By Nick Madigan, New York Times
INGLEWOOD, Calif. -- As a verdict nears in the trial of two police officers charged in the videotaped beating of a 16-year-old, about 1,500 so-called peace ambassadors, many of them current or former gang members, are preparing to fan out to spread the word that violence accomplishes nothing.
The riots that engulfed Los Angeles in 1965 and 1992 remain a searing memory, and many people say they are determined to prevent such unrest from happening again.
“We’ve learned from the last two times that burning things down doesn’t help,” said Bill Burgess, a professed former gang member who is coordinating the peace ambassadors for a community group called Stop the Violence: Increase the Peace Foundation. “It just makes things worse. We’re still rebuilding from those riots.”
The volunteers have been meeting for months, being trained in conflict resolution by social services workers, peace advocates and police officers.
In Inglewood, a city of 120,000 people just east of Los Angeles International Airport, the effort to keep the peace has thrown gang members, community and human rights advocates, churches, police and a Department of Justice task force into an alliance that a few years ago would have been unthinkable.
“It’s an extraordinary partnership,” said Steve Goldsmith, director of the Centinela Valley Juvenile Diversion Project, a nonprofit organization. The idea, he said, is not only to promote calm should the jury acquit the two officers but also to peacefully address issues like gang violence and the use of force by police officers.
In the case at issue, Officer Jeremy Morse was seen July 6, 2002, picking up Donovan Jackson, a black teenager who was handcuffed and lying face down, by his collar and the seat of his pants, and slamming him onto the trunk lid of a police car. Morse then punched Jackson in the face.
The encounter occurred after Jackson and his father, Coby Chavis, stopped for gas at a filling station. The police said they were questioning the older man about an expired license tag on his Ford Taurus and that his son had ignored a command to sit quietly in the back seat of the patrol car.
Morse, who was fired after the incident, was charged with assault under the color of authority, and his colleague Officer Bijan Darvish, who remains on the force, was charged with filing a false report about the incident.
After a seven-day trial, the jury began deliberating Thursday and might deliver a verdict as early as today.
Repeated showings of a videotape of the beating raised unhappy memories of the Rodney King case, in which the acquittal of four officers accused of beating him sparked the devastating 1992 riots.
The Jackson beating brought to mind more recent cases in Los Angeles, like that of a homeless black woman who was shot to death by a police officer because, he said, she was holding a screwdriver in a threatening manner, and of a black actor who was shot nine times at a Halloween party after he pointed a fake gun at a man who turned out to be a real police officer. In Riverside, east of Los Angeles, a young black woman sleeping in her car with a gun in her lap was shot to death by officers who had been unable to wake her. The officers in all three cases were cleared of wrongdoing.
In Inglewood, where more than 90 percent of residents are black or Latino, several hundred residents marched on City Hall after the Jackson incident to demand an overhaul of the police department. But some of the furor was dissipated by a series of town-hall meetings and by 40 days of prayer vigils. Community groups plan to do more praying on the day a verdict is reached.
Peace ambassadors like Reina Carrillo, a former member of the Calle 18 gang who is now director of the Inglewood Peace and Fairness Coalition, said they will pass out fliers urging people to remain calm and to report to “peace sanctuaries,” a half-dozen local churches, if they feel the need to vent their anger, and to attend a prayer vigil at City Hall.
Carrillo, who is of Mexican and Creole descent, said racial issues between blacks and whites still get in the way of Inglewood daily life. “If it had been a black officer and a black child, it would have been a whole different thing,” she said, referring to the Jackson beating.
But times have changed, she and others said, and the virtual certainty of violence may be a thing of the past.
“It’s a cultural shift from one that espouses ‘no justice, no peace,’ which is essentially a threat, to one that advocates peace and justice,” said Khalid Shah, executive director of the Stop the Violence group, established in 1989. “We received scores of calls from people who worried that what happened in ’92 would happen again. So we wanted to do something that would set the tone for peace, before the verdict, not after.”