Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 13, 1990                   TAG: 9006130488
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

RACIAL UNREST IN ROANOKE?

But by night, it is the nightspots, such as Tasty's (just off 11th Street), that are open. And on recent nights, there has been trouble.

Crowds of 60 to 100 people, mostly young, have gathered on the street, sometimes blocking traffic. Bottles have rained down on cars passing through. This weekend, two men walking along the street late at night were beaten with a baseball bat and fists.

The police, responding in force, encountered relatively little difficulty in dispersing the crowd. It is possible to make too much of the problem.

But the greater danger is that Roanokers - comfortable in our valley, and far (we think) from the Howard Beaches and Bensonhursts of a New York City - will make too light of it.

The men who were beaten were injured seriously. A bottle thrown at a vehicle is a dangerous weapon. This is much more than a boisterous expression of youthful exuberance. This is peer-pressure violence, fueled often by alcohol and, no doubt, crack cocaine.

And, it seems, by racial hostility.

The crowds are mostly if not exclusively black. The hospitalized victims of the beatings are white. All the motorists who've made formal complaints about bottle-throwing, police report, are white. Race, though not the only motive, seems definitely a factor.

Nevertheless, some witnesses have reported that black people also have been assailed (though such reports are unofficial). Nearby residents, who have voiced fear about the crowds, are mostly black. And it is black-owned businesses whose employees must pick their way through broken bottles when they arrive for work on a Monday morning.

The first line of defense, for stable black households and black-owned businesses as much as for white passers-through, is law enforcement. To the extent they can, police must more closely monitor the situation, must be prepared to respond, and must arrest those who disrupt the peace.

That is only a first line of defense. Better than trying to control violence is preventing its recurrence.

On this score, the power of the state Alcohol Beverage Control Department to suspend or revoke ABC licenses might well prove helpful. The owner of Tasty's faces an ABC hearing on his licensing; in April, he was convicted of assaulting authorities who were checking customer identifications.

For the longer term, a greater black presence among the city police would help. Of Roanoke's 244 sworn officers, only eight are black. Of the city's 142 uniformed street officers, only three are black. Whether an officer is black or white should be immaterial. But as a practical matter, it isn't immaterial - not when the goal is to establish and maintain respect for the law among those black youth who encounter the law, and its white face, most frequently.

Yet that, too, is only a half-measure. The full measure is to foster for the young the social-support systems that make gratuitous violence unthinkable, to instill in the young the self-expectations that make drugs unattractive, to give to the young the common sense that makes throwing bottles at cars look as stupid as it is.

That's a tall order - and one that may be taller today, for all classes and races of American society, than ever before. But if the order can't be filled perfectly, the attempt must be made.