"Las Vegas"

by Mike Davis

        Las Vegas's frenzied Memorial Day weekend was winding down with the promise of a big storm.  As raindrops the size of silver dollars intermittently splattered the sidewalks outside, weary casino tellers counted a quarter-billion dollars in holiday revenue.  Across the Mojave, 50,000 homebound revelers were strung out almost bumper to bumper, from Ivanpah Dry Lake to the outskirts of LA, 250 miles away.

        In a small park in the northwest part of town, several hundred Crips and Bloods, ignoring the storm warnings, were merrily barbecuing pork ribs and passing around 40-ounce bottles of beer.  earlier in the day, dozens of formerly hostile sets with names like Anybody's Murders (ABM), Donna Street Crips and North Town Bloods had joined at a nearby cemetery to mark a gang truce and place flowers on the graves of their homeboys (there were 27 local gang-related deaths in 1991).  Now these erstwhile enemies and their girlfriends were swapping jokes and new rap lyrics.

        But gatherings of six or more people, however amiable, have been banned since May 17 by Sheriff's order throughout Las Vegas's black Westside, as well as in the neighboring blue-collar suburb of North Las Vegas.  to enforce this extraordinary edict, Metro Police pulled up in front of Valley View Park in three V-100 armored personnel carriers.  When defiant picnickers refused to disperse, the cops opened up with tear gas and concussion grenades.  the Las Vegas "riots" had resumed for the fourth weekend in a row since the Rodney King verdict ignited a tinder box of black grievances.

        West Las Vegas (population 20,000) is the antipode to the pleasure domes of downtown and the Strip.  Grit without glitter, it has no hotels, casinos, supermarkets, banks or even a regular bus service. Yet like South Central LA, it scarcely resembles the frost-belt stereotype of a ghetto.  Its detached homes lack the verdant, Astro turf-like lawns and backyard swimming pools of the white neighborhoods, but they appear to be lovingly tended, with groves of shade trees to protect against the blast-furnace desert heat.  Even the spartan public-housing units in Gerson Park have a tidy ambience that belies their poverty.

        The destruction in Las Vegas, seemingly less systematic than in LA - also less extensive:  $6 million in damage compared with about $1 billion - was somewhat less spontaneous as well.  everyone agrees that rioting did not begin until about 7:30 on the evening of April 30th, after police used tear gas to turn back several hundred young blacks trying to march from the Westside to downtown.  From that point the stories dramatically diverge:  the local newspapers' version, almost totally reliant on police reports, versus the street-level perspective of young African-Americans like D., a 20-year-old member of the Valley View Gangster Crips, whom I went looking for the day after the Memorial Day picnic.

        According to Metro Police Lieutenant Steve Franks (who would shoot a teenager during the second weekend of disturbances), "Our intelligence was that if that group had reached downtown, they were ready to set fire to the hotels.  Had it not been for our officers, this town would have gone up in flames."  D. says, "This is total bullshit.  We were only trying to demonstrate against the Rodney King verdict and apartheid right here in Las Vegas.  The police just wanted an excuse to attack us."

        Having broken up the march, the police cordoned off most of West Las Vegas and drew weapons on anyone who approached the barricades.  Hundreds of young people, meanwhile, had regrouped near the Gerson Park projects, where the local Kingsmen Gang was hosting an impromptu party for the various Crip and Blood sets who had agreed the previous day - apparently influenced by news from LA - to stop fighting.  According to D., a Metro squad car drove straight into the festive crowd.  "People went crazy.  They started throwing rocks and bottles; then one of the homies opened up with his [gun]."  The angry crowd burned down a nearby office of the Pardon and Parole Board, while other groups attacked stores and gas stations with Molotov cocktails.

        Lieutenant Franks claimed that snipers "hid in trees and rooftops, and used human targets when they came out in the open to fire....These yellow-bellied rats stood with young children around them and then opened fire on police cars."  Another police spokesman claimed that gang members tried to kidnap an infant from a white family living on a predominantly black street.  I found no one who could confirm either of these lurid stories, which the city's two daily papers disseminated uncritically to a horrified white public.

        At the same time, the media, as in Los Angeles, studiously avoided any reference to police misconduct during the disturbances.  D., however, has vivid recollections.  "Me and my friends left after the shooting started," he said.  "Our car was pulled over a few blocks later.  When we asked what we had done wrong, a big redneck cop said, 'The rules have changed, nigger' and hit me in the face with his pistol.  I was held five days in jail for 'obstructions.'  The cops threw away my ID and health card, so I lost my job at Carl's Junior."

        D. thinks these now ritual confrontations will only grow more violent during the summer.  Like other black youth with whom I spoke, he believes that Clark County Sheriff John Moran "will do anything, however extreme, to break up the [gang] unification process."  Indeed, D. warned me that Las Vegas is on the verge of what he calls "an underground holocaust."

        Although Las Vegas's mythographers (most recently Warren Beatty in Bugs) typically elide race, black entertainers and laborers played decisive roles in the transformation of a sleepy desert railroad town into a $14-billion-a-year tourist oasis.  But the sensational rise of the modern casino economy went hand in hand with the degradation of black rights.  Glitter Gulch was built by Jim Crow.

        As exiled LA gamblers began to buy up the old Fremont Street casinos in downtown Las Vegas in the late 1930s, local black residents were barred from the blackjack tables and slot machines.  When Tom Hull opened his El Rancho in 1941 - the Strip's pioneer casino and resort hotel - restrictive covenants were being used to force black families across the Union Pacific tracks into West Las Vegas, a wasteland without paved roads, utilities or fire protection.  By the time Meyer Lansky's gunmen ruined Bugsy Siegel's good looks in 1947, segregation in Las Vegas was virtually total.  Blacks could wash dishes, make beds, even entertain, like Lena Horne and Sammy Davis, Jr., but they could not work as dealers or bartenders, stay in a hotel, live in a white neighborhood or go to a white school.

        An all-white police department, with a national reputation for brutality, enforced the color line in a town that African-Americans began to call Mississippi West.  When in 1944 black GIs guarding nearby Boulder Dam tried to defy the racist rules that kept them out of downtown bars and casinos, they were attacked by police.  A quarter-century later, in October 1969, heavy-handed police tactics, together with disgust over continuing job discrimination, again ignited a riot.  For nearly a year afterward, Clark County's only partially integrated schools were rocked by battles between white and black students.

        While racism was building the premier city of the Silver State, racial turmoil was tarnishing its image.  The major hotels and their complicit union reluctantly signed a consent decree in 1971 guaranteeing open employment.  In the same year the Nevada legislature passed a long-delayed fair housing law.  Clark County schools followed a year later with an integration scheme that overrode white resistance to busing.  After 30 years of wandering the in wilderness, black Las Vegans thought they could see equality ahead.

        Like so much else in the desert, this has turned out to be a cruel mirage.  Although token integration is the rule, the majority of blacks are locked out of Las Vegas's boom economy.  In recent years, as the rest of the Sunbelt has slipped into recession, Clark County's population has increased at warp speed (1,000 new residents per week), and Nevada, the "most fortunate state in the nation," according to the local AFL-CIO, has repeatedly led in job creation.  Employment on the strip has soared with construction of mega-hotels, like the 5,000-room-MGM Grand, the biggest in the world, while the so-called South Nevada Industrial Revolution has seduced dozens of high \-tech computer and military aerospace firms from California.

        But only a handful of black families have found their way into affluent new-growth suburbs like Winchester and Green Valley.  Blacks remain vastly underrepresented in the higher-paying hotel jobs and construction trades.  Although minorities make up 20 percent of Nevada's labor force (25 percent in Clark Count) they hold only 14 percent of public-sector jobs.  And the explosion in the city's Latino population and a juge influx of jobless whites from nearby states have severely crimped traditional black employment in the low-way service industries.

        For too many native sons like D., the recent boom has been an embittering "prisoners' dilemma," offering equally futureless choices between menial labor and the underground economy.  As in Los Angeles, the shortfall between the spectacle of profligate consumption and the reality of ghetto life has been made up by street gangs and rock cocaine.  The first Crip set, transplanted from Watts, took root in Gerson Park in 1978-79; now an estimated 4,000 Crips and Bloods (together with 3,000 Latin and Asian gang members) are locked in a grim twilight struggle with police a few dozen block from the Liberace Museum and Caesars' Palace.

        Chan Kendrick, a scraggy, angular Southerner who headed the Virginia ACLU for many years before moving to Las Vegas to run the organization's Nevada chapter.  He makes no bones about which area is morally farthest below the Mason-Dixon line:  "Police abuse here is worse than anywhere in the contemporary urban South.  In an average month I get more complaints about police misconduct in Las Vegas than I received altogether during twelve years in Richmond."

        According to Kendrick and other critics, Metro Las Vegas Police Force, headed by Sheriff Moran (whom a local reporter described as being "as accessible as the King as Nepal") is little more than a mean guard dog for the casinos and the Nevada Resort Association.  Kendrick is constantly challenging the use of nuisance, loitering and vagrancy laws to keep "undesirables," especially young blacks and homeless people, off the Strip.  Likewise, he fights to force the police, particularly rogue narcotics squads, to respect the constitutional constraints on search and seizure.

        In one of many notorious recent incidents, in 1990 casino floorman Charles Bush was asleep when three plainclothes police, wanting to question him about the arrest of his pregnant girlfriend for prostitution, broke into his apartment with a warrant and choked him to death.  The official police explanation was that bush, surprised in his sleep, had fought with them.  The strangulation was ruled "justifiable" - the 44th time in a row since 1976 that the police had been exonerated in the death of a suspect.

        Despite a storm of criticism, the Clark County DA would not indict the three cops.  The Nevada Attorney General's office brought them to trial for manslaughter, but the all-white jury deadlocked 11-to01 for acquittal, and the case was dropped.  The local U.S. Attorney ignored the ACLU's petition for prosecution under federal civil-rights statutes.  As Kendrick points out, "The legacy of the Bush case is even more disastrous than the Rodney King verdict.  It shows that the Las Vegas police are condoned, on the flimsiest of pretexts, to break into black people's homes and kill them when they resist."

        For D. and his friends, meanwhile, the Bush case "is just another lynching, Las Vegas-style."  They point to the hypocrisy of a new state law that doubles sentences for gang-related offenses, while local law enforcement "plays patty-cake with the Mafia on the Strip."  They complain about the humiliation of being strip-searched in the street in front of girlfriends and neighbors.  And they acidly contrast the feds' apathy in the Bush case with their zeal to crush "Killa" Daniel and the ABM Crips from North Las Vegas.

        But their most bitter feelings are reserve for the politicians who think black Las Vegas's grievances can be swept under the rug with a few token gestures, like liberal Mayor Jan Laverty Jones's grandiloquent promise of 42 new jobs in the casinos, or Sheriff Moran's offer of "better communications" with the Westside.  For D. - who feels the only people "telling the truth about radical-level reality" in America these days are rappers like Ice Cube and Chuck D. - "things are already near the ultimate edge.  The time for lies is past," D. says.  "We built Las Vegas for them, and without equality we will tear this motherfucker down."