News Information and Media Site: California Today: What’s Different About the Protests in Los Angeles This Time

June 3, 2020

By Jill Cowan

Protesters blocked the intersection of Figueroa and Olympic in downtown Los Angeles on Friday.Bryan Denton for The New York Times

Good morning.

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On Tuesday night in Los Angeles, the sound of police helicopters once again thudded overhead and sirens screamed as the sun set. Residents who didn’t abide by a curfew were arrested.

Thousands took to the streets in outrage over police brutality captured on video. They were met by the National Guard.

[Read about protests across California.]

As my colleague Tim Arango reported, the parallels have been easy to see between the protests that have roiled the nation’s second biggest city again this week and the riots that erupted in 1992 after four police officers were acquitted of assault in the beating of Rodney King.

But there are key differences.

Some have been driven by conscious actions by organizers who remember 1992.

This week, for instance, the most chaotic scenes in L.A. have played out in largely white, wealthy communities like Beverly Hills, as Tim wrote.

“That’s an important distinction, that these current situations are not happening in black communities,” said Patrisse Cullors, a prominent activist and co-founder of Black Lives Matter who organized a protest on Saturday in the Fairfax District.

Others reflect broader shifts.

[Read the full story here.]

Fernando Guerra, a professor and the director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, said that the clearest difference between the unrest today versus 1992 is that today, the response to police brutality has been “truly multicultural.”

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Many of the protesters that have poured into L.A.’s streets this week have come from different backgrounds, Dr. Guerra said, which stands in significant contrast with 1992.

“It’s true that African-Americans and Latinos were in the streets, but not together,” he said. “It was siloed.”

Dr. Guerra said that separation was certainly enforced by the police, who he said were “much more willing to be brutal” in order to contain the destruction to poorer, predominantly black neighborhoods.

But public perception has also changed.

Dr. Guerra has helped run a survey of Angelenos about race and policing since 1997, five years after the riots, and continuing every five years.

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In each survey, a steadily increasing share of Angelenos has said that different races and ethnic groups were getting along well. (In 1997, 37 percent said races were getting along well and 63 percent said they were getting along badly, compared with 76 percent who said races were getting along well in 2017.)

A fire burned out of control in South Central Los Angeles after three of the officers tried in Rodney King’s beating were found not guilty by a jury and the case against the fourth ended with a mistrial in 1992.Paul Sakuma/Associated Press

In 2017, a quarter century after the riots, the survey found that 58 percent of Angelenos believed that similar riots and disturbances were likely to occur in the next five years — a share that increased for the first time since the study’s inception.

In 2012, just 47 percent of respondents said they thought riots were likely in the next five years.

And according to a different survey by the center, trust in the police over the last several years has remained stable and relatively high in L.A.’s overall population, although that trust is, as you would expect, much lower among African-Americans and Latinos.

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While Dr. Guerra said that on the surface, all those trends might seem contradictory, he doesn’t see it that way.

“It makes perfect sense,” he said.

Taken together, Dr. Guerra said what they suggest is much broader understanding of how black and brown Angelenos are too often the targets of police violence — understanding that has translated into greater accountability.

“In the past, we responded to police brutality by saying, ‘Oh, it’s them, not us,’” he said. “Now, it’s, ‘This is our police department, not Daryl Gates’s police department,’ and we expect much more.”

And while the response by the police today has been far from perfect, Dr. Guerra echoed the observation that, unlike in 1992, police and elected leaders have said they support protesters’ rights to speak out and have acknowledged their pain.

Going forward, he said, he expects that the breadth of the protests will exert “even greater pressure on decision makers to make substantive changes.”

[See video and photos from protests around California.]

Here’s what else we’re following

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Candice Elder.Christie Hemm Klok for The New York Times

“We felt the ground so hot and rough, and how he must have felt in that moment.” Meet some of the protesters giving voice to their anger. [The New York Times]
On Tuesday evening, protests across Southern California were calm. [The Press-Enterprise]
The police are killing fewer people in big cities like Los Angeles or San Francisco. But they’re killing more in suburban and rural areas. [FiveThirtyEight]
The Tulare County sheriff responded to criticism for now-deleted tweets suggesting that protesters should not expect a response to 911 calls. [Visalia Times Delta]
See the police and military aircraft that were monitoring the protests in your city. (If you live in Los Angeles, you’re not imagining that there were a lot.) [Buzzfeed News]
A bipartisan group of lawmakers is reviving an effort to cut police departments’ access to military-style gear. [The New York Times]
Three Pacific Gas & Electric contractors died on Tuesday in a helicopter crash in Solano County. [The San Francisco Chronicle]
It’s been a tough week for Los Angeles restaurants. First, they were told they could reopen dining rooms, but without much notice. And the sudden and confusing rollout of curfews made things worse. [Eater Los Angeles]
How #BlackoutTuesday actually started. [The New York Times]
Santa Clara County, where the top public health official led the nation’s first shelter in place order, is set to allow outdoor dining and religious services, as well as in-store shopping starting on Friday. [The Mercury News]
Yosemite National Park is set to open on Friday to those who already have wilderness or Half Dome hiking permits. [The Fresno Bee]

If you missed it, here are some photos of a snowy Yosemite Valley, in the before times. [The New York Times]

And Finally …

Brianna Noble rode her horse Dapper Dan through downtown Oakland on Friday to protest the death on Memorial Day of George Floyd, who died while in police custody in Minneapolis.Noah Berger/Associated Press

Amid what has felt like an endless scroll of videos showing the chaos and tension of protests over the weekend, one image in particular struck me as, well, the opposite of all that.

In a tableau that can really only be described as majestic, a black woman rides an enormous brown horse down the urban canyon that is Broadway in Oakland.

A “Black Lives Matter” sign hangs down the horse’s flank.

Unsurprisingly, I was not the only one moved by photos of the woman, Brianna Noble, 25, astride her horse, Dapper Dan.

Ms. Noble told KQED that she took Dapper Dan, a “17-hand,” 1,800-pound horse out to Friday’s march because she wanted to help shift the narrative of the protests — give people, “a good, bright, positive image to focus on, as opposed to some of the destruction.”

She said that she used to be bothered by the fact that she was one of the few black women she knew to be horseback riding. Now the owner of Mulatto Meadows, a horseback riding center in Martinez, Ms. Noble hopes her visibility helps inspire other young Bay Area residents to get involved in the riding community.

And as she told The Guardian: “No one can ignore a black woman sitting on top of a horse.”

California Today goes live at 6:30 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: CAtoday@nytimes.com. Were you forwarded this email? Sign up for California Today here.

Jill Cowan grew up in Orange County, went to school at U.C. Berkeley and has reported all over the state, including the Bay Area, Bakersfield and Los Angeles — but she always wants to see more. Follow along here or on Twitter, @jillcowan.

California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from U.C. Berkeley.

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