Mccone Commission, The

In the late summer of 1965, a predominantly black neighborhood of Los Angeles known as Watts descended into 6 days of massive rioting. California Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown, reeling from the political impact of the unrest, tapped John A. McCone, former director of the CIA and a well-known conservative, to conduct an impartial study of the unrest. McCone proceeded to lead a commission—the McCone Commission, which was made up of six whites and two African Americans, as well as a support staff of 29 assistants, 16 clerks and secretaries, and 26 consultants—through a series of hearings, interviews, and studies. This process was designed to provide descriptive and chronological information about the riots as well as to give recommendations to prevent their recurrence.

After 3 months, and after questioning more than 10,000 people, the McCone Commission released a report, Violence in the City—An End or a Beginning? that summarized the riots and provided policy recommendations for preventing future unrest. The immediate cause of the disturbance, according to the report, was the arrest of a drunk driver in Watts, a heavily African American neighborhood, during which police deployed force to subdue the suspect, a young African American male. Bystanders retaliated violently and, over the course of the next 5 days, violence escalated, resulting in the deaths of 34 people and the destruction of more than $40 million worth of property.

According to the report's conclusions, the Watts riots were spearheaded by a small, nonrepresentative sampling of the black community, mainly juvenile delinquents and unemployed “riff raff” elements. The uprising was largely disorganized and, for the most part, unwarranted, stemming from lack of education and an irrational hatred of the police. Most African Americans in Los Angeles, the report asserted, did not participate in the riots, nor did they endorse them.

The report recommended that police–civilian relations in Watts be improved, unemployment reduced, and job training programs established. The report failed to take seriously black grievances regarding systemic police brutality and widespread racial discrimination, shying away from a structural critique of the riots in general. Instead, the report located the nexus of responsibility in the individual failings of marginalized elements within the black community. Reinforcing this nonstructural critique was a second conclusion, namely that Watts differed from urban ghettoes in the Northeast because it was made up of small, one-story houses, rather than tenements, and enjoyed wide, tree-lined streets.

The McCone Commission quickly received criticism for these conclusions. The California Advisory [Page 280]Committee to the United States Civil Rights Commission challenged the report's findings, as did liberal voices such as civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, Berkeley sociology professor Robert Blauner, and Columbia University professor Robert W. Fogelson. Critics like Fogelson and Blauner argued that a larger segment of the black community participated in and supported the riots than the McCone Commission suggested, and that the riots were structured protests against police brutality and intolerable ghetto conditions. The looting and burning of stores, they argued, was strategic, and only white-owned stores known for overcharging black customers were targeted.

These criticisms, which located the cause of the riots not in the individual failings of the black community but in larger, structural relations of power, gained authority when the University of California at Los Angeles's Institute of Government and Public Affairs produced a study affirming McCone's critics, and Columbia professor Robert Fogelson presented his findings to the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice.

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