#longbeachstrong
Long Beach’s Citizens Clean up the Aftermath of Looting in Less Than Four Hours
I showed up late to the cleanup party and missed the whole thing!
The past two days my phone has been rattling with alerts, that horrible screeching Amber Alert noise, to let me know my city is under curfew. Sunday May 31, 2020, while lounging in my backyard, the hairs on my arms raised at the sound of a parade of police cars zooming past at 7pm with their sirens blaring and a flock of helicopters took to the sky. A local crime awareness Facebook page was listening to police scanner and was posting the calls as they came in.
Lootings at T-Mobile, CVS, Subway, Forever 21,people dragged from their cars, which were then set on fire, the National Guard at Lakewood Mall after looters were seen throwing Molotov cocktails. Bing, bing, bing. They just kept coming. Long Beach Post put up a video of the buildup called A Night of Chaos in Long Beach.
My husband watches the news obsessively and I absorb it through osmosis. We saw it coming. We knew there was no way a movement would sweep the nation and not sweep through LA County too. Plenty of people around here remember the Rodney King LA riots of the 90s. My black husband has waxed poetic to me plenty of times about seeing the fires burning for days. The world turned upside down. We’ve had some painful conversations on this subject.
I’ve never had a cop pull a gun on me. I’ve been harassed, I’ve been pat down at parties that were busted, thrown on the hood of a cop car while my car was searched and towed, stripped searched and spent a night in the tank, but never has anyone pointed a loaded gun at me. At the time, I was a drug-addled goth little shit that never was caught with anything by the grace of god. Seriously, the day after my car was searched by the cops I found two empty acid baggies under the floor mat in the back and a bottle of strawberry hill wine/swill wedged under the backseat. My husband was 13 the first time he had a gun pulled on him by a Huntington Beach cop. He was playing D&D in the park with his friends. He was using a stick as a wand and almost got shot. Thirteen.
