Ron Dowell grew up in Watts and Compton, earned degrees in ing, business, and criminal justice, and went on to work for Los Angeles County for 40 years. As he observed his personal and professional surroundings, he noticed both discrimination and erasure, and was compelled to go after them in his next life chapter — as a writer.
In the early 2000s, he began writing fiction and poetry, sharpening his creative writing skills through the UCLA Extension Writing program. In 2018, he was a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, mentored by authors including Tananarive Due, Angela Morales, and Douglas Manuel. Since submitting his work to the feminist literary collective, Writers Resist, he’s been invited by the group to share his work from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Friday at the Fallbrook Library.
Dowell, 72, is a full-time writer and will share his fiction work, “Crooked Out of Compton,” and his poetry collection, “Watts UpRise” at Friday’s event. He took some time to talk ing his writing to address issues like community policing, resistance, and his belief that progress will prevail over the current pushback. (This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. )
Q: Your poetry collection, “Watts UpRise,” has been called both a love letter and a fair critique to the city that helped shape you. What was the inspiration for this collection?
A: The inspiration is that I feel that I have some experiences that are being erased, literally being erased. I lived in the Jordan Downs Housing Project and my first recollection was at about 4 or 5 years old, of living in those projects. Then, we moved to another housing project called Palm Lane, which is probably a mile and a half south of Jordan Downs. I noticed that Jordan Downs is being torn down and it’s being replaced with [apartments and] single family housing, and the whole area is being remade, so at some point there will be no more Jordan Downs.
When we moved to the Palm Lane Housing Project, I was in kindergarten; by the time I got to the 10th grade, we were asked to move again, in 1966 right after the Watts Rebellion in order for them to build Martin Luther King [Jr./Drew Medical Center] hospital there. Both places have disappeared [the hospital closed in 2007 due to alleged incompetence and errors, reopening in 2015 as a new private nonprofit Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital] and I started doing some research on Palm Lane and there was very little written about it anywhere. Part of my motivation was to mitigate the erasure I was seeing. Hundreds of lives, people who grew up in these places, now they don’t exist, there’s no history, there’s no one talking about them.
I was 14 when the [Watts] rebellion started, and I was into baseball. I , which I write about in the book, in a poem that talks about my friend and I. We were playing on a backstop in the Palm Lane Housing Project in August, watching the flames that surrounded the housing project because we could see all the way around Watts and we were surrounded by fire. I felt the need to capture these moments. There’s a stereotype that all we did was participate in the riots and that we looted and stuff like that, but that is pure [expletive]. At 14, I was scared to death watching all of this stuff happening. I felt the need to kind of capture those situations and the fact that the places and locations of my formative years have been erased. So, I make it a point to talk about these experiences and those locations.
Q: In an interview with “Shoutout LA,” you’ve mentioned that your work talks about social issues in a way that’s both honest and innovative, to challenge stereotypes and humanize people. Can you share a couple of examples of this from “Crooked Out of Compton”?
A: One of the stories is called, “Bruised” and that was based on a newspaper report of these two women who were running a foster care scam. They adopted these two children and I decided to take that to another level and wrote about how this boy and girl in the system were separated when their mother was killed by their father. It goes through their different journeys through the foster care system and how the sister’s objective was to reunite with her brother. Along the way, we get into the institution itself and she’s dialoguing with folks at the children’s services bureau, trying to get them to help her. She’s identified where he is and is trying to get their help because the household where he is, is a destructive and abusive one; she’s looking for them to help her get her brother out of that situation and maybe at some point reunite.
I do a lot of talking about institutions in both “Watts UpRise” and “Crooked Out of Compton” because I worked in LA County for 40 years and I had a good opportunity to take a firsthand look at some of these institutions and how they work. I made it a point to never stay in one place; I wanted to get out and figure out what the county was doing. When you read my stories and you read my poetry, you will see that I talk a lot about institutions; I think most are very oppressive and they tend to continuously sustain a really oppressive system, despite the millions and billions of dollars that are poured into these places.
You’ll see other stories where I take on the police, particularly the sheriff because I got an inside view, a view that most people in Compton would never have because you’re either in jail or most of us would never work for the sheriff’s department. One of the things that I saw pretty quickly was that there was a disdain for places like Compton. I heard the words and saw the actions as you sit in meetings, as people were very negative about Compton. It’s an institutional, systemic bias and I saw a lot of that in health care, in the district attorney’s office. So, you’ll see that my stories talk about these things and the impact they have on people. I have a poem called, “Compton, An Energy-Fueled Dark Star,” and I try to talk about the impact of institutions on people and the fact that, in spite of this response from people who are so-called trying to help us, we’ve been resilient and we’ve been able to find ways to make something out of nothing.
Q: In 2010, you turned your master’s thesis into a published book, “Compton4COPS: Community-based Crime Fighting in Disadvantaged Racially and Ethnically Diverse Urban Communities,” based on your experience working in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. What had you been seeing during your time there that compelled you to write this thesis-turned-book?
A: I got there in 1991, right before the Rodney King incident. I worked inside the jail and routinely had to walk all the way back to the back of the jail to get to my office, located near the exit door that led to the garbage bins outside and that’s where they took the inmates back and forth to court. (Matter of fact, OJ Simpson routinely came past my office and waved to my secretary, so we were not in the best location in the jail.)
There were two types of treatment that happened in the sheriff’s department while I was there — before the Rodney King verdict, and after. Before, it was routine to walk down that hall and see people thrown up against the wall, naked, spread out, searched. It got so bad, I one of the head pharmacists actually tried to break up an incident between a sworn officer and an inmate, unsuccessfully. It was a routine thing to see people being manhandled and abused. After Rodney King, the climate changed, I’ve got to give them credit for that. The whole atmosphere changed, and it was no longer as visible and it seemed to be kinder. I spent the next several years there until I transferred to a new jail and helped with the transition and to continue to run my units (delivering medical supplies to the outlying areas and to prepare the medical services budget). I had more visibility and more opportunity to meet more people, and I did. I was on this budget committee, and I lived in Compton at the same time that the City of Compton was negotiating a contract with the sheriff’s department. There were reports that had come out in 1992 and 1999 that said that the department wasn’t a minority-friendly organization. I’m thinking that all of this information is out there and the city was still going to contract with the sheriff’s department? When I went back to school for my criminal justice master’s degree, I decided to write on the different service approaches that law enforcement could use. This was around 2004, 2005 because after Rodney King, all of them decided they were going to try to change, and academics came up with all kinds of different models of policing they thought might improve things. So, I wanted to examine these options and get information on what those options were, beyond just driving around in a car all day and looking for someone to arrest. That’s what “Compton4COPS” was about, to show what options were available and I made recommendations for Compton, specifically, on how to use sheriff’s services. It was designed to be a primer and model for getting control of policing in your community, that’s what it was intended to do.
Q: Calls for police reform aren’t new, but they did gain renewed attention during the early days of the pandemic and the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. What’s your perspective on ideas like defunding the police to redirect money to expanding social programs? When you imagine other public safety alternatives, ways for communities to take greater control of public safety, what do you see?
A: I think it starts with having community control and to have police do what the community wants. That’s what it is, for me. That was one of the main reasons why I wrote “Compton4COPS” because I wanted people to think and consider that there were other options, but the main thing is to come up with your own. What I found is, the biggest challenge was to get people to try to reimagine policing. This is extremely difficult. It’s hard to think of what would be an option to what we’ve had for 400 years. When you talk about reimagining, my take is to get rid of it and to start all over, from scratch. At least, for my community. It’s been very difficult to get people to reimagine something different; that’s why I just concluded that if we had to start from scratch, what would you do? What would you envision for public safety? It’s an ongoing thing and there is no clear-cut example. It’s something you have to invent that meets your needs, and that means you have to first identify your needs. When we start to do that, we see that there are other things that have to come into place, like education, health care, unemployment — all of these things have an impact on what police are doing in our community.
You mentioned defunding police? To me, it’s just a shift in resources, at least until you can get more stability. We need to figure out what we need and what works for us, and then pursue that. That’s my take on it.
Q: On your blog, you mention the idea of resistance; what do you find yourself resisting at this place in your life, and how does that show up in your writing?
A: I resist conformity. It was the same thing in the sheriff’s department, for me. I could have gone along, strictly, with the program, raised no waves. I was promoted quite well, once I figured out the game; I could’ve been promoted, probably, quicker had I played the game. You come to a point where there’s like a line in the sand where you can go along with the program and be personally successful, or you can step across that line and take a risk for the benefit of the whole. By the “whole,” I mean my communities of Watts and Compton, and I crossed that line. I decided, I don’t give a [expletive]. I see what’s going on here, I was raised in segregated areas and we were trapped, so I’m just going to go forward and I’m going to criticize whoever needs to be criticized in order to move that along. I’m still doing that.
Q: What do you make of this latest resistance to perspectives that challenge tradition, specifically the banning of books focused on race, gender, the LGBTQ community; or the rewriting of history to claim that enslaved Black people somehow benefited from the institution of slavery?
A: First, this is not new. I think it’s always been here. For me, what it brought to light is something that has always been there, it’s just more open now. I was thinking about how my point was we were being erased. We were being erased anyway and it was done quietly through redlining restrictions on where we could live, the segregation, voting—it was always there. So, this stuff that’s happening now is something that I react to, but I try not to overreact. I think, in the long, run it’s a ing thing. I think the new generation of young people are not going to accept it. Whenever there are initiatives moving us forward, there’s always this backlash and I think that’s what we’re going through now. At least, I hope it is and I hope it’s temporary.
