For months now, COVID-19 has totally dominated the news. It may be the longest single-subject news streak since World War II. But, in recent days, the coronavirus has been muscled off the top of the fold by the violence ignited in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on May 25. For nearly a week now, America has been burning in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Seattle, Miami, Washington, D.C., San Francisco and other cities.<\/p>\n
On Sunday morning, Long Beach was quiet, but it was the sort of tense quiet that comes after a fuse is lit and the spark begins to travel, sizzling, toward a powder keg.<\/p>\n
The tense calm in the morning was punctuated by the Long Beach Police Department barricading its headquarters Downtown against a potential riotous assault. It wasn\u2019t a move that instilled much confidence in the city, and it was one that appeared to be acknowledging that violence would, indeed, occur.<\/p>\n
But, considering that few cities escaped protest last week without intense and fiery vandalism, the police barricade and the battening down of windows and storefronts by businesses in the area gave the real feeling that Long Beach was girding itself for the sort of street violence unseen in the city in almost three decades, since the weeklong rioting in April and May of 1992 that came as a reaction of the to acquittal of four Los Angeles policemen on trial for the beating of Rodney King.<\/p>\n
And the King riots surpassed the violence the Watts riots of 1965, when, again, nearly a week\u2019s worth of rioting and looting occurred, sparked by an incident with the LAPD when officers pulled over an African American motorist for reckless driving, and an argument broke out. Six days of civil unrest followed, fueled by years of simmering resentment due to\u00a0 mistreatment of African Americans in the community by the police as well as discrimination in housing, employment and education.<\/p>\n
This was the historical backdrop leading into Sunday. The protest was scheduled to begin at 3 p.m., but some 150-200 people had already begun to arrive Downtown shortly after 2:30, and dozens of LBPD units stood by, staged along the back side of the Arena next to the Rainbow Lagoon.<\/p>\n
Watching all of this unfold is how I spent Day 78 in isolation, and I truly felt isolated, sitting at home in East Long Beach, figuratively thousands of miles away from Downtown, sitting with my dogs reading the Post reporters\u2019 dispatches from the streets as things turned worse:<\/p>\n
\u201cCops went through the crowd with lights and sirens. They were pelted with water bottles.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSetting up skirmish line at Ocean and Magnolia… Another one at Broadway and Pine\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re throwing water bottles at LBPD motors\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPine and Broadway, just issued unlawful assembly announcement.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re trying to loot the Nike store.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBillings Hardware boarding up windows.\u201d<\/p>\n
And the crowd grew throughout the afternoon to numbers that seemed too large to contain violence, so the taut suspense that had grown since the morning continued.<\/p>\n