Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992

“Where the Water Is” centers on Sergeant Charles Duke, Special Weapons and Tactics Unit of the LAPD and use-of-force expert for the defense witness at King’s Simi Valley and Federal trials. Examining the Rodney King video, Sergeant Duke, a weapons and tactics expert, does not see what the public saw—a man receiving a horrific beating. Instead, he observes “weak” and “inefficient” baton technique, as administered by an officer who should have been removed from the line of duty to receive proper use-of-force training (61). The implication is that had proper technique been used, fewer blows would have been needed to subdue King (Duke counted fifty-six) and the visuals, in turn, would be much less incendiary.

Duke goes on to complain about the unavailability of “upper-body-control holds” (choke-holds), which might have limited the incident to “about fifteen seconds” yet which were eliminated in 1982 by the Police Commission and City Council after a spate of related deaths, most also involving drug use (62). The removal of the choke-hold, over the protest of the police force itself, Duke argues, precipitated the use of other, less palatable expedients: batons, nightsticks, and beating “into submission.” Embittered to be placed at a disadvantage and have techniques dictated by political forces, the Police Force responded with “an ‘in your face’ to the City Council and the Police Commission,” saying essentially: “‘We’re gonna beat people into submission and we’re gonna break bones’ […] You took upper-body-control holds away from us. Now we’re really gonna show you what you’re gonna get, with lawsuits and all the other things that are associated with it’” (65).

As presented here, the Rodney King beating, so far from an aberration, or an unwelcome exposure, was, in effect, precisely the political showdown the beleaguered LAPD wanted. It is another indication of a structural problem, and a pervasive distrust, within the police force itself, let alone between the police and the outside groups with which it must contend.

The title of this section refers to the water cooler where Sergeant Duke had his reservations about baton-related brutality shot down by an exasperated superior officer (64).

This section centers on Josie Morales, a clerk-typist andCity of Los Angeles uncalled witness to the Rodney King beating, Simi Valley trial. Morales, along with her husband, was a direct witness to the Rodney King beating. Her husband, who grew up in Mexico, where “police abuse is prevalent,” was “just petrified” by what he saw and tried to bring him and his wife inside (67). Morales, however, was determined to bear witness: “‘We have to stay here and watch because this is wrong,’” she responded, and the two watched for the duration (67). Afterwards, she attempted to bring her testimony to bear in trial and yet, despite assurances, was never called to witness. Concerned that the prosecuting attorney “was dead set on that video and that the video would tell all,” Morales wrote him a letter stressing the importance of putting at least “‘one resident’” on the stand to “‘testify to say what they saw’”: namely, “where those officers went and assaulted Rodney King at the beginning,” something “the video doesn’t show you” (67-68).

Haunted by what she had seen, and by the prosecution’s failure to present it as evidence, Morales has a striking premonition: “that those officers were going to be acquitted” (68); she begins to see it in her dreams, but it is summarily dismissed by those in whom she confides (her co-workers, the prosecuting attorney). And yet “‘I wasn’t thinking it was a dream.’ And that’s all, and it came to pass” (69). Eerily enough, a large number of witnesses (as seen already in Theresa Allison, “Lightning but No Rain”) will cite the presence of supernatural forces at work in relation to the Rodney King incident.

The title of this section refers to the composition of dreams, which are “some kind of indelible substance” that corresponds to, and influences, our reality (69).

This section’s voice is an anonymous man who was ajuror in King’s Simi Valley trial. He conveys the suspicion that he and his fellow jurors were betrayed and scapegoated by the justice system for the onerous verdict, “like we were pawns that were thrown away by the system” (72). As the trial judge separated himself from the verdict, and “all the political leaders,” from Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley to President George H. W. Bush, took to the airwaves “condemning our verdicts,” the jurors felt as though they’d been “setup,” left entirely alone to endure the shame, harassment, and threats of an angered public (72). In exercising their civic duty, they’d been condemned as villains, those chiefly responsible for the destruction wrought by the Los Angeles riots.

The juror recounts harassment by reporters and receipt of “threatening letters and threatening phone calls”; meanwhile, newspapers all over the nation published their addresses, even “the values of our homes” (73). The net result was plain enough: “We’ve been portrayed as white racists,” to the extent the KKK wrote the jurors letters of encouragement and support (73). Similar to the gang member in “Broad Daylight,” who favors love ballads and shooting rivals in broad daylight, we gain perspective on jurors who are appalled at the notion of white nationalism and who view themselves as responsible citizens and yet found themselves “pawns” of a “system” which all but asked them to render a verdict that seemed palpably “racist.”

The title of this section refers to a reporter taunting the jurors as they entered their assigned hotel room, asking, “‘Why are you hiding your heads in shame? Do you know that buildings are burning and people are dying in South LA because of you?’” (71).

Gil Garcetti, the seasoned trial attorney, testifies to the impact of police officer testimony in the courtroom. It is a natural (if somewhat hopeful) response, he reasons; after all, “You want to believe the officers, because they are there to help you, the law-abiding citizen” (74-75). Presuming one is not part of a harassed minority, run-ins with the police will be few and unlikely to change the basic view “we’ve been sold all our lives”: “They are still there to help and protect you” (75). So, when an officer appears in court, not looking “like he’s a cowboy,” “with a raid jacket and guns bulging out,” but instead “professionally dressed, polite,” there’s an instantaneous “aura” of credibility about that individual, a type of “magic” (75-76). So even while Garcetti admits that “the credibility of the police is more uncertain” throughout the nation, the credibility of the individual officer is not: “for the most part people want to believe the officers” (76). It is the same logic of loving the soldier but hating the war, a logic quite familiar to a generation licking wounds left by the Vietnam War. What Garcetti does not say is whether this same “magic” is felt by nonwhite jurors—i.e., by those who may have had more serious, injurious encounters with police—and who were, strikingly (seemingly unconstitutionally), absent from the jury box during the Rodney King trials.

The title of this section refers to the “magic” or “aura” of credibility and authority which the police officer brings to courtroom testimony—an aura which often makes it hard to win convictions in cases of police brutality (75, 76).

This section returns to Stanley K. Sheinbaum, Former president, Los Angeles Police Commission. He gives his impression of brewing trouble as the LA riots were just getting underway, thus concluding this section and leading us into the next. Sheinbaum recalls driving along the Santa Monica Freeway—an affluent thoroughfare—and spotting an African-American woman driving a “nice black recent BMW.” The car fit the scene, but something else did not: “her window was open” and “As she was driving, she had a hammer in her hand” (78).

At once, Sheinbaum intuits trouble is at hand and yet the chief of police, Daryl Gates, does not. When he arrives at headquarters, Sheinbaum finds that, rather than girding to deploy his force, Gates is getting in his car to leave the city altogether so as to attend to a matter of personal business: a fundraiser in the campaign to defeat Prop. F, the “heart” of which would have limited the chief’s (his) term to five years. Sheinbaum leaves little doubt that he regards Gates’ decision as a careerist and heartless maneuver: after all, “He’s the chief of police and this thing very well may be falling apart” (78-79). The implication, it seems, is that such faulty leadership has, over time, sown the seeds of its own undoing. (For other reactions to Gates’s inopportune agenda, see Paul Parker (“Trophies,” p. 170) and Gates’s own remembrance (“It’s Awful Hard to Break Away,” p. 180).

 The title of this section refers to the “hammer” Sheinbaum sees in the hand of an “African-American woman” behind the wheel of a “nice black recent BMW” on the Santa Monica Freeway, suggesting serious trouble is on the way in Los Angeles (78).