top of page
FROM THE DESK OF MCE
LOS ANGELES 101
A collective of stories from the vantage point of those born and raised in The City of Angels
WAKE UP, L.A.
by Robert Eisele
My life changed abruptly in the summer of 1965. I was a 17 year-old selling Regal Shoes on South Broadway in downtown L.A., a summer job I despised. My joy in life was football. I wanted to be on the field crunching skulls, not folding socks for the display table. I could hardly wait for my senior season at St. Francis High in La Canada. I was from the wrong side of the Devil’s Gate Dam, though – the ethnically-diverse Pasadena/Altadena side – so the girls I met in upscale La Canada rarely gave me a second look. I didn’t own a car, my hair was buzz cut for football, and I had a fat face like the actor, Mickey Rooney. But my team had won the C.I.F. Championship the previous year with thirteen wins and no losses. Maybe my starting position on this year’s squad would garner me a little attention from the rich girls at Sacred Heart Academy.
​
Bullshit like this was flowing through my brain as I arranged argyles and sweat sox for display, bored out of my mind. But then I heard the chop of helicopters overhead, glanced out the window and saw a caravan of National Guard Jeeps rolling down South Broadway toward Watts/Willowbrook, each vehicle with its own .50 caliber machine gun mounted on a tripod. At first, I thought somebody must be making a movie, or that it was just a military exercise. After all, Vietnam was heating up, there’d been a draft since World War II, and California had a shitload of military bases. But then I heard on the radio that South Central was burning. “Negroes,” as most of the media still called Black people, were rioting because of the arrest of 21 year-old Marquette Frye, his mother and brother on a hot, August night. L.A. was starting to burn.
​
In a few more hours, “Burn, baby, burn!” would become the war cry of the Watts Uprising. Magnificent Montague, a Black D.J. at KGFJ, L.A.’s only R&B radio station at the time, had invented the phrase as an incitement to heat things up with dance and music. He was no Patrick Henry creating revolutionary slogans. But that day, revolution was in the air. And although I was a White, 17 year-old football rowdy, I began to feel its pulse. I also began to smell smoke. My brother Dick, a big, bad-ass 19 year-old at six-two, his calves as thick as a Samoan’s, was also working at the shoe store and he decided we should close early and get home. We grabbed a couple of rug cutting blades from the back counter, got on the bus and headed back to Pasadena.
​
The end of the line was on South Fair Oaks Avenue. Today, that’s Old Town Pasadena, replete with trendy shops and fine restaurants. In 1965, it was the main street of Pasadena’s ghetto. And when we got off the bus, South Fair Oaks was on fire. There stood Dick and I, two bulky, young White boys in business suits with a riot of young Black men swirling around us, breaking windows and grabbing whatever they could carry. Dick and I flashed the peace sign and hauled ass out of there, jogging down Colorado Boulevard to grab the Number Three bus up Lake Avenue to our parents’ house in Altadena – one of the first diverse neighborhoods in Southern California.
At 17, I identified more with the rioters than the cops. Not because I was a hippie radical, but because L.A. cops were like cowboys back then, rollicking through their own version of the Wild West. At that age, I’d already witnessed police brutality. And there was more of it to come – brutality that would shape my worldview for decades.
I used to go deep sea fishing on the half-day boats out of Long Beach with an L.A. cop I met downtown. To protect his identity, let’s call him Andy. He liked my brother and me because we were young, White jocks, fellow tough guys in training. It was rumored that Andy was the inspiration for a particularly mean-spirited character in one of Joseph Wambaugh’s L.A. cop novels. But he could be funny and generous, so we tolerated him.
I’d also gotten to know a young Black Panther who sold the Party’s newspaper on the corner of Sixth and Broadway, just outside the shoe store where I worked. He was a skinny kid, an idealist, and only a few years older than me. One day, I heard him shouting and ran outside the shoe store to find Andy pushing him around. Andy was trying to get the Black Panther to throw a punch, but the kid was too little and too scared to oblige him. So Andy whipped out his baton and started smacking the shit out of him anyway. The kid curled into a fetal position as the cop wailed on him. I tried to get Andy to stop and he offered me a whack of the baton. I jumped back, barely avoiding a billy club to the balls. So I just watched, shouting at Andy to stop as the Black Panther cub was bruised and bloodied and sent to the hospital. And, for a while, I hated myself for it.
When I was about 19, I saw the LAPD beat the shit out of a Black wino in front of Bob’s Liquor on Lincoln Blvd in Venice. At 21, as a long-haired motorcyclist, L.A.’s Finest pulled me over for nothing and laid me face down on the pavement while they frisked me for drugs. As late as the early 1980s, a Black friend of mine, an orthopedic surgeon, was stopped in Marina Del Rey and frisked, face down on the cement, because he was driving with a beautiful blonde. But the worst police brutality I ever witnessed was on the UCLA campus in 1970 when I was 22. Nixon had just escalated the Vietnam War into Cambodia, and college students nationwide were on strike. There was a big protest at UCLA and California’s governor at the time, Ronald Reagan, had just uttered his infamous words about student protestors, quoted in the Los Angeles Times (January 7, 1970): “If it's to be a bloodbath, let it be now. Appeasement is not the answer.”
For the LAPD, that was a license to kill. And a reason for me to hold a lifelong enmity for Ronald Reagan. Because what his words unleashed on campus that day wasn’t a student uprising; it was a police riot. Black-shirted, white-helmeted cops, some with shields, all with batons, waded into a crowd of student protestors, swinging from the heels. A friend of mine, a biology major and Goldwater Republican, was instantly radicalized when he stepped out of the library and into the path of a police baton. At that moment, he lost his respect for authority – along with a few teeth.
I was chased, with hundreds of others, toward the Graduate Research Library. I escaped inside and hustled to the second floor balcony to see what was happening. As I peered down at the Sculpture Garden, I saw a willowy Black co-ed with an Angela Davis style Afro, standing on a pathway, frozen in fear. A cop, chasing other students, raced by and smashed her in the head with his baton, knocking her cold and sending her Afro wig flying. Other cops swooped by like polo players batting her head like a ball from the backs of their ponies. Occasionally, one of them would stop to work her over. The co-ed wasn’t just knocked out. She was beaten into a deep coma. For the next year, I’d follow her healing progress in the campus newspaper, The Daily Bruin. She was seriously brain damaged by the incident. And none of her assailants were ever prosecuted.
The issue of race in America may be a complex thing, but there’s nothing complex about the incidents I’ve cited above. They were all the brutal acts of bullies sanctioned by the silence of a racist society and the policies of a corrupt police department. Experiencing these acts made me a lifelong civil libertarian. That’s why, when NWA released “Fuck Tha Police” in 1988, I was one of the few 40 year-old White men who heard it as an anthem of social protest more than just a gangsta rap.
It was the time of Chief Darryl Gates and his battering ram, a medieval device designed to shatter the doors of suspected crack houses. But some of these suspected houses were just family homes, and anger and rage were festering once again.
“Right about now NWA court is in full effect.
Judge Dre presiding in the case of NWA versus the police department.
Prosecuting attorneys are MC Ren, Ice Cube and Eazy muthafuckin E.
Order, order, order! Ice Cube take the muthafuckin stand.
Do you swear to tell the truth the whole truth
and nothin but the truth so help your Black ass?
“Why don't you tell everybody what the fuck you gotta say?
“Fuck tha police
Comin straight from the underground
Young n---- got it bad cuz I'm brown
And not the other color so police think
They have the authority to kill a minority.”
I’d crank up the rap when driving to dinner with friends and they’d be shocked. When I
reminded them about our protest songs from the Sixties, most of them would fail to see the connection. But to me, that was the essence of NWA’s “Fuck Tha Police” in ’88 – a protest
anthem against a brutal police force and a system that had no place for poor and working-class
Blacks.
In 1990, I began researching a television pilot I was to write for ABC about the LAPD’s C.R.A.S.H. units (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums). So, on a warm autumn night, I donned a Kevlar bulletproof vest and rode along with two C.R.A.S.H. officers from the 77th Street Precinct. Gang violence and crime in L.A. and the entire nation were soaring. The LAPD, a relatively small force policing a huge geographical area, had developed a siege mentality to combat the violence. Although there were more officers of color in 1990, I sensed Darryl Gates’ paramilitary style did not bode well for the prospect of urban peace. Especially when I overheard a cop on my ride-along say he should arrest a random Black teenager at the Jordan Downs project so the kid could “start his criminal record.”
The city was simmering again, ready to blow. NWA and other L.A. rappers like Compton’s Most Wanted had their ears to the ground and heard the drums of discontent. They were prescient. CMW’s “Growin’ Up In The Hood” echoed an ominous, nihilistic message:
“Life ain't nuttin but bitches and money
'Cause in the city you live and let die
Nuttin but bitches and money”
They were telling us to beware. Shit’s gonna fly. And on March 3, 1991, the fuse to an inevitable explosion was lit. Rodney King was badly beaten by four L.A. cops after a high-speed car chase, while several more officers just stood around and watched. And a local resident caught the entire incident on video tape....
Thirteen days later, a Korean store owner killed a Black teenager, Latasha Harlins, shooting her in the back of the head as she walked out of the store after a scuffle. The killing was taped on the store’s surveillance video and played on the evening news, over and over again, along with the Rodney King beating. To add fuel to the fire, the store owner was convicted of voluntary manslaughter but received only probation as her punishment.
When the four cops who assaulted Rodney King were acquitted in a Simi Valley courthouse on April 29, 1992, the forsaken of the city exploded for the first time since the Watts Uprising, 27 years earlier. But now, the rioting was citywide and included not only Black Angelenos, but Latinos and Whites as well. At the time, I was living in the Hancock Park area of L.A. with my wife, seven year-old son and four year-old daughter. The violence swirled around us for three days. Fires, stolen cars, looting. Many of my neighbors fled but I couldn’t. This was my neighborhood, my home and I wasn’t about to abandon it. People feared there would be home invasions, but I sensed that wouldn’t happen. In fact, as the rioters – Black, Latino and White – fled from nearby Samy’s Cameras with their loot, many of them flashed us the peace sign as they drove off. It wasn’t all about rage. It was also about opportunity, a chance to steal without getting caught.
As I sat on my front porch and watched the smoke roil up the street, I edged toward despair. My own extended family is a rainbow of White, Black and Latino. We’ve been in L.A. since the early 1900s and our faces reflect what the city has become. Why this enmity, then? Why did my city have to go to war with itself? It wasn’t just police brutality or social inequality. It was L.A.’s long history of racism. And in 1992, its victims were not only Black and Latino. They were also Korean and White.
Reginald Denny, a White truck driver, was rolling through the intersection of Florence and Normandie when his semi was stopped by rioters. He was pulled from the cab of his truck and beaten unconscious by the mob. A few nearby residents had the courage to pull Denny to safety, but not before a TV helicopter caught the beating on videotape: haunting footage of Damian “Football” Williams, a powerfully built young Black man, smashing Denny’s head with a concrete slab, then dancing a victory dance for the helicopter’s camera. The beating of Reginald Denny wasn’t just a violent act. It was a racist one.
Los Angeles seems peaceful today. The crime rate is at its lowest in over fifty years.
The book, “Freakonomics,” which uses economic theory to examine social issues, posits that the crime rate is so low because of Roe vs. Wade. Legalized abortion means less unwanted children. A dark theory, but whether it’s true or not, L.A. is different than it was in ‘92. I wouldn’t walk my neighborhood at night in the early nineties. Now, an evening stroll is a frequent pleasure. And community policing has made the LAPD more evenhanded.
I know it’s not easy to be a police officer. I’ve ridden with cops during high-speed chases, sirens blaring. Talk about an adrenalin rush. If I had to jump out of a car after a chase and subdue a raging criminal, perhaps I’d wind up being accused of abuse. After all, the police brutality I witnessed wasn’t done by monsters. It was done by men who were all too human. Twenty-thousand years ago, only a million of us were scattered across the planet. And anywhere a Paleolithic man or a woman travelled, they were related to everyone they met. We all spring from an African Eve who lived 200,000 years ago, and traces of her are still inside us. There’s no Black or White or Yellow race. There’s one race. Perhaps the browning of America will one day make that truth evident and the issue of race, of the other, will diminish in importance or even disappear. But poverty in America is rising. The top one percent of America’s richest own 42 percent of the nation’s wealth. Half of America’s households own a mere one percent of that wealth. We’re plummeting fast toward economic inequality for all. Watts exploded in 1965. In ’92, the entire city ignited. Ever since, I’ve had this lingering, irrational feeling that Los Angeles will erupt in violence every 27 years. If 2019 brings such a conflagration, the theme won’t be “Fuck Tha Police.” It’ll be “Fuck Tha System.” And the colors of its flames will be Black and White, Yellow and Brown.
(Author’s Note: This was written in 2013. L.A. exploded in violence once again in 2020, ignited by the murder of George Floyd – 28 years after the city’s 1992 riot.)
bottom of page