The next article is a bait-n-switch with a misleading headline. That tries to tell you that Watts and its Black Population, which is almost GONE. Now has a BETTER RELATIONSHIP with the Nazi-Cops that have HISTORICALLY SOUGHT THEIR DESTRUCTION FOR DECADES IF NOT LONGER.
Here is the article and pay attention to the fact that, ONCE AGAIN!? Young Blacks, ESPECIALLY BLACK TEENAGE BOYS! Talk about how they are getting HARASSED! ANNNNNNNNNNNNNNND, ONCE AGAIN!? Coon-Ass Nigger-Traitors talk about how things are BETTER FOR THEM! FOR THEM. Not the REMAINING Young Black Boys or Black Kids in general, BUT FOR THEM! Here is the article, if you wanna call it that;
Watts, 50 Years On, Stands in Contrast to Today’s Conflicts
LOS ANGELES — Donny Joubert watched the boy
round the corner of the housing project holding what looked like a
handgun. The barrel
was pointed at him and the two officers from the Los Angeles Police
Department. The boy was 10 or 11 years old, Mr. Joubert figured, and
had more gleam than anger in his eyes. Mr. Joubert, a community
activist who grew up in the project, shouted and lunged for the gun.
It was plastic. The police officers did not even reach for their holsters.
“Somewhere else, that kid would be dead,” Mr. Joubert said.
That interaction, Mr. Joubert said, is the best illustration of the way the
community has changed significantly in the 50 years since the Watts
riots broke out on the streets here for six days starting on Aug. 11, 1965.
Confrontations between African-Americans and the police are once again convulsing the country; in Ferguson, Mo., where protesters gathered over the weekend to
commemorate the anniversary of the death of Michael Brown and
the riots that ensued, a gunman fired at the police on Sunday night
and was shot, and other gunfire and skirmishes broke out. But
Watts — once a symbol of urban strife and racial tensions —
stands as a stark contrast. There were fewer than a dozen
homicides in the neighborhood last year, compared with
hundreds in 1965. Community leaders like Mr. Joubert, a
former gang leader turned peacemaker and respected mentor,
say relations with the police have never been better.
“They don’t think the kid is out to kill them; they’re not out to kill
the kid,” Mr. Joubert said. “They walk and they know who they
are talking to. We’ve been through this before, we’re still kind of
recovering and saying there’s another way.”
Still, this is no utopia.
Each summer, Mr. Joubert, 54, helps run a jobs program
for teenagers at Nickerson Gardens, the low-slung public
housing complex where he was raised. Twice last week, the
teenagers were summoned inside because of shootings,
as administrators worried that a stray bullet would endanger them.
And little of the trust Mr. Joubert has for the police has filtered to
these teenagers.
“They harass us all the time,” said Raydon Boyce, 19.
The Watts Riots
“Don’t matter what you do,”
Nigel Ewers added, echoing the
sentiment expressed by all of the
teenage boys taking a break one
morning last week.
This is not the same Watts their parents grew up in. While
the area remains persistently poor, demographics have
transformed it from an African-American enclave to a neighborhood
that is more than 70 percent Latino. Many blacks have moved
to the suburbs in the Inland Empire and the desert north of Los
Angeles. Those changes have brought their own tensions; many
black residents talk of feeling pushed out while Latinos have
struggled to rise to political leadership.
“Sometimes we’re all against everyone,” said Steve Torres,
17, whose sister left Watts for a small town in Virginia last year.
Sitting across the table, an African-American teenager spoke of
police officers “killing us off.”
“Don’t really matter who you are; we’re just labeled as bad
people,” Mr. Torres said.
Big questions hang in the air, sometimes asked aloud:
Could what happened in Ferguson happen here? Could Watts
explode as it did five decades ago? Alternatively, could the
improvements in Watts happen in Ferguson? There is a deep
generational divide in the answers.
Last summer, when Los Angeles police officers shot and killed
Ezell Ford, an unarmed mentally ill black man, less than a mile
away, protesters wanted to march from downtown to Watts.
Mr. Joubert and other leaders urged them to stay away, he said.
“There’s always a sense things can boil over,” said Nina Revoyr,
the chief operating officer for the Children’s Institute here, which
runs dozens of programs and offers free mental health services
in the neighborhood. “But there’s a sense of maturity here; the
neighborhood has been through all this before and the
transformation has happened. There’s a true relationship —
you see a problem, and you talk about it.”
After the police caught a group of youngsters who had been
stealing from the offices of the Children’s Institute, Ms. Revoyr
worked with officers to avoid pressing charges and instead sent
them to a diversion program where they completed hours of
community service.
Every week for the better part of a decade, Mr. Joubert and
other local leaders have met as part of the Watts Gang Task
Force, exchanging information with the police and trying to
find ways to quell tensions in the community, whether they
stem from a gang fight or a police interaction.
In some sense, the changes in the area are evidence of the
uniqueness of the neighborhood, which covers just more
than two square miles. It is, as some residents put it, the
smallest neighborhood with the biggest reputation.
The city’s Housing Authority has poured more than $10
million into special projects there in the last several years.
The Police Department has dedicated 10 officers and a
sergeant to each of the housing complexes, with officers
generally signing on for a five-year commitment to patrol
the area by foot each day. The police officers have begun a
football league for 9- to 11-year-olds and work as coaches on
their days off.
There are signs, too, of enormous challenges. The perimeters
of the sports fields at one middle school are fortified with
mounds of dirt, meant to protect students from bullets.
Residents celebrated a park when it opened this year on what had
been a weed-infested lot. Now, the gate to the park is locked,
and the slides and skateboard ramps were empty on recent
summer afternoons.
The area remains physically isolated, crisscrossed by freeways and
railroads (WHO BUILT ALL OF THIS BULLSHIT THROUGH
HERE, HUH? WHO FUCKIN DESIGNED AND DECIDED TO
BUILD ALL OF THIS BULLSHIT THROUGH HERE, HUH?
Fuck outta here with this fluff propaganda piece).
There is still no sit-down restaurant, but the father of the
city’s food trucks, Roy Choi, has announced plans to open one.
The Children’s Institute will soon unveil plans for its new
building designed by Frank Gehry, which it hopes will function
as a community center.
The persistent doubts remain.
“We look around at what other places have, and we just don’t
see the opportunities here,” said Tim Watkins, who runs the Watts
Labor Community Action Committee, which his father created
after the 1965 uprising, as locals refer to it. “There’s still a lot of
desperation around here, and that can lead to desperate acts at any time.”
Sgt. Emada Tingirides, who grew up in the neighborhood and
now serves as the coordinator of the Community Safety
Partnership program in the housing projects, said hardly
a day goes by without talking with residents here about police
shootings in other parts of the country.
“If it happened here, we would know what to do after the fact,”
she said. But she acknowledged change does not come easily
and officers still face mistrust from the young men in the
neighborhood. “This is a cultural shift that is going to take
time, not just years but decades and generations.”
She thought back to the boy who approached her with the
toy gun about six months ago. Mr. Joubert snapped the object
in half and then persuaded the ice cream trucks and liquor stores
to stop selling them.
That boy, she said, might be someone who now believes the
police are out there to protect him, or at least not out to get him.
(Pathetic. So you are all PRISONERS IN YOUR OWN WATTS SAFARI RESERVE. Tch.)
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