Tell Me, Where Were You?

I’ll go first. I was in junior high. Eighth grade, to be exact, and I remember watching the announcement of the verdict on TV and seeing the footage of the Simi Valley courthouse from a helicopter circling above the government center, just one town away from where I lived. Shortly after, I watched a crowd pull Reginald Denny from his truck, beat him to the ground, and throw a cinder block at his head. I had never seen anything so violent.

The buzz at school the next day was that the riots that had broken out the night before were heading our way. I had never seen a riot before, so I didn’t know how big they were or how far they could spread. I also didn’t know where exactly they were, but I knew they were in Los Angeles, and that we were just about 35 miles away. It seemed, to my naive young mind, plausible, but unlikely.

Night after night, we watched the news and saw the footage of stores burning, and mobs running down the street, arms full of stolen merchandise. It was my first encounter with civil unrest in America. I don’t think my young mind was capable of comprehending what it saw.

People were angry that justice wasn’t served against the people who beat a man in the street, so they took to the streets and beat a man in the street. Even at thirteen years old, I knew that was irrational and stupid. I could sympathize with their anger; I was angry myself, but I couldn’t understand what was being accomplished by tearing up the town. It would have been like me destroying everything in my bedroom because I didn’t like a decision my mom made.

Of course, the riots accomplished nothing. Police and civilian relations have never been worse, and Rodney King was hardly the last victim of their brutality. In June of 2020, in the middle of the COVID pandemic, millions took to the streets to protest the death of yet another black man at the hands of the police.

Thousands gathered outside the government center in Simi Valley, where 28 years earlier, four LAPD officers were acquitted of charges of excessive force. Just across the street sits a bar called Judge Roy Bean’s, named for the infamous West Texas “Hangin’ Judge.” Over the bar hangs a noose, to, I suppose, honor Judge Bean.

My 46-year-old brain can’t process that juxtaposition any better than my 13-year-old brain could process the riots. The one thing I can understand, however, is why things are the way they are, and while they’ll never change.