Rebuilding trust in the wake of Rodney King and (hopefully) Freddie Gray

Many publications, including this one, have remarked on the terrible coincidence of the Baltimore unrest coming almost 23 years to the day after the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. It’s a sad comment on our nation that for nearly 50 years we can look back on riots on American streets, almost always started in reaction to police brutality against racial and ethnic minorities. Of course, America has suffered urban rioting for centuries, not just decades, many of which were brought on by different precipitating events. (For instance, L.A.’s famous Zoot Suit riots in 1943 were also racially based, but featured white members of the US military, rather than the police, assaulting Mexican American and African American men on the streets.)

There is a lot of important discussion these days setting forth the idea that America’s propensity to throw large numbers of racial minorities into the prison system is at least partially to blame for these sporadic bursts of racial unrest. In her celebrated book “The New Jim Crow,” legal scholar Michelle Alexander made a compelling case that the blatantly racist structure of the past has simply been repackaged as “law and order” policies, leading to mass incarceration at the highest levels on the planet.

After decades of cruel, failed policies like “three strikes” and mandatory minimums there is finally some movement across party lines to address this problem. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton gave a well-received speech on the subject just last week, even repudiating, if not by name, some of former president Bill Clinton’s initiatives. There is talk of the Koch brothers and other wealthy conservatives and libertarians joining the fray. There does seem to finally be some recognition that these policies have done far more harm than good. In the wake of protests all over the nation — after the police killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Freddie Gray — these discussions are even more urgent.

But mass incarceration is only a piece of the puzzle. The other piece is police tactics in the communities they are allegedly protecting. So it’s worth taking a look at what happened in Los Angeles after the riots in 1992. Keep in mind that compared to what we’ve seen so far in Baltimore, the unrest and damage then was massive. There were at least 53 deaths, 2,383 injuries, over 16,000 riot-related crimes, over 12,000 arrests, 7,000 fires and $1 billion in damage reported. California deployed more than 10,000 National Guard troops and even had thousands of active duty federal troops and Marines patrolling the streets.

Everyone knows why that happened. Four white officers charged with beating of Rodney King one night by the side of the road were acquitted by an all-white jury in a Los Angeles suburb favored by LAPD. It was emblematic of the injustice that members of the black community dealt with every day at the hands of the police and the judicial system. And their anger burst in an ugly and destructive way for 6 long days. At the end of it, much of South Central LA was ruined. There were many promises to rebuild and some improvements in corners of the area were made. But the poverty and lack of opportunity that existed there then are little-improved today.

However, one thing is different now: The relationship of the police and the people of South Central. And this is because, for all the promises that were made in the aftermath, reforming of the police department actually happened. It took years and it’s still imperfect — police brutality still happens — but the culture seems to have changed for the better.