I'm talking about. It was.

Whew.

Law enforcement authorities say that heat,

intense heat, irritates a man, makes him more violent.

The tension was

it was mounting up.

The spark

for the unrest comes 1st August afternoon.

The fry brothers, who have been at a party.

They've been drinking a little bit.

They're speeding down the highway

and they start getting chased by a California highway policeman.

They end up stopping very close to home,

and a confrontation begins between the police and the brothers.

We see the police pull Marquette over.

We heard the officer's calling him all kind of niggers and all this stuff.

His mother stayed right around the corner here on town.

So she was coming.

She was rather than saying, really?

At Marquette, I told you, you know, I'll be drinking and this.

But her whole thing was for the officer not to impound that 1955 Buick

and the officer, he was going to let Marquette go.

Then his other two racist police pulled up,

and the LAPD does their usual humiliating, aggressive behavior.

Marquette mother jumped on the back of the officer.

They got two going at it.

They finally got Marquette, Rondo

and Rene and the police car and drove off.

But the highway patrol was still here waiting on the tow truck

to tow to 1955 year.

A sister by the name of Joyce Gaines did have.

And she had on a

smile that made her look like she was pregnant.

We were exchanging words and telling them, don't impound the car, man.

I said, man, the hell with you.

Black nigger took her and slammed her against the car.

When they snapped her against the car and all hell broke

loose.

It began with police and rioters clashing on a hot Wednesday night.

Some believe

it could have been stopped right then if law officers moved in in force

and sealed off the area.

I was a young police officer working

the watch area, and the riots actually started on my beat.

It was as close to anarchy as I've ever seen anywhere or at any time.

It was the most widespread, most destructive racial violence in American history.

White people

driving through the riot area were considered fair game,

whether young or old, men or women.

Their cars were battered, the drivers

stoned, kicked and beaten, and the cars were burned.

And the mobs might groan and curse and disappoint men when a white got away,

and then cheer like a football crowd when a car went up

in flames.

White people try to always call it a riot.

Wasn't a riot, you know.

It was a rebellion against a pressure riot is when, you know, you see these

white folks at the football game, they pull down the goalposts.

This was about people who had reached a boiling point

in terms of the oppression that we were feeling.

There was no way to contain it.

The riot, I think, opened a lot of people's eyes.

You know, I was very young then, and I guess I always sort of

watched The song of the South and those kind of things, and figured

all the people in South Central really were happy.

But it

would be a

wonderful feeling, wonderful day.

And as all of a sudden occurred to me, doesn't look like they're that happy.

And to retaliate, it was a good feeling.

It was a really good feeling.

Well, then 1500 people were in the streets,

15 citizens injured, 19 officers hurt, 31 arrested, 12 juveniles.

Over 100 police rushed to the area, sealing off eight square blocks

in an effort to quarantine.

The rioting subsided and began all over again shortly before dawn.

I got up that

morning and I went to the neighborhood playground.

Could see smoke coming up from across Central Avenue.

When I got home, my grandmother told me that I could not cross Central Avenue

because of the riots and the riots that came down Central

Avenue from Watts, all the way on the South Central Los Angeles.

And we need to stay in the house and be protected.

My uncle, who was a street type person,

he came into the house and he had about six hats

that he had gotten off of Central Avenue when they were looting.

Now, in the daylight hours to the shattered section of South

Los Angeles, a Negro neighborhood

torn by two nights of rioting, left battered and bloodied.

And now the looters, the pillaging.

I saw a lot of people that had, you know,

3 or 4 televisions and other, you know, things like that, that, you know,

really didn't amount to a whole of beans compared to

what we lost.

What had been skirmishing

before between police and hit run Negro groups

became a wholesale exercise in stealing and burning.

What do you want the policemen to do?

Do you want to match them in there? For what purpose?

Depending on everybody down.

On fire? No.

I'm simply asking you to explain. What?

What the thinking of the police is.

I have no other thing.

They said they have a city to protect.

And I can't tell the man in the watch and allow all, least

the rest of the 450mi² to be open season

to every, every petty criminal and burglar in town.

I know someone like Doctor Martin Luther King should be down there.

No, King doesn't, but we've got local residents.

Heck of a King doesn't put out all the fires in the United States.

There are some local Negroes here that are that are leaders in these situations

for us to continue to try and meet violence with violence, okay?

It's the wrong way.

That's all it's going to see. And I want to tell you something.

Tonight is going to be another, whether you like it or not.

Yeah.

No, no no wait no no no.

See, babe, we we, the Negro people down here have gotten completely fatal.

And you know what?

They go through the night, they don't get hit like they're not going to.

They're not going to fight down here. No.

You know what? They're going to wait.

Oh, yeah.

As word of the

shouted threat to do the white man and spread by word of mouth, whites

began to crowd the gun shops for weapons to defend themselves.

And yeah.

Now, when I was a young boy,

at the age of five.

You know what I mean? Here.

Chevrolet. White.

Any color, any car.

I pass 21 year.

I take a picture. This junior.

Get him.

Get him in. Hey,

I got.

The sound of the snipers rifle is being heard even more frequently.

From time after time, sniping turned into full scale combat

Guardsmen in Los Angeles.

Police responding with pistols and semi-automatic weapons.

By the third or fourth night, the LAPD had actually evacuated the community.

One side I'd seen in my life that I thought was the most

amazing is about 40 black and white.

Leaving South Central.

Some people are getting hurt.

Here are the police and innocent citizens on the rioters are prevailing.

You know, if you think I'm going down there

and plead with a bunch of who love us to obey the law, oh.

When what's happened?

I was 12 years old, and we had just moved from one side of town to the other.

And as a matter of fact, if we had stayed where we lived

previously, we would have been in the middle of it.

My white friends were afraid their parents stores were being burnt

down, their furniture stores or other stores

that they had.

See, if you were, like, the only African-American

in an environment people expect for you to explain.

So please tell us why you're all doing this.

But they bought businesses.

But most of the people in this building at that particular time were black.

So I guess they just passed it on.

But it was a really serious, scary time just to be in the area.

On the

morning of Friday the 13th, Chief Parker called

what the National Guard.

National guard

was on the street, coming right down Central.

I remember personally the tankers going up, you know,

and the police walking down the street in armored gear, rifles drawn

and my brother and I were standing at the doorway as they walked past.

They just kind of looked at us and pointed the guns toward the door.

For what?

I don't know, maybe to intimidate us, to frighten us.

And they did.

The LAPD came back with the National Guard.

They took their revenge.

Drop that first. Hit your hands up.

Put your hands up!

We know now that these have been days and nights

as horrible as any American city has ever lived through.

This evening, Los Angeles remains hot, quiet, tense and dangerous.

28 people killed all but four of them.

Negroes will stop reports.

That figure is sure to rise as bodies are found in the rubble,

762 have been injured and 2256 arrested.

The damage at a guess, close to $200 million.

Governor Brown has extended last night's 8:00 curfew for another 24 hours.

Right now, about 15,000 police and National Guardsmen

are on patrol in the 40 Square Mile riot area.

I command you to immediately disperse.

Any persons remaining in this immediate area

will be taken into custody here.

At first, they turned off the electricity,

and then they threatened to turn off the water.

And my grandmother decided to take us from South Central

46 and Central Avenue to my aunt's house.

When she loaded up the car and drove us to the end where the blockade was.

I remember the flashing lights coming down in the car

and the National Guards rifles in the car, water.

When you get out of the car, you better get out.

Render your life, not be able to get out.

I'm sorry.

How do I get off the street so long?

But she's only about four hours out.

Yeah.

Curfew 8:00, everybody.

It was martial law,

and no African-Americans were allowed on the street.

After a certain period of time, you aren't allowed to leave the city.

You weren't allowed to travel around.

I said, all over American.

I come out to watch to tell you the day that no matter how your hair looks.

All right,

no matter what your

features are, no matter what color you are,

you are somebody.

So speak out of your heart and speak.

You couldn't talk to anybody, so there was nobody to talk to.

You couldn't talk to the cops because they don't want to talk to me.

They want to be my friends up this like they've been doing all of that.

And the only way, the only way in saying

that we can never get anybody at any time to listen to this day in a row.

We got sent enough to know that this is not the final answer,

but it's a beginning.

It's a beginning.

But it was too late.

Oh, well, somebody took him to death.

Although he was, the load on it got kicked in the head

when a guy in the city hall, a police chief called the people

of the United States of America in this area a bunch of monkeys.

He's not worth $0.02 to be a policing

for three days before this, all this happened,

this think was

just started and waiting for the first day they got they check right.

Maybe this was a continuing situation down here all the time.

Well I mean can't I don't they get the money from welfare.

I mean we have the aid in 80.

They need job.

That's what they mean.

What hurt make all the rioting stop. One.

I don't think it ever stopped.

Really? Never.

I mean, that may not be like this, but

it'll never stop.

What will end it?

Now, that's the question that everyone want to know.

The thing I think the way it ended is

a little more harmony on both sides.

Expressed how.

You have me there.

That's kind of hard to say.

You wish it would end?

Yeah.

Nathan, all the stores are closed.

I mean, the stores. What it left

not open.

Get food.

Oh, I don't know what's gonna happen.

In the wake of the riots, some believe that public officials

are to blame for failing to act or acting too slowly.

Still others believe the police are to blame.

And still others say that Negroes themselves are responsible.

They say that many in this part of town are from the poorest parts of the Deep

South, are immoral, uneducated,

ill prepared for life in the big city.

And there are those who believe the riots for the work of an organized hoodlum gang

whose leaders are willing to back down now in the face of armed might,

to put away their weapons, buy their time, and strike again harder.

Perhaps when the guard and the police have moved on to other areas,

it's hard to tell about the enigma of what's

a few things, of course, our obvious

one is this the three fingered sign that makes it crude

looking for what's passing through the Negro sections.

At the height of the riots,

you could hear again and again the cry, give me three men.

And if you didn't hold up the three finger w you could be in trouble.

But that was watched during the riots.

Watch.

Today is a sign posted by a National Guard

checkpoint manned by three armed soldiers.

A sign saying turn here or get shot.

Where were you in L.A.

or on the east side of town, South Los Angeles?

Well, that's a nice, yeah, neighborhood.

I mean, it's

they're doing the riots most definitely.

Again, you don't say this at all.

No, not only was I there, I was participating

in, to what degree?

You know, whatever I could pick up fast what I

how did you feel the next morning?

Very good to. We.

Legacy of 1965.

Is that it sort of brought to a close

the optimism of the civil rights movement.

It introduced violence as a result of people's

dissatisfaction with the pace at which things were moving in a major way.

And in 1965, of course, leads to 1967 and the long, hot summers across the country.

Pretty much every major city

in this period experienced some type of urban uprising.

We are running around talking about black folks are looting.

I agree there should be more shooting and looting.

That's the only thing I believe in

black folks trying to loot when they should be shooting.

If you going to loot, loot your gun store. Was.

There was a kind of commission report that came out.

It talked about two Americas.

This is our basic conclusion.

Our nation is moving toward two societies,

one black, one white, separate and unequal.

And that's when in Washington they pass the anti-poverty program.

So there's a lot of money available coming in the community.

So you had all kinds of programs that were started.

You had programs for health, you had programs for economic development,

you had programs for the arts.

What's in 1966 is not unlike the wants of 1965.

But there is one change.

There is communication.

Now, most of it by blacks with blacks or blacks, but

some of the channels have been opened up by white men to one of those white men.

And watch 1966 is much over, but Schulberg wrote On the Waterfront

came down and helped organize the Whites Writers Workshop

because it was never there.

Something empty. Fill the gap.

And since the absence was not seen, the call to the people die.

Schulberg had the notion that if you gave people an opportunity

to express themselves, to have some kind of artistic outlet,

then you'd have a better neighborhood, you'd have better circumstances.

And a lot of us took him up on that.

He knew that Watts,

like many so-called ghettos, was a bottlenecked energy.

So I went to the Watts Writers Workshop and asked about,

you know, the different classes.

And Anthony Hamilton was the head of a poetry class.

And after that class, he approached me and said, you know what?

We have a group

called the Watts Prophets, and we've been looking for a female member.

We weren't trying to be

Grammy winning musicians and poets.

We were trying to make a difference, make a change, make our people feel

better about themselves.

They break. We'll find me.

Daybreak will find me. Down on my knees.

A slave to my job.

Lord I got to get free a baby is born.

But what's his destiny if he's black in a white world?

It is.

But they were using their craft and they were using their music,

you know, to really explain and really talk about

the condition of black folk and talk about the inequity

that existed among us up until the point that we had a riot in Boston.

Those niggers are all right.

They're doing fine. Okay.

We riot.

Then when we had a riot, then a white man said, oh, something's wrong

because these suckers are burning down my store.

I got to give these niggas something because I thought they was happy.

But what did he give them

with the bands and the smoke?

You think it was an Armistice Day parade?

A second anniversary watch?

Well, in a way it is celebrating two years of peace

in this South Central Los Angeles community.

The theme of the festival, Black is Beautiful.

It's designed to remind the young man here that they should be proud of their color

and of what one of the interesting things that happens out of whites as well

is that there's also a lot of ferment around cultural

organizing and community organizing.

The US organization comes out of this particular period.

We have got my manhood back by the acts of man.

When the brother grows up with a knife from a building

that he has just returned to his manhood, Christ

has presented us with an opportunity that we had never had before.

That is to pull everybody together and get them into some constructive program.

The Black Panthers come on to the scene very shortly thereafter

that the racist dog

policeman that was stopped, they wanted murder and brutality

of black people of faith, the wrath of, black people in the black community,

the US and the Panthers had different ideologies than US organizational,

more cultural nationalists.

They wore dashikis grew their hair out, and the Panthers were revolutionaries.

They wore leather jackets.

They talked about being armed and using weapons in self-defense.

They were all motivated by monitoring the LAPD.

Let's monitor what they do.

Taking down names of cops, documenting police abuses.

A lot of the gang members became Panthers.

They were repurposed.

Community activists had something different to do.

They had something that was positive to do.

And it was a really good time because crime was down, gang

violence was at its lowest, and consciousness was at its highest.

For African-Americans.

It wasn't sanctioned by the system,

by white folks, by law enforcement.

So it was a constant, you know, ebb and flow.

If you will, or an attempt to break it up, to create havoc

so that it wouldn't continue.

When the FBI was under, J.

Edgar Hoover, their goal was to create as much conflict

between the Panthers and the US, because they were the two most prominent

political groups in Los Angeles.

A new report from the Senate Intelligence Committee detailing more FBI abuses.

The staff report tells how the FBI used anonymous notes to provoke

bloody gang wars between the Black Panthers and rival groups.

One of the main organizers was a young man named Bunchy Carter,

who was a leader of the Lawson's gang,

and he undergoes

sort of a political awakening and signs

up, then becomes a Black Panther in a school building at UCLA.

There's a shootout between the US organization and the Black Panther Party,

and when she, Carter's one of the folks was killed.

At approximately 2:45 p.m.

this afternoon,

two men were murdered at the UCLA campus.

Their names are John Huggins, 23 years old,

and Al Prentiss Carter, 26 years old.

It's just one of the tragic moments in L.A.

history because

Bunchy brought that leadership to the youth.

Between 2

and 300 Los Angeles Police Department officers

masked near the Black Panther Party headquarters in Los Angeles,

the United States government and the state authorities and state

agencies are out to systematically commit

genocide on the Black Panther Party.

There was just an emptiness in Los Angeles in 1969.

Everything just stopped, and it allowed a new generation of teenagers

to try to do their own thing.

Crip continuous revolution in progress.

When Raymond Washington started the Crips, they wore leather coats.

Leather coats became a big deal because that's what the Panthers wore.

So stylistically, they wanted to be like the Panthers.

Politically, they didn't have the know how.

Redmond, Washington was just a 15 year old kid in the

never been to jail, doesn't know anything about prison at that point in time.

He just a kid that knows how to fight.

What Raymond Washington and the other Crips wanted to

do was go to neighborhoods and try to, hey, join us.

But they said, oh no, no, no, no, we're fine.

All these gangs that have been victimized by the Crips,

they come together and say, hey, these Crips are just running all over us.

We gotta defend ourselves.

That's when an alliance of all these gangs started to fight against the Crips.

Do its members the gang or club

like our neighborhood is an identity, a defense against the world.

But while belonging to a gang is a harmless inclination

of many youngsters in the ghetto, the gang is far removed from fun.

Holy bigots by the by hate them.

The gangs feelings toward the police and toward the world in general

are emphatically expressed in wall paintings and graffiti.

In many respect, gang graffiti is the newspaper of the street.

Great great great great great great. All right, Darryl, you're here.

And if you'll look handsome, we will take the bone.

All right.

There has been a motion to appoint Daryl Gates to chief of police

of the city of Los Angeles.

All those in favor say aye. Aye.

The motion is carried unanimously.

A meeting of the Board of.

This is truly, great organization.

I perceive that this organization can do anything.

Absolutely anything,

if it has the proper leadership.

Daryl Gates was a protege of William Parker.

So basically we have William Parker from 1950 to 1966.

He dies of a heart attack a year after the riots.

And then Daryl Gates becomes a chief in 1976 to 1992.

So basically we have William Parker as the police chief.

From 1950 to 1992, Chief Gates was a driver for Chief Parker,

and that was part of his training to be chief of police.

The Mafia has a similar system in that there's a driver for the Don.

Maybe the Mafia got that from the police.

Well, maybe they both got it from the military

because that is common in military to,

pray about,

mighty, mighty war in the 70s, as I became more active,

the level of repression from the LAPD was very, very severe.

So activists would get together and we would have meetings

and the LAPD would harass us, would infiltrate our meetings,

tires would be slashed, cars would be vandalized.

Daryl Gates and files on members of the city council.

And during those years,

the police chiefs actually was the most powerful person in the city.

Because of the way the city charter was written, he couldn't be fired.

Gates bristled when one reporter asked him to comment on the increase in officer

involved shootings.

You know that there is an increase.

That is precisely what I'm talking about.

There is a decrease in officer involved shootings,

but as people like you that perpetuate the myth that there's an increase.

The entire Swat idea came out of Daryl Gates

and LAPD's work in trying to

contain black activists in the 1960s.

I knew Daryl Gates very well or worked directly for him.

Some of the things that he was criticized for, I think he was misunderstood.

One time, he said he was concerned

that blacks didn't respond to the chokehold as normal people.

He said, quote, in some blacks, when the hold is applied,

the veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do in normal people.

He was immediately made out to be a racist.

Hey, it may be that, on some the arteries do not open

up, in in a normal fashion or maybe a normal fashion.

Said a normal people would have been better terminology.

Blacks who died after the application of controls, the vast majority of them had

that are on the home side of a sickle cell anemia crisis.

So he was on to something.

But when he said it, it came out wrong.

I'm convinced it was his sense of compassion

that was driving him to try to find out what was going on, which almost

when I was like between 1213, police officer

by he were trying to antagonize me to fight.

It was a grown ass man with a gun

and he's groping my ass

and grabbing my nuts and like, trying to get me to do something.

All my homies right there, you know, it's like, what the fuck?

Dehumanizing, you know?

Growing up in South Central,

we didn't really interact with any other racist.

We were segregated.

You go to far north of Wilshire or Pico.

Cops were pulling you over, so it wasn't too much of going outside

of your neighborhood to get kind of had you.

Boxed in in Los Angeles, a court now

appears to have settled the issue of which students will be educated.

Where we went to school in the San Fernando Valley got bused.

I'm a P-Funk fan.

Punk rock started happening on the radio.

It was a lot of shit.

It was fertile.

Oh, we went to school with white kids that were like

actually getting into this stuff, you know?

So there was a little cultural exchange.

I didn't get bused.

Kids from L.A., I bust out to my high school, Taft

Ice Cube, went to my high school.

A bunch of kids went to the high school.

But music was around that school, too.

It was crazy.

And I wanted to get down in like, Jefferson, Nebraska with a bunch of kids

spray painting at the time.

I think, you know, the suburban white kids ended up

they were getting exposed to all kinds of shit.

For me, it changed my life.

Just.

Today, in a pool

room in the heart of lots, the rage is subdued.

But it's there.

A new generation of frustrated young men.

Most have a little education.

Some have jail records.

That's no job they don't want to rap about.

I want to steal, but I don't want to go to jail, you know?

So what will you do?

I don't.

Estimates of the unemployment rate and watch run as high as 40%,

and there aren't enough jobs to go around.

I had uncles that worked at General Motors.

When I worked at Kaiser Steel.

You had Goodyear rubber.

Industrial metal was right here, up and down Alameda.

Some good blue collar middle class jobs.

So as kids growing up, we always knew it was a given

that we're probably going to be in those fucking factories, too.

Well guess what? Those jobs got outsourced.

All those factories started closing.

So when I was coming up, there was no jobs, period.

Like, you really didn't know what you were going to do.

One global

industry actually writes to the rescue,

actually expressed an interest

in the declining parts of South Central L.A.,

and they came from Latin America and Colombia and started coming into town.

And they started recruiting black gang members to sell drugs.

And then there was the way of distributing cocaine that was different than before,

which was changing from powder to crack, which led to widespread distribution.

We were all buying up crack as fast as we could, as fast.

We get our money,

you know, got money in our hand, you know, minority out the door, baby.

The drugs are so powerful it will empty the money from your pockets,

make you sell the watch off your wrist.

The clothes off your back, or kill your mother.

Yeah, that's what we're saying.

The whites I grew up in, it was rough, but we was aware.

Gang banging and all that really wasn't about killing somebody might get stabbed.

You know, I'm saying somebody might get rat packed

and stomped out or whatever, but it wasn't.

It wasn't this.

We all just live living the life that's like,

chosen in a way, but it's like forced on us also.

You understand me?

That drug, that money and and guns.

All of that got put here by Reagan and Bush.

CIA Director John Deutch defending America's spy agency against reports

it sold crack cocaine and LA's black neighborhoods to fund the Contras.

I am a former Los Angeles police narcotics detective, and I work

South Central Los Angeles.

And I will tell you, Director Deutch emphatically,

that the agency has dealt drugs throughout this country for a long time.

Every so often it would be

a stalled train car.

It just so happened that train car full of guns.

Where is a CIA informant or a snitch or something?

But somebody the word get out.

Like, you know, it's a car over there and it's full of weapons, new weapons.

That's how a lot of guns got dispersed through the hood is our code of gangsters.

They are using them. Is the real gangsters.

Yeah, because I'm down by law.

I quit my way around too much.

Too many careers is too much.

We, the Los Angeles Police Department cannot exist

with the gangs, and they cannot exist with us.

And so it's just that clear.

You got a red knife, homie?

I'm putting your knowledge that you a game.

You looked up to policemen like superheroes because that's

how I was painted to us.

But getting done dirty by them.

You know, it was a reality check.

Tired of you people hanging around playing.

Boom.

See what I just threw those dice and loaded and loaded it in.

It says, oh, no, let me try this one more time, guys.

If they try this shit, they don't want to tell you who you bang with.

I don't bang with no way. Where do you live?

I live over within you. Yeah you are.

You are such a says crip verse.

It made me question myself.

Like, did I do something wrong like you? Really?

You know, am I a criminal?

Am I what this person said I was

it was like three of us we had on baseball uniforms.

I mean, we're 19 years old.

Some were walking through the alley

and these cops pull up on and say, who won one day we like, we about to go play.

We haven't played yet.

And they say, hold up, smacks my partner.

All right.

Smacks another one, right.

And he punches me.

And he said, gentlemen, that's for the future.

And he got in his car has left there we are reaching the end of 1985

and about to start 1986, but I thought it was time to, talk to you

a little bit about what we've done in 1985 and, cover just some of the highlights.

We put together a motorized battering ram

to get through car doors, and it's been magnificent.

I had never seen tanks roll down the street

to break into a house, because there was such a drug epidemic going on.

They had these things called the Battle Ram, which was a tank, a military tank.

So this was part of the police procedure.

Sorry, Roger,

I should have.

LAPD tore down people's doors with all the wrong addresses.

Didn't matter. They were black.

Who's been with us for a long time?

I need not tell any of you how valuable they are.

They do such a sensational job.

I haven't heard of any dog brutality.

And yet they would release those canine dogs to hunt black kids.

They even had a a joke on the police radio

when they were getting ready to sic the dogs on a captive black teenager.

They call it feeding time, and they refer to black kids as biscuits.

Yes, biscuits.

Being a police officer is something that I did.

The service that I did, it wasn't who I was.

I could take that uniform off.

But the color of my skin, who I am,

I could not take off staying in a patrol car every day.

When you're going out

and you're getting these calls and believe me, it's dangerous.

Patrol officers don't know who's going to hurt them

or what the call is going to be next.

And there's some people out there

that were racist before they came into police work. Right?

They had no reason.

And so everything out here is an aggressive attack mode.

And there's some that they've become cynical

because of the type of work that they have to do.

And they're scared, but they do know that there's a racist system

that will back them up and that they have a better chance of being acquitted

when they when they do overstep their boundaries.

A cop cannot walk up to a man on the street and feel that he is

so powerful that she would not retaliate, especially if he's wrong.

You know them, but the police.

But nobody but public servants.

In 1986, Ice-T is beginning to rap about running from police on six in the morning,

six in the morning, police at my door, fresh this week across the bay.

So the music has this sharp turn, and it's looking at the ways that police

are trying to contain black bodies and offering a sense of resistance.

We were definitely

talking about the corruption and the brutality.

We never really feared what those songs would bring.

We just thought we had to, you know, take a stance.

It was important to us because, I mean, you know, we were the ones getting

harassed every other day, but me having a mic.

I get to kind of

explain and really talk about the things that cause, cause problems.

See, I'm more of a complaining type of rap, like a nag, you know,

because I like to talk about things

that need to be talked about, things that I want to change

or things that that, people need to take from the back of the mind.

I put it to the front of my corner's in a six tray Chevrolet rack top Impala

top crawl.

I got my cousin laid back riding shotgun.

You know, I was doing my thing in the street with

some of my homies from, like, you know, we was using our low street money.

What do you mean by street?

Dope money, Ronald Reagan money.

So we was using our Ronald Reagan money.

You know what? I'm saying it to make an album.

And we just happened to be at the same studio that Ice Cube was at

the artist that he had was, Yo, yo, you can't play with my yo yo.

The brand new challenger.

Black cube used to come scoop me up and I.

I love the brother, you know.

So we we squashed I did because we had some differences.

But he used to come scoop me up

and I'd be like, man, I could I could kill this dude, right?

I wonder how long it take before I hit the news if I hit him right now,

why we in the car

like people is playing his music all around the country right now.

But I can kill him right now.

How do you get to a place where you're thinking about killing your own brother?

400 years of slavery and teaching us to hate ourselves?

Hate yourself? Somebody teach you to hate yourself?

Everything black is wicked and evil and worthless and all that

and everything close to white is right and good and all of that.

So I'm way down in the dirt.

I'm in the in the Eastside bottoms.

I'm, you know, so life don't mean shit to me.

But that's all we know. That's how we talk.

That's how we train.

Audi.

The title of this video tape is, very appropriate.

It's called the Foothill Incident by now.

Or like every man, woman and child, and probably the United States,

you have witnessed, this Foothill incident,

a videotape,

in your own living rooms, over and over again,

25 year old Rodney King had been pulled over by Los Angeles

police officers after a High-Speed Chase, an apartment dweller across the street,

took this home video after seeing no apparent reason

for the police to attack the suspect with boots and nightsticks.

There's not a man or woman in this department

that does not feel as outraged as the public is there.

As a matter of fact, I think we're probably

angrier than the public because it affects us more.

We were like, Holy shit, this, you know, this video camera revolution.

Like they got it finally.

You know what I mean? Finally we got some evidence.

We we're going to expose this this time.

We're going to have justice. This is a terrible thing to say.

We all felt bad for his beating,

but we cheered the fact that it was finally documented.

When we see him getting beat down, everybody's in an uproar.

We ready to go again.

The Jim Browns and the Jesse Jackson's and the Arsenio Hall

and all these people really, really said, hold on, young people.

We got them this time. Don't do anything.

This time their ass is in trouble.

The four Los Angeles policemen charged in the videotaped

beating of a black motorist will not be tried in Los Angeles County.

They moved the trial from L.A.

up to see me.

Valley and Simi Valley is where all cops retire.

And I know that wants to move the trial up there.

The empathy was not going to be with Rodney King.

It was going to be with the officers, because that's the way it works.

I will also reveal the anger and bitterness, but no remorse.

He showed off one of the dozens of cards he says he's received from well-wishers.

I just want to get acquitted and get this over with and behind me.

As a white person, you were taught as a child

and all your life a cop deserves the benefit of a doubt.

So somewhere in the back of my mind, even I'm

looking at that on TV and I'm seeing it and I'm going left.

There be no fucking that dude to death.

There's still this fucking thing that you've been

told your entire life back there that's like part of your base program.

There's got to be a reason.

There's got to be.

He must have done something.

He must be doing something to make them keep doing that.

This on television, all the all over the world, you can see,

tried to beat the man to death.

So how can you say what we saw, what we're watching is not true.

And then something else happened which inflamed a different set of grievances.

15 year old Latasha Harlins was shot and killed by store owner Sue Jadoo.

Do claim Harlins was stealing a bottle of orange juice

when she confronted the teenager.

Latasha was a beautiful person.

She was more like like a mother figure.

She was their protector.

She was always around, making sure nobody missed what her family.

She was good in school. And,

she wanted to be an attorney.

She wanted to be an attorney.

I remember that day like yesterday because we were supposed to hang out,

go to the movies, and.

My grandmother told me

to go to the store to get some orange juice,

and it's the same store at the same time.

And I said, no, I don't feel like it.

You know, me and my sarcastic mouth.

I don't feel like going.

And she said, and she said, okay, don't worry about I'll wait till Tasha get home.

I said, okay, and she just never made it home.

I was so devastated because I could have been there.

I probably you probably would have been me, I don't know, but I could have.

I should have been there when my grandmother told me to go

get the juice. Go. I should have just went and got the juice.

Suraju starts yelling at her like, why are you stealing this bitch?

Like, quit stealing this.

So she's like, I'm just trying to get this, you know, to pay for it, right?

And Latasha Harlins is

turning to walk out and leave, and she fires the gun.

It's fucking bullshit.

You know,

you had a group of individuals that worked so hard

to build this dream of theirs and have so much pride

in what they're doing, opening a shop that they put their whole life into.

In their mind, they're kind of in a protection mode psychologically, right?

Protecting their their store, but not realizing that they're in a neighborhood

that's not theirs.

There was no like, you know, greet them, you know, at the airport.

Hey, you better read up a little bit on civil

rights history so you can maybe, you know, when you open up that store in the hood,

maybe you might avoid 1992.

It's going to happen to you in a couple of years.

It was the wedge that split apart

in a very open and visceral way,

the Korean immigrant community and the African American community.

Why did you open a market that we can use to our family?

Go back to Korea, where no one making blocks,

why don't you, as

you put out a red card death certificate and that's all like Black Korea.

This is what

everyone was listening to my age, my color that came out before the rise as well.

I believe, and it was extremely prophetic.

Every time I want to go get a fucking quote, I gotta go

down to the store with the two oriental white motherfuckers.

They make a nigga mad enough to cause a little ruckus,

thinking every brother in the world got to take Sony,

watch every damn move that I break.

They hope I don't pull out of get try to rob the fucking little store.

But I got a shot fake that Ice Cube made that song.

You know he was only reflecting the reality that we were living with.

Black Korea was like the one track.

I think that probably impacted me the most

in my entire life.

If you don't have these things like truth speakers through, you know,

music or art, then all you have is the media, you know what I mean?

All you have is the news and that's that's your main source of what truth is.

That was like

the other side for me to kind of listen to these other stories and voices.

And a lot of my friends were like, we're boycotting Ice Cube.

Fuck that dude.

You know?

But what gave

I do the right to take Latasha Harlins life?

And who are we actually defending here now?

In that case, justice was actually partially served

because du was found guilty.

She was found guilty of manslaughter.

If you or I were found guilty of manslaughter in the state of California,

we're probably going to be sentenced to 15 years in prison.

That's a typical sentence for that, for that offense.

So the jury did their job, and I do.

It was the judge.

Judge Carlin,

she gave soon.

I do five years probation for shooting a girl in the back of the head.

That's unheard of to suggest that any sentence

that this court might give

results in the conclusion

that young black children don't receive full protection of the law.

That is dangerous rhetoric.

And I can tell you, people were mad

she got away with murder.

We won one judge.

One judge had the power to overturn that decision

on why judge one, why judge?

Always want to just one thing.

And that was justice for the Joshua.

And to be shown that we mattered in this community.

We mattered in this city.

Let's go without you.

Harlins was that explosive moment that really sort of got

everybody focused on what was going on in our community and how badly

our community was being treated, and how not much had really changed.

How long can you suppress

and oppress people before you expect the reaction?

We, the jury

in the above entitled action, find the defendant, Lawrence

Powell, not guilty of the crime of assault by force.

Spike Lee to produce great bodily injury with the deadly weapon.

This 29th day of April, 1992, signed by the foreman.

I remember April 29th, 1992.

We were in the studio and the news broke

that the, cops were, you know, let go.

It sends a bad message.

It says it's okay to go ahead and beat somebody when they're down

and kick the crap out of them, and it's okay,

because if it's not videotaped, don't worry about another brother officer.

It won't turn you in.

And if your brother officer does turn you in, don't worry.

We'll get white jurors or whoever it takes.

And you walk. I was home grown fries.

Normally a little chili dog stand.

I'm getting a chili dog. I love the chili dog.

And then the sister.

She said they let the white motherfuckers go.

Everybody like, oh, fuck this. Not again.

There was so much negative energy in the city.

Rodney King had his trial right here on the street where he got beat.

Those four policemen were not judge and jury, and I don't care what he did,

if he did anything that did not give them the right to beat him out

here, they need to come out here

and take a beating like that, because that was not right.

So the officers that had obviously done things that I thought were ineffective,

overly brutal and, probably criminal.

So you're saying Chief Beck is saying that the verdict was wrong?

No, I didn't say that the way he said it.

So what are you saying?

I'm saying I'm saying what they did was wrong.

Right?

So you think the verdict was fair in.

Oh, no.

Excuse me.

You know what?

Let's the.

Let me back this up.

Chief Beck is saying the prosecution was was correct in the end.

You're right. The verdict was wrong.

We knew that the officers was going to go to jail.

You didn't beat that man down.

And he caught you on television.

They didn't got you on everything.

And when they let when they let him go,

I mean, it was like,

nigga, you gets no justice.

The four officers left the courthouse to face an angry court of public opinion.

Outside, there are quite a few police officers

gathered here outside the courthouse now to maintain order.

As each of the four LA cops leaves.

I do not seek to explain the jury's decision

because frankly, no explanation makes sense.

What were the,

rules that

say, like, rules of engagement for the police officers?

Could they do this or could they do that?

And the testimony that we heard is, yeah, they could do it.

If the guy was resisting arrest, they could swing their batons

until he stopped. But I do know this.

The jury's verdict will never outlive the images of the savage

beating seared forever into our minds and our soul.

This was a modern day nation.

Cops can make mistakes, and we sure make mistakes.

But we pay for our mistakes.

You know? We pay for our bad decisions.

We go to jail for our bad decisions, or we die for our best.

There's some type of consequence for them.

It was this seems over and over and over.

They just have to, you know, a right to kill or beat the shit out of you.

And I could just see on the monitor, just all around the city stuff

just started happening. I'm gathering.

Did you hear about what happened here?

So I'm just in my neighborhood,

which is Bloods, and then other bloods start coming to our neighborhood,

and we're trying to figure out what are we going to do.

And this was going on all over the city.

Damn,

this is right.

We're going to

officer down.

There was an incident between the Atria

Gangsta Crips and the LAPD,

and they threw blows.

They had fistfights and you know what I mean?

It got bad,

you know,

I applaud them and salute them because they stood up to the cops

right there at that time period.

The LAPD retreated.

Back.

Oh, yeah.

They went in.

They raised the emotional temperature above the boiling point,

and then they let the voices are starting to rise, rise, rise, rise.

We were sick and tired of being sick and tired and sick and tired.

And we weren't taking it no more.

Everybody here

expected some turmoil following yesterday's surprise courtroom verdicts,

but no one imagined the kind of violent orgy that took place in the streets here.

I was actually on the corner of Florence and Normandie when the riots started.

Community leaders had said the day of the verdicts,

everyone should go to first A.M.E. church.

So I got in my car along with one of my coworkers,

and I saw all of this congestion.

So as I pulled up on the corner, I realized that there was a whole group

of people that were standing there throwing bricks and rocks into cars.

When I saw that, I sped up real quickly.

I missed the brick, but my coworker got the brick.

All along the

way and on that corner, there were no police period.

The police were completely invisible.

Turn the fuck around.

So from the time there's been, we've been taken out.

We have bottles through the window.

Fuck motherfucking police.

The war zone was a five square mile section of the city

known for its high crime and poverty.

But there was some trouble everywhere.

Across town, at the city's police

headquarters, a crowd of several hundred tried to rush the building.

They taunted patrolmen who stood shoulder to shoulder

in riot gear.

What the hell, brother?

That.

The white boy I'm looking at all.

They're eating the chili dog.

I'm eating it. Chili. But I'm looking at just cause I'm.

It was amazing. It was like,

65 all over again.

But I guess it won't be one.

I say no, I mean, look, the white man,

y'all, we kill it.

I got home and both my daughters were home watching television,

and I pulled in the driveway and they came out

and they said, dad, dad, you won't believe what's going on.

There's a riot.

And I said, what do you mean?

And I go inside and I look at the television

and I see what's going on at Florence and Normandie.

I ran out to the police car.

I got on the radio.

I said that there is a homicide in progress.

Respond. All units, code three.

About a minute and a half.

Two minutes later, I didn't see any units.

So I get on the radio again.

And then she says, commander 12 rescinded your order,

and I thought to myself, what is happening?

What's going on here? This is crazy.

There's no police there.

The police were marshaled within four blocks of where it started.

If they had gone there and stopped it, there would never have been a riot.

Of course, we learned later

that our illustrious chief of police was on the other side of town

at a fundraiser to fight the ballot measure

that we were organizing around to bring him under control.

What he did was he basically said, okay, you guys don't like police?

Fine. None will be around.

There's no way to explain, no police officers,

because you're talking about an area that was always heavily policed.

But 8:00 or so Chief Gates showed up.

What have you been able to do so far tonight?

Well, we're I think slowly getting in control.

And as you can see, we're out in force and the officers

are beginning to make arrests, more and more.

And, I think,

we will begin to impress upon the people of this area that,

we mean business in the city that is just aglow with fire.

Total chaos. Total chaos.

I remember driving from my house.

I lived in Carson and bordered Compton.

I get on the 110 freeway, fire trucks, emergency vehicles,

police officers just flying up and down the freeway.

Smoke fires me and B-Real.

We were on fucking smoke and crazy as Weed and shroom and our brains out.

And as we're coming over the last hill before you see

the greater part of LA, it looks to me like L.A.

is on fire.

And I say to be.

I was like, yo, it looks like everything's on fire, dude.

He's like, Tony dies.

We're fucked up.

All you could see is black smoke all through the city,

coming into Los Angeles and fucking like, whoa, what the fuck is this?

The apocalypse?

The anger kept pouring out.

The crowd soon began throwing rocks and bottles and setting fires.

Still, the police held back.

The greedy began looting and it continued for hours unchecked.

Dozens of buildings had been torched and fire trucks

couldn't get anywhere near for fear of being attacked.

I was at Fire Station 17, which is on the east side of Los Angeles

in the industrial area. We were at the

furniture building

and we needed some fuel for the chainsaw, so I ran back to,

to get the fuel and this lady came running at me with this ex.

And since I was in the compartment with the chainsaw, I just grabbed it.

So I started it up and I told her, I said, don't miss.

And she looked at me, smiled, dropped the ax,

and then she left and I was.

I was like, I really didn't want to have to go there,

but I would have went there.

I got some video.

You went live, I swear to God.

People's reaction. Yeah.

And they'll talk to me because I'm black.

Let's make some noise.

Let's make some noise.

Come on. The me, the room.

Your group is owned by your.

Mind you went to work for us.

We wanted to go. Oh.

Everybody

get to the corner of the crosswalk or you're going to jail.

You're going to go real quick.

Young. Yeah.

We tried to get through the city as safely as possible because that

deal was a little treacherous, depending where you're rolling to.

But, you know, we always were strapped and we're rolling crazy back then,

so we didn't really fear for our lives in that that sense.

I mean, you know, because we were part of the ones talking about the shit,

and then you just

go back

up. Then you went,

oh, I can just go back.

And the agony continued long after the sun came up.

Fire is fire.

You can control that can't control people.

A full 24 hours after the stunning verdicts, Los Angeles is still on edge.

19 30 hours day.

Two war zones getting thicker.

She looks like Beirut or bitch.

Your anger, your frustration, your hard feelings.

Not out in the streets, not breaking windows, not looting.

That rioting.

This is what bothers me.

It's like people are watching television and they're listening to the radio, right?

They hear and they see that nothing is being done.

So they're like, well, I'm going to go out and get something.

Hey, why hide this racket? Okay.

What did you get? Shoot, shoot. Yeah.

Where do you live? Right here.

Why did you do this?

I don't know, because it's free and it's free.

Yeah, but you know what's wrong?

You know. What are you doing?

Are you embarrassed?

Not you. Don't. You know this is illegal,

right?

Your friends are the police. They've been doing them.

I got it all on camera. Him.

It's amazing.

Let me get this out here.

I'm one who respects our police.

They keep the peace.

They face danger every day.

They help kids.

They don't make a lot of money,

but they care about their communities and their country.

Thousands of police officers and firefighters are risking their lives

right now on the streets of LA, and they deserve our support

for the job.

Hi. Those Rice Krispies. Hey,

right in the box.

This palette has been updated since the start of it.

Very start.

You feel any fatigue at this hour?

Yeah.

After that.

Tired. I'm wearing down.

Nobody can make a decision.

You got all these damn brass that,

try and make a decision, and

it ends up the troops out there, and the people are getting left out.

You have the incompetent who are now leading us,

and they can't even lead the troops as it is. So.

All right, you know what the hell we're doing out here?

The police were more interested in containment,

not stopping it whatsoever.

They were not allowing people to come up here and tear up Beverly Hills.

But you could stay over there on this side of Wilshire.

That was shocking to me to like, you know, because you're looking around,

you think, well, where the policeman is this happening?

You watch the news, and the news only talks about black people.

It really wound up being citywide.

I called it the Rainbow Revolt because white folks were participating in looting.

I just bought a home in Venice and needed furniture.

And the whole place was furnished with stole and furniture.

That riot was fuel for us to kind of

misbehave and get a lot of shit out of our system

that we had pent up

and, and we really, really felt good.

Let's go back to the phone page.

What is your name and where are you calling from?

My name is Joyce. Calling from Long Beach?

Yes, Joyce, we're angry because it's showing that

we have blacks together are nothing.

That's what their Santa we mean. Nothing.

I came home

from work tonight, and I'm looking at women

killing these people on those smashing windows.

They're burning our supermarkets.

Where the hell is

can we go to get food and get treated with some amount of decency? Yes.

I'm hurt that the verdict was what it was, but I'm hurt from our people.

This certainly isn't what you call a damn revolution.

I'm go over there with the food I got through shopping.

I don't have any food in the house.

Some looters spared

black owned businesses but ransacked the Asian stores next door.

We're going to take back our community.

If we allowed you to come in before, maybe we made a mistake.

But now we're telling you you must go. We're going to kill.

The. Girl!

Come back.

We want you to get screwed. Who?

I ought to get into an.

So we got some,

to get my son killed. You go to mama.

Don't bring anything, okay?

I'm not to shoot the gun.

A riot, baby to fire.

Raise me in 92.

All the homies tell me. Fuck the police. We should go and loot.

But my father tell me if they get too close,

then you should shoot I was conflicted, what's a little soldier supposed to do?

I think my dad, you know, was,

Like a lot of our family members to the older folks

they participated in, like, I guess,

helping out some of the businesses and protecting them and stuff.

People who were African-American are coming through this neighborhood.

The roadblocks are basically been taken, not taken down, that moved.

Does that make you nervous when you see people driving by?

Who are the other color?

Yeah, and I know there are

there are a lot of if you if you look out there,

a lot of Hispanic and black people out there

and they're just roaming around packed in their cars, roaming out,

trying to loot something or pillage something, the young kids, the 20 year

olds, 18 year old, 19 year old,

we we kind of were tasked with like patrolling the streets.

And so it took a couple days, but basically we started to

kind of protect the borders.

Oh, I don't understand this.

I mean, it's just unbelievable, inhumane things happen.

They are good people.

They have been good to my mother and my father like, that is just ridiculous.

That's ridiculous. Just forget it.

So many whites

have barricaded their neighborhoods and the days of fear and rage. No.

No color.

We, the white people, would not have gone out to burn the black neighborhoods.

National guard troops have moved into riot torn sections of Los Angeles.

The troops have been deployed to rout looters and seize control of

neighborhoods.

Curfew has been imposed going from dusk to dawn.

It is, encompasses Crenshaw.

The Alameda Century to Vernon.

And Is it curfew on?

And if you're in that area, you, are subjected to, being arrested when you.

Are. Well.

I was a

little nervous because they were shooting people that were out in the curfew.

You law enforcement, they were shooting people.

If you were in groups, you got shot.

There were at least 10 or 11 officer involved shootings

during those three days.

Oh, me.

Just looking

at the community, a community that was already suffering.

To me, it was just like, wow, you know,

ten steps back instead of pushing ten steps forward.

So I understood.

But I was still sad about the whole situation.

The civil unrest in Los Angeles is now the deadliest

in the city's history, worse than what's in 1965.

In three days of violence this week, at least 37 people

have been killed, more than 1300 injured.

There have been more than 3000 arrests, property damage, over $200 million.

It's like breaks your heart

to know so

many people's lives were affected.

It shows up.

Our verdict here

I don't know, you know, it's just something you have to live with.

I mean, we're all stuck here for a while.

Let's, you know, let's

let's let's try to work it out.

Let's try to be, you know,

let's try to work it out.

The 1992 riots kind of ended abruptly.

It's like as soon as the tanks hit the tree,

it was over just instantaneously.

One way to stop this riot.

It wasn't with a a new model city's program announced from Washington.

It was with superior force dealing with hooligans, criminals and thugs.

It was early evening and watch

scores of police, nervous about any unusual activity,

swarmed in to deal with what they believed might be a gang incident.

And what they stumbled on turned out to be 600 gang members

Bloods, Crips, a half a dozen others agreeing to make peace.

These cold killers crying and shit and hugging and seeing eyes

and all of this because we saw a bigger cause.

We saw a bigger enemy that was that was more vicious.

And most serious

about getting rid of us than we was about getting rid of each other.

We start celebrating outside.

We had a big party that night.

Folks came from all across the city,

and we always had these renegade cops in the neighborhood.

And back then there was this cat named sunshine

and sunshine told us one day, like after we organized a peace treaty,

we was like, so sorry, I'm in the peace treaty. Yo. What's up?

You down with it?

And he was like, it be a cold day in hell before I ever support

the peace treaty, he said, I make $57,000 a year as a base salary.

He said. I make another 60 in overtime.

He said, I'm put my daughter

through Princeton on your ignorance, and this is what he told us literally.

Thank you very much for the overtime.

We do appreciate it.

They don't necessarily want peace between the Bloods in the Crips.

How are they going to fill up the jails if everybody's behaving themselves?

Those three days were the best three days of my fucking life.

To this day, I've done a lot of shit on me.

But those three days, I'll never forget them.

And I'll cherish those days.

Because at this time, we were so brutalized and we were so uncounted.

I used to really wonder, like, do they even know what's going on down here?

We finally had the spotlight and the attention on us.

My little Mayberry, my little South Center.

Now the whole world is checking this out.

Like what's going on there?

She's already,

she'd like to say to my family who lost her business during the riots.

I would say to anyone who lost anything during the riots that,

I'm deeply, deeply grieved by that and grieve the loss.

And the police department,

it was not able to, to protect everyone.

We just do not have enough people.

And I hope the people in your community and every community will realize that,

you know, it's misinformation about my not sending out the National Guard.

I sent it out just as quickly as we had the National Guard.

Well, there were accusations that you delayed in

bringing the police department into the riots because you,

wanted to show what would happen without the police department.

How do you feel about those actions?

Nothing else.

I'm a,

I'm a consummate professional.

We never do a thing like that.

And besides, the Rambo in me wouldn't allow that

to happen.

Critics have urged Police Chief Daryl Gates to step down early

because of the department's performance during the riots.

I am concerned about the department, and I think its department,

is a at a point where

it's taking a lot of hits, because,

a lot of anger has been directed at me.

It's not until the 1992 riots that we have a new chief, and they decide

we have to go out of the city to get a chief.

They can't even hire a chief

within the department because they didn't want another William Parker protege.

And that's when they got, Willie Williams from Philadelphia.

That just goes to show you how effed up the LAPD was internally.

They couldn't even find a chief from within to take over the reins

during this much tumultuous time.

The legacy of the riots.

When you look at what's happening now with the shootings,

what's going on with police brutality, it seems like nothing's changed.

We're catching it,

and we're still not getting the justice.

It's still not that feeling of, oh, we got it on camera now

we're going to win this time.

It's still like we have to fight even harder.

I think you should be proud as a black man,

because you stood your ground and said, this is unjust.

And if you're going to keep up with the shenanigans, you're going to feel it.

I took it upon myself to say,

we got to develop a relationship with these police

because they ain't going nowhere.

They're in our neighborhood and we got to stop them

from from beating us down.

So you had an an officer involved shooting?

The L.A.

Police Commission has just ruled that the shooting death of a

homeless man on Skid row was justified.

Since the man. Not a god damn big difference.

Thank you, black Lives Matter, for making people stand up on a regular basis,

because that's actually a

path to a solution, is you got to stand up and you got to keep standing up.

How many more black people have to die

to LAPD?

Listen to us.

And the last four years we have had some of the most officer

involved shootings that result to death in Los Angeles.

Carnell Snell, Ezell Ford,

Wendell Jones, Lakisha Wilson.

Today

back, the way that we are identifying our dignity is showing up

on the streets for the people that they keep killing fire.

Charlie Knight driving back, y'all, that's going to take his life.

Y'all took me and my family life.

So from today, fuck this protester shit.

Imma start taking y'all lives.

Chief Beck later said, quote, to target someone because of their profession

is no better than targeting someone because of their race.

There's the LAPD before 1992 and there's the LAPD after 1992.

The before was a brutal, racist institution

that kept poor people and people of color in their place.

Post 1992.

It's still serving some of that function,

but it's an institution that has more checks and balances.

The community is now much more organized and pushes back a lot harder.

We never had communication with police, and we're trying to start a whole

new beginning by getting that dialog and that communication.

Like the chief said, we were talking to him

and hearing and listening and trying to find a better way

to bridge the gap between us and them.

Chief Charlie Beck says transparency and trust are key.

What law enforcement does now in Los Angeles is use certain words to try to

calm, calm the community, calm the city, and they know which words work.

One of the words that works is saying, we're going to be transparent

and you start to see other chiefs in other cities try to say the right thing.

And the only reason why they're talking this way in these press conferences

and trying to say the right thing and, and, and claiming

transparency is because they don't want to see a riot in their city.

If you were me and you were in my body, would you be afraid of the police?

Based on what's going

on in the world, in America, would you be afraid?

Would you be nervous to drive in a car with your son?

Would you be afraid if you had any interaction with the police?

So I'll tell you a story.

So for about.

4 or 5 years of my career, I worked surveillance,

and I had very long hair at a time when very long hair was not popular.

And, you know, my job was to was was to,

we're criminals in tough neighborhoods.

And I have literally because of the way I looked and the car I drove

and the and the way I drove it, I've been stopped hundreds of times.

Hundreds.

And there is

there is always tension, always

the solution to that

is empathy

on both sides of the glass.

You know what?

Think about think about what

the police officer is going through as he approaches a car.

Maybe at night, maybe it's dark.

Maybe he has information you don't know about.

Think about what he's going through and try to empathize with

with their situation.

And what I tell my cops is.

That the driver

empathize with his situation.

You know, maybe he's never been pulled over before.

Maybe he just got pulled over yesterday by some by an officer that didn't

treat him very well, you know, have some empathy.

And if there's empathy on both sides of that transaction,

you know, then everybody's going to be fine.

So you believe if I carry empathy in my heart

that I'm less susceptible?

If you display display empathy.

In other words, if you understand what the, the,

the actions of the police officer and therefore, you know, recognize

that they are they may be on edge as they approach that.

They you know that the initial encounter is a

is the, is the most dangerous part of a traffic stop.

I think the that you have to remember those things, you know, and, and

and if you do those things and then certainly in Los Angeles,

you know, we don't see issues that that come out of that.

Well, I guess if the empathy is mutual because, well, I don't know that they do

all the right things and police officers are still sort of on edge.

So I guess you just got to hope that humankind can prevail over

scared police officers and scared people in cars.

Well, and I agree with that.

And and that's why I think this is, you know, from, from my point of view,

this is one of the most, you know, everybody talks about the conversation.

You know,

and the conversation that has in the conversation,

which is what which is the conversation between parents

and particularly their

teenagers and adult sons about how to act when you get stopped by the police,

when you're driving down the street and you see those lights in your rearview

mirror about,

the last thing you're thinking about is whether or not the police

officer that's getting ready to stop you is having a bad day.

Or if you do think about that, you say, oh my God,

I hope he's not having a bad day, otherwise I might get shot.

It really is sad. You know,

I was always happy I didn't have a son.

For the gang aspect.

Aspect of of living.

And just from, you know, what it takes to become a young black man

and in this world, I was just happy that I didn't have to deal with those issues.

You know, we've had leaders within the community who are gang leaders,

who have tried to make positive change,

but it takes all of us.

We we can't continue to let this devil manipulate us to kill each other.

This crazy.

I still had problems

losing my children to gangs.

I still went through that.

You yourself? Yes.

My grandson was just murdered last

year. Yes.

You know, it happens in our communities

and it's heartbreaking.

And I'm one of the aware ones that raise my children

to understand and to read and get an education.

And I still

I still lost my grandson.

I was I was angry I was angry cuz

I used to tell my mom,

you know, if I make it to 18, I'm a suicide bomb, a police station.

I hated, hated, hated the police.

It was pretty radical.

Yeah, it was very. It was.

It was scary for me to listen to him talking.

And I have to say this.

I'm. I'm happy that we can have this conversation all here together.

Our entire family.

Because he used to tell me I'll be lucky if I see 21.

Let me tell you something about my son real quick.

Nicholas, come here real quick.

Come here.

Hurry up, hurry up.

Come on.

Here.

This is.

This is something that us as people of color should never have to go through.

Take this hat off.

Take the hat off.

Sit down.

Tell this gentleman what I taught you about

when we get pulled over by the police, what should you do?

Put your hands up on the dashboard so the police

don't think you have any weapons or to show your hands.

And how old are you? 12.

I got to tell a 12 year old

how to conduct himself when he interface with law enforcement.

Because I'm scared

that if he acts silly and does something with his hands, they will kill him.

They've already killed Tamir Rice, who was 12 years old.

So I got to teach him how to conduct himself,

where to put his hands, how to behave, where to position them

so that we can make it where after the end of the day, where are we going?

Home. Home? Thank you.

Well, Martin's been

has become the right word.

Night, man.

Can't walk the streets with them.

We are game I like me.

Nothing like a king.

Like a king, like a king.

Rodney King was my.

Like a king.

Like like a king.

How I wish you could help us, doctor.

Make sure it's

shown on national TV.

Yeah.

I have no mercy.

A legal in your mind.

Like they sprung up from the tree.

The LAPD like a king.

Like you.

Like.

Rodney King.

Rodney.

Never thought that I would make it this far.

Yeah.

I'm still in school while driving from cars.

Yeah, I'm young and reckless.

Larry Summers on my knuckles.

You can call me. Empty him.

You can touch shoes.

I never fell in love on my heart. Break it.

Get it high.

Live and never forget L.A., my city.

Run, miss. Check out my ball like Kobe.

Get a cup of milk a got love L.A.

got a big no love L.A.

This is my city, this is my city.

This is my city. This is my city.