Interviews
Interviews
The Webster Commission met with a variety of public officials, law enforcement personnel, activists, and community leaders to discuss the rioting, its root causes, and the adequacy of the LAPD’s response. Two-hundred seventy-five interviews were conducted and more than three hundred individuals shared their own mental impressions, conclusions, and opinions. Featured here are summaries of three interviews with community members and leaders representing different communities in L.A. The interviews provide some insight into how each community experienced and reacted to the riots and evaluated the response of the LAPD.Reverend Cecil “Chip” Murray
As minister of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church (“FAME”), the Reverend Chip Murray was one of the most prominent religious leaders in L.A., overseeing a large congregation and administering a variety of training and assistance programs in service to the church community. In his interview, Murray describes efforts by himself and other Black community leaders to prepare for an explosion of violence in the weeks leading up to the verdicts, the reasons the LAPD failed to respond to the violence, and the longstanding oppressive forces and traumas that fueled the uprising within the Black community.
Further Reading: “Rev. Cecil ‘Chip’ Murray: The Reverend Who Led the Rebuilding of South L.A. After the 1992 Riots”Jay Rhee
Rhee was a business owner and member of Los Angeles’ Korean American community. In his interview he speaks about his role in fending off looters during the civil disturbance and the inadequacy of the police response to the looting that affected so many Korean American-owned businesses. Many attributed this looting to simmering tensions between L.A.’s Black and Korean American communities that had recently been heightened when South L.A. shop owner Soon Ja Du fatally shot 15-year-old Latasha Harlins on March 16, 1991, for allegedly stealing a bottle of orange juice.
Gloria Romero
Gloria Romero was a professor in the Department of Psychology at California State University, Los Angeles and had been a member of the Police Commission's Hispanic Advisory Council. Professor Romero speaks in her interview about the LAPD’s failure to hire adequate bilingual officers and train officers on the legal limits to their involvement in enforcing immigration law as “caus[ing] serious, lasting damage to LAPD-Latino relations during the disturbances.” Like the Rev. Chip Murray, she faulted the LAPD for allowing minority neighborhoods to burn, and she also described how underlying socio-economic conditions and other factors precipitated the civil unrest.
Further Reading: “Policing a Global City: Multiculturalism, Immigration and the 1992 Uprising” by Ryan Reft
