In 1989, Karen Toshima, a UCLA student, was killed in gang
crossfire on a Westwood street, which is usually a safe and bustling area in
Los Angeles. After the shock that gang violence could exist in such a nice area,
the police planned to execute a major cleanup of the area in a massive show of
force against gang violence. However, the people of South Central were disappointed
that the police showed such a sympathetic response to Karen Toshima’s death
when gang shootings like this happened every day where they lived and they never
get attention. A couple of days before the shooting of Karen Toshima, four
people were shot in South Central, but the people of South Central didn’t see the
police respond like this for them.
In response to Karen Toshima’s death, the LAPD hired 150
more police officers and enacted Operation Hammer, a plan to heavily saturate
gang occupied areas for two or three day with thousands of officers and make as
many arrests as they could for anything they could book them on. Police would
plant drugs on gang members and set them up. Police used snitches and took
money off of people they arrested. Operation Hammer was a free ticket to do
overly aggressive police work with the insurance that they were being backed by
the city as they were attempting to make the streets a safer place for
everyone.
The LAPD believed that the unjust mass incarceration of gang
members was the most effective way to get streets of white, well respected
neighborhoods to be safer instead of realizing why gang members and gang wars were
even a thing. Just running gang members off the streets would not protect
people. Gang members would still be around because the areas because the areas
that they live in would still be routinely ignored and silenced if they were
there or not. The city of LA didn’t offer to provide services or programs to the
impoverished and ignored areas of South Central to help with gang problems. The
city viewed these gang members as hoodlums that couldn’t be tamed so they must
be detained instead which blatantly showed the disregard the city of LA had for
actual change.
Similarly, in the case of Rodney King, the police used
excessive force when arresting King and disregarded people’s anger for the sake
that they didn’t want to handle people from poor, impoverished areas that have
been routinely abandoned by the police. Rodney King was attacked by overly
aggressive police as fellow LAPD officers and California Highway Patrol
Officers looked on. When those police officers were tried and found not guilty,
the routinely ignored, impoverished people rioted, showing their anger over how
often they were ignored. The government responded by bringing in even more
excessive force by more police officers, riot officers, and the National Guard.
Similarly to how the LAPD made an initiative to keep white
streets of Westwood preserved for the privileged that frequently went there
after the death of Karen Toshima, the LAPD focused more on the protection of the
white, rich homes of Beverley hills and Pacific Palisades instead of focusing
on the area where people were rioting during the 1992 riots in order. The LAPD
once again ignored the safety of the routinely ignored people of South Central and
focused more on the protection of rich, white areas. The blatant display of favoritism
and prejudice was something present in both the response of the LAPD to the
death of Karen Toshima and the response to the riots of ’92 in LA.
- Kimberly Carl
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