Was It a Riot--or Rebellion?

Do you call it a riot or a rebellion?

It sure looked like a riot to me as I watched the scene on West Adams Avenue the night of April 29. A group of young men, after looting and torching a liquor store and drinking some of the merchandise, were hurling bottles and rocks at a formation of Los Angeles police officers and several men from the First AME Church. The churchmen, standing between the cops and the drunks, were trying to make peace. The selflessness of their mission didn’t prevent one of them from taking a brick on the head.

But as the dust and soot settled, I found out that the question is not so simple. What looked like a riot at the time was more complicated.

I talked to an African-American man on Vermont Avenue, outside a gutted market. Two Latino women and some children were pulling cans of food from the ruins. “What we did was American,” he said. “You ever heard of the Boston Tea Party? They looted the ships and threw it overboard.”

Or as another African-American man told me, “If the same thing were happening in Cuba, the L.A. Times would call it a rebellion.” As a matter of fact, many Los Angeles African-Americans refer to L.A.’s last bloody conflagration as the Watts rebellion.

My Times-issued Webster’s New Riverside University Dictionary defines a rebellion as “an uprising or organized opposition intended to change or overthrow an existing government . . . “ A riot is “a raucous or violent disturbance created by a large number of people.”

But this is more an argument over politics than semantics. Your choice of words defines your politics. If you think L.A.’s recent upheaval was a riot, you’d prevent its recurrence by calling out more cops. If it was a rebellion, you’d call the Job Corps.

The best example of how this debate affects the current election is found in one of the races for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination.

Rep. Mel Levine says cops. “I believe the riots were criminal behavior, caused by rioters,” he said during a debate on KCRW-FM Monday.

This was the thrust of Levine’s presentation. He briefly referred to his past liberal legislation. But the guts of what he said, his main message, was law and order. “I believe the riots were anarchy, were lawlessness, a failure of political leadership, an invitation to come on down (for) free burning, free shopping.”

The messages of the other two candidates, Rep. Barbara Boxer and Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy, differed in emphasis. They, too, denounced lawbreaking. Boxer said that “people who riot should be punished.” But she also said that an underlying cause of the disturbances were 12 years of Reagan-Bush economic policies that inflicted economic and social damage on the inner city.

McCarthy agreed. “There is deep bitterness, hopelessness and despair on the part of many people,” he said. “I would separate their legitimate concerns from those who seized events to loot some of the stores and were seen exiting the stores gleefully smiling.”

This reflects the divisions within the California Democratic Party.

Boxer and McCarthy are representative of the party’s liberal wing, consisting of urban blacks and Jews, urban and rural Latinos, environmentalists and assorted San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley lefties.

The liberals have always insisted that urban disorders have their roots in economic and social oppression; that these upheavals are as much a political protest as a violation of the law.

But the party is changing, becoming more suburban, more receptive to a political message that speaks to fears of personal safety rather than massive help for the inner city. Levine is targeting these new-style Democrats with a message far different than the party heard in the ‘60s, the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Now that I’ve thought about it, the semantic argument--this super-analysis of the Levine-Boxer-McCarthy positions--is nothing but mindless quibbling over which words are politically correct.

Really, if you followed the “riot” people’s SWAT squad approach to its limits, the city would call in the 82nd Airborne Division the next time there is trouble. If some of the “rebellion” folks followed their hearts, they would be holding cocktail party fund-raisers for the Crips and Bloods in Malibu Colony homes.

I don’t think we had a rebellion. To me, a rebellion has fiery manifestoes and a ragged army, led by people like Lenin, Washington, Simon Bolivar or Castro.

There wasn’t anything like that visible on the streets of L.A. But anyone who heard the anger expressed there knows we had more than a riot. Whatever the politically correct word, it was a damn mess.