It is five years since four Los Angeles police officers were found not guilty of charges connected with the Rodney King case, a verdict which sparked the worst civil unrest seen in the United States in a century. Since then little has changed in the forces underlying that disturbance, forces well explained in this account of life as a black man in the Los Angeles area. PNS commentator Michael Datcher is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and co-editor of "Tough Love: The Life and Death of Tupac Shakur."

I have been deathly afraid of the police most of my life. This feeling has only intensified over the five years since the Los Angeles riots as I have come to realize how much the fear separates me as a black man from other Americans.

I had my first police encounter at age ten. Returning home from the public swimming pool on a sunny summer afternoon, my three pre-teen friends and I discovered an old abandoned newspaper rack in an open lot.

We were wearing swimming trunks, wet towels flung over our shoulders. Kids. We tried to shake the few remaining coins out of the machine.

A series of police cars rolled up, sirens off -- a sneak attack -- and slid to a stop. A white police officer jumped out of the car closest to me, and ran over to me, clutching a revolver in his outstretched hands. He squatted to line up the bridge of my nose from two feet away and yelled "FREEZE!"

I was shaking so violently  that he yelled "Freeze!" again. He was the first white man to call me "nigger."

After that, my fear of the police grew with each interaction. To my young mind, it was as if the officers couldn't tell the good guys from the bad guys, so they treated almost everyone like a criminal. In my neighborhood -- the east side of Long Beach, California -- I grew up witnessing the police routinely hurling racial epithets and beating up black men.

Ashamed of my fear, I disguised it as anger -- as many black men do. The sight of a police car passing could immediately change a pleasant conversation among brothers into an explosion of explicit language about "5-0," the code word for police.

When I was involved in this, I was always startled by the intensity of my own rage. But my anger was so palpable because my fear was so real. The rap "F*** the Police" by the seminal group N.W.A. became an anthem for which I willingly stood and placed my hand over my heart.

In college, when I tried to discuss this with white classmates, I would feel myself growing defensive, straining to share my experience with them because I could see the disbelief spread across their faces. I was hurt and insulted by their doubt -- and this fed my anger toward the police. For the first time, I began to realize that police officers treated white citizens with so much more respect than they showed with black citizens that many whites could not believe my experiences. They thought my stories were too extreme to be true.

This is why the videotape of the attack on Rodney King was so important to me. Although it sounds unhealthy, I recall being extremely excited when I saw the savage beating on the evening news. It was as if the burden of proof had finally been lifted from my shoulders. The truth was on display for the whole world to see. I could stop feeling so ashamed of my fear. Anyone seeing the ferocity of that beating would understand my fear, see the justification for my anger.

On April 19, 1992, when the verdicts were read finding the four police officers on that video tape "not guilty" I was in a cafe in Berkeley, full of white students. I walked immediately to the campus computer center and wrote a letter to a colleague in New York. "I know there will be riots in the streets of L.A. tonight. I know that people will die tonight."

I was so sure because those verdicts scream, "You people bring this violence on your selves." Those verdicts undermine our justification for anger. They make us feel ashamed of our fear again.

It was too much to take. In the first 15 minutes after the verdict, the intensity of pure black pain gave birth to the worst civil unrest in America in over a century.

As I reflect on the five years since the uprising, I am most moved by the innocence expressed by the event itself. As the uprising grew, like some children, it got buckwild. Many people tried to take advantage of the situation and true to form the mainstream media focused on these people. With film of people looting stores in the background, news commentators said over and over, "I don't see what this has to do with Rodney King."

They did not see because they were looking for some way to avoid the fact that black pain was thick and heavy enough to set a city ablaze. If they really wanted to find out, they could have interviewed any black who worked with them. If I had been at home, they could have interviewed me -- crying with a match in my hand.

But I was in Berkeley, at a computer terminal, working my pain out on a keyboard. Five years later I'm at home in Los Angeles, doing the same thing,