Part 16 (1/2)

Remarkably, no one had died during the first two days of rioting in Watts. That changed Friday night. Sometime between six and seven, the first resident of Watts died, an African American caught in the crossfire between police and looters. He would not be the last.

Friday night brought something no American city had ever seen before: a full-scale urban war, one in which firemen and ambulances were fair game. Snipers repeatedly opened fire on the hundred-odd engine companies that were fighting fires in the area. That night, a fireman was crushed and killed by a falling wall. As the shooting intensified, the dying began. At six thirty, twenty-one-year-old Leon Watson was gunned down, standing outside a barbershop. Two hours later, a deputy sheriff was fatally shot with his own gun while struggling with three suspects. The killing came quickly now. One hour later an unarmed Watts resident was killed by police outside a liquor store. Three unarmed companions were wounded. The next civilian died three minutes later. The next, two minutes after that. And so it went. The streets of Watts were washed with blood.

Desperate to restore order, police officers and sheriff's department deputies joined with more than a thousand Guardsmen, on foot, to sweep the streets. By 3 a.m., some 3,300 Guardsmen had been deployed. Yet still the violence raged. Throughout the night, hundreds of reports of snipers firing on the police were called into the 77th Street station. Not until the following evening, when Lieutenant Governor Anderson imposed an eight o'clock curfew on a forty-six-square-mile area of South Los Angeles and more than 13,000 National Guardsmen had deployed, was order restored. That Sunday, Chief Parker reappeared on the airwaves. His presence was not helpful. An attempt to a.s.sert that authorities had regained control-”Now we're on top and they're on the bottom”-was misinterpreted by many as an endors.e.m.e.nt of white supremacy. Not until Tuesday morning was the curfew lifted. More than a thousand people had been wounded and treated in area hospitals. Thirty-four people had died during the rioting. Nearly four thousand people had been arrested. Six hundred buildings had been damaged by looting and fire, primarily grocery stores, liquor stores, furniture shops, clothing stores, and p.a.w.nshops (which seem to have been targeted primarily as repositories for guns). Some 261 buildings were totally destroyed. But as the fires died down, a new conflict flared up. At issue was the question of who was to blame.

TO GROUPS like the NAACP, the ACLU, SNCC, and others on the left, responsibility clearly rested with Chief Parker, Sam Yorty, and the Los Angeles power structure. Community organizer Saul Alinksy recommended that both Parker and Cardinal McIntyre-”that unchristian, prehistoric muttonhead”-be removed. As the embers of Watts still burned, Dr. Martin Luther King arrived in Los Angeles, where he criticized the Parker/Yorty administration and described the riots as ”a sort of blind and misguided revolt against the nation and authority.”* King's critical yet conciliatory comments were not welcomed. Governor Brown described King's visit as ”untimely.” African American Angelenos were hardly more welcoming. At a meeting in Westminster, he was heckled by the predominantly black crowd. One member of the crowd stood up and said that the community needed ”people like Parker and Yorty down here-not Dr. King. They're the ones responsible for what's going on.” King's critical yet conciliatory comments were not welcomed. Governor Brown described King's visit as ”untimely.” African American Angelenos were hardly more welcoming. At a meeting in Westminster, he was heckled by the predominantly black crowd. One member of the crowd stood up and said that the community needed ”people like Parker and Yorty down here-not Dr. King. They're the ones responsible for what's going on.”

King agreed and promised to do everything he could to get the mayor and the police chief to attend a meeting, adding, ”I know you will be courteous to them.” The crowd laughed. Neither Yorty nor Parker had set foot in Watts since the riots.

Still, King tried to follow through on his promise. Mayor Yorty was not receptive. In a closed-door meeting, Yorty excoriated the civil rights leader for daring to mention ”lawlessness, killing, looting, and burning in the same context as our police department.” He also rejected the idea of a civilian police review board. King left Los Angeles shaken by white obstinacy and by the rise of a new black militancy.

To Mayor Sam Yorty and Chief Parker, the cause of the riots was clear-and had nothing to do with King's psychological mumbo jumbo. The quick spread of Molotov c.o.c.ktails, the inflammatory printed handbills that appeared in Watts on Thursday, the reports of men addressing the crowds with bullhorns, the movements of youths in cars through areas of great destruction-Parker felt like everything pointed to the involvement of the Communist Party, the Black Muslims, or both. Parker did not believe that radicals had started the violence; he did believe that they had moved into a chaotic situation and made it immeasurably worse. His department, with its vaunted intelligence apparatus, had not failed. Instead, they had engaged with a deadly foe. Even as the violence on the street wound down, the LAPD prepared to hit back.

At 2 a.m. on the morning of August 18, just days after the violence had finally subsided, the LAPD launched an all-out attack on what it saw as the epicenter of the violence-the Muslim Temple at 5606 South Broadway, headquarters for the Los Angeles chapter of the Nation of Islam. The ostensible cause of the raid was an early-morning anonymous phone call to Newton Division, claiming that the Black Muslims were stockpiling weapons. As the police were breaking down the door, they came under fire-or so they later claimed. Officers later explained that ”pellets” had started ”pounding” their cars. So the police opened fire. In all, somewhere between five hundred and a thousand rounds of ammunition slammed into the two-story stucco structure. Eventually, the occupants of the Temple signaled that they were ready to surrender. Fifty-nine Nation of Islam members were arrested. No guns were found. Three weeks later, a judge blamed the incident on the LAPD's ”imagination” and dismissed charges against the nineteen men charged with felony offenses. When African American councilman Billy Mills demanded that Parker come before the council to explain the raid, Parker refused, saying, ”I suggest he read the City Charter and find out what his powers and limitations are.”

The following day, the Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times noted with evident satisfaction that the ”taboo” on white men entering the Temple ”had been broken.” The paper further reported that while no guns had been found, the temple was full of seditious literature, including hundreds of leaflets that provocatively read, ”Stop Police Brutality.” Police actions only bolstered the Black Muslims' standing. Soon thereafter, Marquette Frye, the young man whose stop had sparked the Watts riots, joined the Nation of Islam. noted with evident satisfaction that the ”taboo” on white men entering the Temple ”had been broken.” The paper further reported that while no guns had been found, the temple was full of seditious literature, including hundreds of leaflets that provocatively read, ”Stop Police Brutality.” Police actions only bolstered the Black Muslims' standing. Soon thereafter, Marquette Frye, the young man whose stop had sparked the Watts riots, joined the Nation of Islam.

THE STREETS of Watts weren't the only place where the LAPD went on the offensive. During the riots, the ailing chief had at times withdrawn from command decisions. However, he had kept up a busy schedule of television appearances, during which he forcefully criticized the rioters and defended the department. Now that the riots were over, Parker was ferocious in defending his men's performance and his own legacy. Instead of sulking or hiding, he launched a media blitz.

Watts was not a failure of the department, the chief insisted. What had happened was a bad Highway Patrol stop on a hot day that gave the Communist Party and its allies the opening they had long hoped for. It did not matter that the men with the bullhorns were later identified as members of local community groups or that the cars moving with suspicious ease through the combat zone almost certainly contained gang members, not Communist Party organizers. The LAPD had not failed. Nor had Chief William Parker. He had not missed black Los Angeles's anger and alienation. On the contrary, Chief Parker maintained that Watts had proved him right.

As evidence of a large conspiracy failed to turn up, Chief Parker turned to another explanation-one that emphasized black migration, the civil rights movement, and ma.s.s psychology. He was not shy about making his case. ”A great deal of the courage of these rioters was based on the continuous attacks of civil rights organizations on the police,” declared Parker on CBS Reports CBS Reports later that month. later that month.

”They're attempting to reach these groups ... by catering to their emotions,” declared Parker (an emotional man who had no patience for that quality in others). ”'You're dislocated, you're abandoned; you're abused due to color,'” Parker continued, mimicking and mocking the att.i.tudes of civil rights supporters. The civil rights movement had unleashed the virus of civil disobedience-the belief that people ”don't have to obey the law because the law is unjust.” At the same time, a huge surge of black migration had ”flooded a community that wasn't prepared to meet them.” (Parker didn't hide his own feelings about the matter: ”We didn't want these people to come in,” he told the panel.)* Both factors laid the foundations for the uprising. One thing was for certain: The LAPD was not to blame. Both factors laid the foundations for the uprising. One thing was for certain: The LAPD was not to blame.

”I think we are almost s.a.d.i.s.tic in the way we're trying to punish ourselves over this thing without realizing what we have destroyed is a sense of responsibility for our own actions,” continued Chief Parker. ”We have developed a shallow materialist society where everyone is a victim of their environment and are therefore not to be blamed for anything.... If you want to continue to live in that society, good luck to you.”

On August 29, Parker appeared on Meet the Press Meet the Press, the most respected of the Sunday news shows. There he faced off against host Lawrence Spivak and journalists from NBC News, Time Time, and the Was.h.i.+ngton Post Was.h.i.+ngton Post. The questioning was polite-Parker was introduced as the most respected law enforcement officer in the United States, after J. Edgar Hoover-but pointed. Parker was asked about the causes of the riots, the lack of black officers on the force, and the persistent allegations of police abuse against minorities. His responses were unyielding. The rioting was sparked by a botched arrest by the California Highway Patrol. The LAPD had only a handful of Negro lieutenants because it was hard to find qualified Negroes willing to work in such an underpaid, underappreciated profession. Isolated verbal abuse of minorities was perhaps a problem, but so was the fact that eight hundred of his officers had been physically a.s.saulted in the performance of their duties during the course of the previous year.

The response to these appearances was overwhelmingly positive. Parker claimed that in the weeks following the riots and his media appearances, he received 125,000 telegrams and letters-”ninety-nine percent of them favorable.” The city council, the American Legion, the Downtown Businessmen's a.s.sociation-virtually every major interest group in the city rushed to proclaim its admiration for Los Angeles's indispensable chief of police.

CALIFORNIA Governor Pat Brown begged to differ. By 1965, Brown was an old foe of Parker's, having clashed repeatedly with him over wiretaps, capital punishment, and other criminal justice issues. Brown suspected that frustration over discrimination and high unemployment was behind the riots, not Communist agitators or some spreading malaise of lawlessness. On August 19, he appointed an independent commission, the Governor's Commission on the Los Angeles Riots, headed by former director of Central Intelligence John McCone, to examine the cause and course of the riots. Brown charged the commission with delivering a thorough report as quickly as possible. The commission heard directly from more than seventy-nine witnesses; its staff interviewed hundreds of people, including ninety arrested during the riots. Twenty-six consult ants queried another ten thousand people.

The testimony of many of the African Americans who appeared before the commission and Chief Parker, Police Commission president John Ferraro, and Mayor Yorty was strikingly at odds. Witnesses such as councilman Tom Bradley and state a.s.semblyman Mervyn Dymally expressed some sympathy for the plight of law enforcement officers attempting to patrol a dangerous ghetto. Yet they also insisted that the LAPD was both too slow to enforce the law in black neighborhoods and, when it did act, too often did so disrespectfully-sometimes even brutally. Negroes, testified a.s.semblyman Dymally, ”generally expected the worst from police and got it.”

Parker, Ferraro, and Yorty rejected this critique. In his testimony before the McCone Commission on September 17, Parker put forward his a.n.a.lysis of what had happened-to a strikingly sympathetic audience. According to Chief Parker, Watts reflected the general decline of law and order throughout the United States. Parker's rambling testimony, with its strange third-person references to himself (e.g., Negro leaders ”seem to think that if Parker can be destroyed officially, then they will have no more trouble in imposing their will upon the police of America ... because n.o.body else will dare stand up” to them) would later be described by the historian Robert Fogelson as ”bordering on the paranoid.” But McCone and most white Angelenos found it perfectly reasonable.

Civil rights leaders attacked Parker for provocative comments, particularly his ”we're on top and they're on bottom” statement. Critics interpreted this as an endors.e.m.e.nt of the status quo. It was possible that Parker's remarks in that particular instance were simply descriptive. But there is no mistaking the drift of Chief Parker's comments. Despite his earlier experiences as a Catholic in an aggressively Protestant city, Parker had never been sympathetic to the civil rights movement. Its embrace of civil disobedience horrified him. He did not see the history of hundreds of years of legal oppression. He did not see the horrifying indignities that African Americans in his own department such as Vivian Strange or Tom Bradley (who once dressed up as a workman in order to go look at a house in a majority-white neighborhood he was considering buying so as not to draw unwanted attention) routinely faced. This was a tragic failure of empathy for the chief of a great African American city.

Yet for many years, Parker's comments on race had a certain balance: He criticized civil disobedience but also disdained the ”pseudoscience” of racism. He foresaw a time when ”a.s.similation” would remove racial conflicts. But as the 1960s progressed, any sense of balance fell away. Bill Parker had denied that blacks in Los Angeles experienced racism in any significant way. Now he actively played on white fears of black and brown violence to rally support for the police department.

”It is estimated that by 1970,” he told viewers of ABC's Newsmaker Newsmaker program on August 14, ”forty-five percent of the metropolitan area will be Negro; that excludes the San Fernando Valley.... If you want any protection for your home and family, you're going to have to get in and support a strong police department. If you don't, come 1970, G.o.d help you!” program on August 14, ”forty-five percent of the metropolitan area will be Negro; that excludes the San Fernando Valley.... If you want any protection for your home and family, you're going to have to get in and support a strong police department. If you don't, come 1970, G.o.d help you!”

Given such comments, it is hardly surprising that Chief Parker's relations.h.i.+p with his critics did not improve. Back in Los Angeles at a city council meeting in September, Councilman Bradley attempted to pin down Parker on the ”shadowy organization” that Parker constantly (albeit elliptically) referred to in his talks about the Watts riots.

”Can you identify the organization?” Bradley asked the chief.

”I have my suspicions,” replied Parker. Then he turned the question around on Bradley. ”Perhaps you can. You're closer to those people.”

PARKER'S combative appearances belied his fragile health. That October, he returned to the Mayo Clinic, this time for heart surgery. In his absence, the department took a few small steps toward a less combative posture, a.s.signing African American lieutenants to five critical divisions (Public Information, Newton, 77th Street, University, and Wils.h.i.+re) to serve as community relations officers. But when rumors began to circulate that Parker might be about to retire, Yorty urged him to return to the job.

On December 2, 1965, the day before Parker was scheduled to return to Los Angeles, the Governor's Commission on the Los Angeles Riots, which was known simply as the McCone Commission, issued its report. Written largely by commission vice chairman Warren Christopher, it attempted to tack between the two camps. The rioting was dismissed as the handiwork of a disgruntled few, not a ma.s.s uprising driven by legitimate concerns. As to whether the LAPD's style of policing was to blame for the outbreak of violence, the McCone Commission report was coy. It reported ”evidences [of] a deep and longstanding schism between a substantial portion of the Negro community and the Police Department,” and mentioned the frequent complaints of ”police brutality” (a phrase the report placed in prophylactic quotation marks, lest the commission be accused of confirming that such things occurred). The report also noted that ”generally speaking, the Negro community does not harbor the same angry feeling toward the Sheriff or his staff as it does toward the Los Angeles police.” Indeed, the McCone Commission correctly observed that ”Chief of Police Parker appears to be the focal point of the criticism within the Negro community.”

”He is a man distrusted by most Negroes,” the report continued. ”Many Negroes feel that he carries a deep hatred of the Negro community.”

But the commission raised these issues only to dismiss them. ”Chief Parker's statements to us and collateral evidence such as his record of fairness to Negro officers are inconsistent with his having such an att.i.tude,” the commission declared. ”Despite the depth of feeling against Chief Parker ... he is recognized, even by many of his most vocal critics, as a capable Chief who directs an efficient police force that serves well this entire community.” This, of course, was precisely the proposition that many African Americans rejected. Christopher concluded the section on the policing with the Parkeresque declaration: ”Our society is held together by respect for law.” The police, it continued, were ”the thin thread” that bound our society together. ”If police authority is destroyed... chaos might easily result.” The commission also echoed Parker's rhetoric about the civil rights movement: ”Throughout the nation unpunished violence and disobedience to law were widely reported and almost daily there were exhortations here and elsewhere to take the most extreme and illegal remedies to right a wide variety of wrongs, real and supposed.”

The report's criticism of the Police Commission was more pointed. It noted, with wonder, that ”no one, not a single witness, has criticized the Board for the conduct of the police, although the Board is the final authority in such matters. We interpret this as evidence that the Board of Police Commissioners is not visibly exercising authority over the Department vested in it by the City Charter.” Yet the commission's recommendations-that the Police Commission meet more frequently, request more staff, and get more involved, were strikingly naive. The Police Commission's powerlessness was not simply a matter of its occasional meetings and limited resources. It also reflected a deliberate, decade-long strategy by Chief Parker to a.s.sert the prerogatives of the professional policeman over those of the casually involved citizen. A mere exhortation was hardly an effective remedy against as skilled a politician as Bill Parker.

To many on the left, the McCone Commission's report was a bitter disappointment. A January 1966 a.s.sessment by the California advisory committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights criticized the report for ignoring warnings, such as the one sounded by a.s.sistant attorney general Howard Jewell, that the bitter conflict between Parker and civil rights leaders might well lead to riots. But to Parker, even mild criticism smacked of a personal attack.

Back on the job after a six-week period of rest and recuperation, he responded with characteristic bluntness.

”I think they're afraid I'm going to run for governor,” Parker told the Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times. ”[T]his is just a political attack on me in an attempt to use the Police Department as a scapegoat and to repeat the completely false charge that the Police Department caused the rioting.”

In fact, it was Mayor Yorty who was planning to run for governor against Pat Brown-as a law-and-order conservative. Not surprisingly, Yorty backed Parker's response to Watts 100 percent. Politically, Parker had become a potent symbol of law and order. Personally, Yorty worried about Parker's health. On December 16, Yorty wrote to the Police Commission to propose appointing a civilian police administrator to a.s.sist Parker in his job. Nothing came of the idea.

Forced to choose between Chief Parker and his critics, L.A.'s elected politicians went with the police. In March 1966, the city council voted to commend commend Chief Parker for his management of the department and the ”pattern of realistic human relations” he had established with the city's African American community. Only three members of the council, Tom Bradley, Gilbert Lindsay, and Billy Mills, voted against this curiously worded expression of support. Chief Parker for his management of the department and the ”pattern of realistic human relations” he had established with the city's African American community. Only three members of the council, Tom Bradley, Gilbert Lindsay, and Billy Mills, voted against this curiously worded expression of support.

Parker's popularity dissuaded the city's elected officials from criticizing him directly. ”It's most plausible that Chief Parker is the most powerful man in Los Angeles,” mused Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times publisher Otis Chandler to a publisher Otis Chandler to a Was.h.i.+ngton Post Was.h.i.+ngton Post reporter that summer. ”He is the white community's savior, their symbol of security.” reporter that summer. ”He is the white community's savior, their symbol of security.”

Privately, however, many recognized that Parker was the major obstacle to improved race relations in the city. On March 4, 1966, an FBI agent who'd attended a special panel on Watts at the National a.s.sociation of District Attorneys in Tucson reported on his conversation with L.A. district attorney Evelle Younger and Judge Earl Broady, a member of the McCone Commission and an African American. Both Younger and Broady described Parker's ”ingrained action [sic] [sic] against Negroes” as ”the major stumbling block to any problem of effective community relations.” Younger also identified the LAPD's failure to recognize or promote black officers as a major problem. Both men said that they believed Parker would have resigned by now if not for demands from civil rights groups such as the Congress of Racial Equality that he step down. (Parker didn't want to lose face.) Younger also confided that Chief Parker was a very sick man. Less than a week later, Parker was hospitalized for ”a temporary cardiac incapacity.” Not until June 1 was Parker able to resume command of the department. against Negroes” as ”the major stumbling block to any problem of effective community relations.” Younger also identified the LAPD's failure to recognize or promote black officers as a major problem. Both men said that they believed Parker would have resigned by now if not for demands from civil rights groups such as the Congress of Racial Equality that he step down. (Parker didn't want to lose face.) Younger also confided that Chief Parker was a very sick man. Less than a week later, Parker was hospitalized for ”a temporary cardiac incapacity.” Not until June 1 was Parker able to resume command of the department.

On July 5, 1966, Chief Parker sent a memorandum to the city council that represented a serious attempt to come to terms with the city's public safety needs. In it, Parker returned to one of his favorite themes: the need to increase the size of the LAPD. The memo noted that in October 1965, L.A.'s ratio of police officers per thousand residents had fallen to a mere 1.87-little more than half of New York's 3.31 officers per thousand. Yet while L.A.'s population had risen 17 percent since 1958 (and serious crime had risen 47 percent), the size of the police department had actually fallen. One table comparing the number of police per 1,000 residents in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles made a powerful case for Parker's argument that Los Angeles had made a disastrous decision to underinvest in its police force: The memo concluded by noting that ”if the recommended [police] manpower rate for 1958 were projected to a police-officer-per-thousand ratio in 1965, Los Angeles would need 11,010 police officers”-double the size of the current force. As for the chances of this happening, even Parker considered the idea ”academic.” Thanks to his insistence on high standards (of a certain sort), the LAPD couldn't even fill the much smaller number of positions that were currently available. But Parker's fundamental a.n.a.lysis was almost certainly correct. Los Angeles was underpoliced-criminally so. It still is.

On the evening of July 16, 1966, Bill Parker went to a banquet at the Statler Hilton Hotel to receive an award from the Second Marine Division, which was celebrating its seventeenth annual reunion. He received a plaque citing him as one of the nation's foremost police chiefs. After a few brief remarks, he walked back to his table, where Helen was sitting, while a thousand Marine Corps veterans gave him a standing ovation. He sat down, then, suddenly, he leaned back and started gasping for air. Slowly he crumpled to the floor. His heart had finally failed him. After almost thirty-nine years on the force, Chief William H. Parker was dead. He was sixty-one years old.

The public responded to Parker's death with an outpouring of grief. Mayor Yorty declared himself to be ”shocked and heart-broken.”

”Los Angeles and America will sadly miss our courageous and beloved Police Chief Parker,” Yorty declared. ”He was a monument of strength against the criminal elements.”

Governor Pat Brown (a frequent Parker antagonist) praised the chief for his ”courageous commitment to the rule of law.” Even adversaries such as A. L. Wirin had admiring words. Although they had ”disagreed sharply on most subjects,” the civil liberties attorney declared, ”I have admired him throughout the years as an efficient and dedicated police officer.”

Said councilman Tom Bradley, ”I regret the death of a man who did much to change the image and practices of the police department, although he often spoke from emotion without considering the effect of his words.”

Only Thomas Kilgore, the western representative for Dr. Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leaders.h.i.+p Conference, seemed willing to dissent: ”His death will be a loss in the sense he put together a strong, disciplined police force. But I think his death will be a relief to the minority community, who believe he woefully misunderstood the social revolution taking place.”

At the funeral home, Parker's casket was given a twenty-four-hour police honor guard. The day before the funeral, Parker's body was brought to the City Hall rotunda to lie in state. More than three thousand mourners came to pay their respects and view Parker's body. The funeral itself was scheduled for 10 a.m. the following day at St. Vibiana's cathedral. Police and church officials alike were caught off guard by the ma.s.sive turnout. Thousands of Angelenos-including Gov. Pat Brown, Republican gubernatorial nominee Ronald Reagan, and Mayor Sam Yorty-and police chiefs from sixty cities filled the cathedral for the requiem high ma.s.s, with Cardinal James Francis McIntyre as the officiant. Another 1,500 people lined Main Street to listen to the ma.s.s on loudspeakers and, afterward, to observe the hea.r.s.e carrying Parker's body, escorted by 150 LAPD motorcycle officers. The funeral procession to Parker's grave site at the San Fernando Mission Cemetery was seven miles long. There, a military honor guard buried Chief Parker with full honors while the American Legion Police Post 381 band played ”Hail to the Chief” as the casket was moved to the grave site. Taps was played, a rifle volley fired, and then Chief Parker was lowered into the earth.

* In November 13, 1965, In November 13, 1965, Sat.u.r.day Review Sat.u.r.day Review article, King offered the following explanation of why rioting had broken out in Los Angeles: ”Los Angeles could have expected riots because it is the luminous symbol of luxurious living for whites. Watts is closer to it and yet further from it than any other Negro community in the country. The looting in Watts was a form of social protest very common through the ages as a dramatic and destructive gesture of the poor toward symbols of their needs.” article, King offered the following explanation of why rioting had broken out in Los Angeles: ”Los Angeles could have expected riots because it is the luminous symbol of luxurious living for whites. Watts is closer to it and yet further from it than any other Negro community in the country. The looting in Watts was a form of social protest very common through the ages as a dramatic and destructive gesture of the poor toward symbols of their needs.”* During the same interview, Parker also made it clear that ”less than one percent” of L.A. County's 600,000 African American residents were involved in the violence. During the same interview, Parker also made it clear that ”less than one percent” of L.A. County's 600,000 African American residents were involved in the violence.

28.

R.I.P.