keyboard_arrow_right Public officials and the news media offered conflicting interpretations of the Watts Riots in their immediate aftermath. Some conservatives and many city officials claimed that the violence had resulted from wanton lawlessness, and they pointed to the large number of minority men living in the inner city who had criminal records and to the influx of “outsiders” from the South. They observed that looters took far more goods from stores than they could possibly find useful and that it was irrational to burn down one’s “own” neighbourhood. Some suggested that the riots were an insurrection fostered by urban gangs or by the Black Muslim movement, which the mainstream press then regarded as a radical cult. Others suggested that police-community relations in South-Central Los Angeles had long been uneasy and that those tensions had exploded into rioting. Finally, many federal officials and some reporters explained the riots as a protest against the poverty and hopelessness of life in the inner city, and they described the challenges of joblessness and the lack of basic services in South-Central Los Angeles. That interpretation of the riots dovetailed effectively with President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “war on poverty” programs, which were then being introduced in cities across the country. The war on poverty thus seemed to be a response to the Watts Riots, and the riots seemed to demonstrate the need for the war on poverty.