A Distress Call From Watts : Anniversary: Regina Jones felt uneasy handling the first LAPD call from the riots 25 years ago. Her discomfort about happenings in her ex-neighborhood haven’t eased since.

“Officer needs help! Officer needs help!”

The message was an urgent whisper over the two-way radio. It was a hot Wednesday evening around 7:20. The date: Aug. 11, 1965, the night the Watts riots began.

“Officer requesting help, please give your location and identify yourself,” was my modulated yet frightened reply.

The moment of silence that followed felt like an eternity. A call for help could mean a life in danger. I yelled so that everyone in the communications center could hear me, “Officer needs help! I don’t have the unit or the location!”

“This is 12A3,” a breathless voice answered. “We need assistance at 116th Street and Avalon.”

“12A67, 12A67 and units in the vicinity of 116th Street and Avalon, officer needs assistance,” I broadcast simultaneously over all channels.

Control Center was now monitoring my broadcasts, and I could hear my voice amplified throughout the room. “Would the officer requesting help please give a location and identify himself?” I almost begged.

“That was me,” said a male voice that sounded like 12A3. “12A3, did you request help (and) then change your request to assistance ?”

I needed to verify that the distress call was, indeed, from 12A3.

“12A3, yes,” was his only response.

My stomach tightened. I had trouble breathing. Despite my shaking hands, I repeated very calmly, “12A67 and units in the vicinity of 116th Street and Avalon Boulevard, 12A3 needs assistance.”

Within seconds, several police officers radioed that they were Code 6 (out for investigation) at the location.

My second anniversary as a radio-telephone operator for the Los Angeles Police Department was a month away. Although I had been trained to handle daily emergencies, they still had not become routine to me.

When I first heard the officer distress call, I sensed something out of the ordinary was going on. I could hear scuffling, shouting and footsteps in the background. In the first 20 minutes after the call, more and more officers and several sergeants went Code 6 at the location.

Later, I learned a California Highway Patrolman had stopped a car for reckless driving. The driver, Marquette Frye, 21, failed to pass a sobriety test and was arrested.

His mother, who lived nearby, arrived on the scene and tried to talk to her son. By then, a crowd had gathered and was growing. As tempers flared, the first Los Angeles police arrived.

Someone from the crowd, which reportedly had grown to almost 1,000 people, spat on one of the officers. Instead of leaving the scene, the officers went into the crowd and arrested the two they believed were inciting others to violence.

When the officers did withdraw a few minutes later at 7:40 p.m., their car was stoned by irate on-lookers.

It had been a hot, smoggy summer day, and the sun had not yet set. In my mind, I could see the corner of 116th Street and Avalon Boulevard. It was six blocks from my home, and I often drove past that very corner on my way to work.

This was the neighborhood where I grew up, and I had sensed for years that tempers and the tensions were nearing the point of combustion. Under an unrelenting heat--a heat that seemed to feel hotter in South-Central Los Angeles than anywhere else in the city, the fire had been ignited.

Instinctively, I knew that the more police dispatched to the area, the more likely things were to get out of control. No one listened to me.

Before the end of my shift, a command post had been set up three blocks from where the arrests had taken place. The fire department and police dogs were standing by, and there were blockades on Avalon Boulevard.

By now, I was worried--worried about my family, friends and the people I knew. And I was worried about the police officers I felt accountable for.

When I was finally relieved from my post, I rushed to call my family.

During the day, my husband Ken worked for NBC as a production assistant for the Huntley-Brinkley news report. Nights, he moonlighted as overnight newscaster on KRLA radio. I suggested he check out what was happening.

I got home around midnight, after taking a short detour around the blockaded streets. My mother and I sat up the rest of the night listening to the chanting, screams, alarms, sirens and other noises that told us many people had taken to the streets.

The next day I was tired and afraid to leave my children, even with my mother. As soon as I arrived at work, I wanted to go back home.

The police department’s Emergency Control Center had been activated and police commissioners, sheriff’s deputies, highway patrolmen and other government officials were gathering in the conference room. With giant maps covering its walls and a grand circular table in the middle of the room, it looked like a war room.

A couple of the women I worked with offered to take me and my family into their Orange County homes. I appreciated their offers, but I was afraid of being the only black in their white communities. My first real experience with racism had been with people I worked with at the police department.

I was also afraid of becoming an accidental casualty in my own neighborhood. I am fair-skinned and that year I had bleached my hair blond. After hearing reports of whites being pulled from their cars and beaten, I made certain my head was covered before driving home that night.

The third evening of the revolt, I had a day off. That night, the grocery store a block from my house exploded into flames and burned to the ground. A fireman was killed when the building collapsed and he fell from his ladder. We could feel the heat and see the flames from my back yard. Afraid that a flying ember might ignite our 20-year-old house, I hosed down our wood shingle roof.

The children and I were alone when we heard gunshots. I turned out all the lights and peeked out the front window. A man was running down the street as streaks of fire shot past him. A few seconds later, two policemen followed on foot, firing their revolvers, shouting “Halt! Halt!” I’d never seen gunfire before nor heard the cracking sound that comes from bullets exploding.

Neighbors that I had known all of my life were running by carrying bottles of liquor and groceries. One of our elderly neighbors was dragging a large bag of dog food down our street. A schoolteacher who often yelled at my children for playing on his lawn passed by pulling a wagon piled high with canned hams and packages of meat.

These people were not criminals. They were protesting their poverty and oppression. They knew this was not the way out, but they were caught up in the confusion and hysteria of the moment and this was an outlet for their anger.

I knew that the National Guard had been called in, but it wasn’t until the next night, on my way home from work, that I came face to face with them.

Fear shot through me as I pulled off the Harbor Freeway and saw Jeeps with machine guns mounted on top. Uniformed guardsmen were stopping each car at the barricades at Imperial Highway and Broadway.

I stopped my car and sat still, keeping both hands in plain sight as I held the steering wheel tight. Two heavily armed guardsmen approached my car while others watched from Jeeps a few feet away. Their rifles were pointed at me.

I was afraid a sudden sound might scare them into shooting me.

“Where are you going?” asked the soldier.

“I’m going home from work,” I answered, my frightened eyes meeting the frightened eyes of a young white man in uniform.

“May I see your identification?” he said without relaxing his grip on the rifle or taking his eyes off me.

“Sure, it’s right here on the seat,” I replied and slowly turned my eyes away, letting go of the steering wheel with one hand, reaching for my identification with the other. He paused for a few moments until the other guardsman, who had been scanning my car to ensure there were no hidden passengers, was back beside him; he then put down his rifle and took a flashlight from his belt to inspect my documents.

“I work for the police department and I just got off work,” I volunteered, trying to sound calm.

“You shouldn’t be out here at night,” he said, as he returned my identification. “It’s not safe.”

“I know,” I replied, feeling violated and angry at having to answer to anyone to enter my own neighborhood.

My husband had been working around the clock since I called him that first night. NBC had asked him to go into the riot area and carry lights for the camera crew.

Ken had asked to be assigned as a field reporter, but his request was rejected--they didn’t have any black television reporters then. He resigned on the spot and became a full-time radio reporter.

Although he had grown up in the neighborhood, he knew his safety depended upon giving the right hand sign at the right time. He was afraid of being shot by the police for being black or being thought a traitor and beaten by members of our community.

I was in constant fear--afraid for my children, my husband, my family, my friends and myself.

The terror and anger in Watts, of course, soon spread nationwide.

Chicago, Philadelphia, Paterson and Elizabeth, N.J., all had riots that August. Before Watts, in July, there had been riots in New York and Rochester, N.Y.

After the long hot summer was over, a few bandages were applied, but no cures were sought. As a result of the Watts riot, for example, Martin Luther King Hospital was built.

But today it is bursting with drug-addicted infants, its emergency rooms filled with gunshot wounds, stabbings and disease--the results of poverty, crime, unemployment, unrest--the very things that led to the riots in the first place.