To Beverly Newton, the fatal police shooting of a 13-year-old black boy Sunday was a travesty.
"That kid shouldn't have been out at 4 in the morning," said Newton, 51, an African American from Windsor Hills. "But if a white teenager was out joyriding at any time of night, he would have just been ticketed."
Yet when Newton asked her husband, a retired Los Angeles police officer, what he would have done in the same situation -- chasing a stolen car, only to have it crash, then back up toward his cruiser -- he told her frankly, "I don't know."
In black Los Angeles this week, there was immediate outrage over the slaying of Devin Brown, the eighth-grade car-theft suspect who was shot while backing a car toward an LAPD cruiser, according to police. But in some quarters, the response was more complicated.
In offices, shops, cafes and living rooms, African Americans replayed the facts and argued over the appropriateness of the police response. Some viewed the incident through the prism of their own experiences with aggressive policing. Others, such as Melanie Elaine, a hairstylist, saw in it a moral about lax parental supervision.
"I think [the officers] were protecting themselves," said Elaine, 40, who works at the Salon Eberechi on West Slauson Avenue. "They didn't expect a 13-year-old to be behind the wheel. Secondly, where was his mother?"
Many who disagreed about one officer's response concurred about the police in general: Distrust still pollutes the relationship between blacks and the Los Angeles Police Department, nearly 13 years after riots sparked by the televised police beating of Rodney King.
A Times poll released last week shows that the LAPD enjoys its best approval rating in years: 68% of all registered voters. But among blacks, only 40% approve of the LAPD. That perception gap is the widest measured in more than a decade of polling on the question.
Exacerbating the tensions were recent developments in two other high-profile cases of police violence.
On Feb. 3, prosecutors declined to file charges against an LAPD officer who repeatedly beat a black auto-theft suspect, Stanley Miller, with a flashlight. And in January, two Inglewood police officers involved in the videotaped beating of black teenager Donovan Jackson won a $2.4-million jury award for wrongful termination.
