Dead serious: The execution of Tookie Williams

The Rev. Jesse Jackson tore himself away from ceremonies in Washington honoring the late Rosa Parks just in time to fly to Los Angeles and drape the mantle of civil rights martyr on the founder of the murderous, drug-dealing Crips street gang, Stanley "Tookie" Williams.

Mr. Williams was executed by the people of the state of California early Tuesday morning for murdering four people. What he did to the city of Los Angeles remains uncompensated.

Does Los Angeles appear to you to be a large city? It isn't, not if you're trying to find a place to live in it. The city is divided into two kinds of areas: unsafe and unaffordable.

With luck and two salaries, you may be able to find an area with a moderate-to-high rate of property crimes, not too close to the drive-by shootings and open-market drug sales that characterize the no-go areas controlled by street gangs.

The Crips and the Bloods have lost their monopoly now, muscled aside by ever more savage gangs from Mexico and Central America. The violence between Latinos and African-Americans in the city's schools is a small window into the minor leagues of a billion-dollar business in drugs and death.

Tookie Williams may go down in history as the George Washington of this Los Angeles.

Weeping supporters of Tookie Williams told reporters outside San Quentin that he should be allowed to live because he could use his life to teach kids to stay away from gangs.

He taught a lot of people to stay away from gangs. Whole sections of Los Angeles have been abandoned to crime. Murder statistics are recited with the reassuring tag line, "mostly gang-related." The late former mayor Tom Bradley once caused a political uproar by going on a foreign trade mission and answering questions about murders in Los Angeles by explaining that the criminals stay in their own neighborhoods.

In other words, the police make their stand at the 10 freeway, so stay north of that and all's well.

All is not well. The citizens of California have the right to say that they will not live with cold-blooded murderers running private criminal empires on the streets of their cities. They have the right under the U.S. Constitution to have the death penalty. They have the right to tell murderers and would-be murderers that when we say we will not tolerate those crimes or the people who commit them, we are dead serious.


Copyright 2005


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