Sleepless in Los Angeles as cries for injustice turn into a terrifying chorus

After a night of rioting and looting, the morning seems like a scene from some kind of alternate reality: a quiet serenity descends over the Hollywood Hills, morning hikers walk into the canyons, neighbours talk with their dogs at their feet.

There has always been something insular about the different parts that make up Los Angeles. Neighbourhoods tend not to overlap. And a long-standing joke about Californians suggests they would rather fly to New York than drive two suburbs for dinner.

A police car burns during protests in Los Angeles.Credit: AP / Ringo H.W. Chiu

Protests in the past have not really breached these borders. On my first working trip to the city in 1992, in the wake of the riots triggered by a jury acquitting four LAPD officers for beating Rodney King, there was obvious unease. But those riots were contained largely to one section of the city.

Living in the same city almost three decades later, as the disenfranchised turn their individual cries for justice into a terrifying chorus, something has fundamentally changed. Glued to our television screens, watching live images of looters on Melrose Avenue, just 10 blocks away from my home, the unease gives way to real fear.

The city had only just taken its first breath after a 70-day stay-at-home order to flatten the COVID-19 curve when it was hit with a more restrictive curfew enforced by the National Guard, army reservists in armoured trucks, transforming the city of Angels into a police state.

Where strong state leadership had restored confidence during the preceding crisis, there is now the dismay that America has been left behind the rest of the world, thanks to failing federal leadership and a peculiarly American emphasis on individual liberty: that is, the freedom to place others at risk rather than wear a face mask in public.

My friends and I talk more frequently now. Some are frightened. One predicted we were on the eve of a historic moment, a day before that historic moment came in a crown of fire. And the conversation topics have shifted, from supermarket delivery slots and baking sourdough to monitoring hyper-local news apps. "I think this is near you," texts a friend, attaching a screenshot of a nearby hotspot.

Images of riots, broken store windows and burning cars, which dominate the television news, plant the seeds of fear. So sleep does not come as easily as it did. And all night long my phone quietly sounds beside the bed; each new message is someone else checking on my welfare.

But the television pictures do not capture the vast scale of Los Angeles nor the insular nature of its communities. That's why, incredibly, you can still go to sleep listening to police sirens wailing and wake to the sight of dog walkers and joggers passing your window.

Nor do the headlines focus on the positives among the horror: the police chief in Flint, Michigan, whose officers laid down their batons and walked with protesters. Or the protesters in Louisville, Kentucky, who formed a protective circle around a police officer. Or another protester, weeping, who fell into the comforting embrace of a cop.

Such stories are a flicker of hope in the darkness, a sign that not every showdown between authority and resistance results in bloodshed and destruction.

At the heart of the problem is an us-and-them divide – and disenfranchised black communities are only the tip of the iceberg. It leans into a tension between the police and those they police, but also between governments, who regularly pardon their own corruptions, and citizens, who feel persecuted and prosecuted.

LA is not alone. In an already inequitable world, the scales feel tipped not just towards those in power, but worse, only to those who voted for them. Dominic Cummings and #sportsrorts might seem like scandals that are a world away, but they are tendrils of the same poisonous roots.

And from that anxiety has sprung a nationwide wave of anger.

Protesters looting a shop in Los Angeles over the weekend.Credit: AP

Peaceful protest – such as footballer Colin Kaepernick’s decision to "take a knee" during the playing of the US national anthem – is invariably met with outrage from the political establishment. And for the disenfranchised, taught repeatedly their peaceful protests are unwelcome, few options are left.

In a terrifying postscript to Martin Luther King Jr’s words "a riot is the language of the unheard", America is now paying a bloody price for its inability to listen.

On one side of the burning car stands an implacable mob. On the other a police force which has, too often, squandered its moral leadership.

As the sun sets on Los Angeles, the uncertainty returns. With darkness comes danger and the implication that the day’s peaceful protests will give way to something more unpredictable.

The police, anticipating the moment, ordered the curfew brought forward. So the streets fell silent in what should be peak hour, as hotspots like Hollywood roar to life with rage and anger and the sound of smashing glass.

Then, at 8pm, the unsettling silence is punctured by distant cheering. And for a moment it sounds like the rioting mob is close. Then the applause reveals it is the nightly ritual of thanking health and essential workers for their work during the COVID-19 lockdown. Remember that? Essential workers. Remember them?

The great power of America lies in its optimism. It is the epicentre of the world’s businesses, particularly film and television. That unassailable confidence is why I moved here six years ago.

But my America feels trapped in a perfect storm: centuries of racial scars which have never healed, the pervading fear of the COVID-19 pandemic, the unemployment spike in a country where health insurance is a privilege that comes with a job, and the grotesque murder of George Floyd, followed by the too-familiar narrative of a police jurisdiction slow or unwilling to prosecute its own.

Each wicked problem has become a domino which, in isolation, towers above us: indecipherable, unyielding, unsolvable. But lined up they become something else, a revelation about the fragility of the so-called greatest country on Earth, and the realisation that all it will take is one swift kick to send them all tumbling down upon us.

Michael Idato is culture editor-at-large for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age