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Subject: Bitterness Smolders In Wary, Uneasy L.A.<By Lynne Duke=Washington Post Staff
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 92 04:53:56 EST
Message-ID: <36.1992Nov18.045356@AmeriCast.com>

Bitterness Smolders In Wary, Uneasy L.A.<By Lynne Duke=Washington
Post Staff Writer=

LOS ANGELES - William E. Faulkner's dental practice is girded
against attack. Although he reopened the office three weeks after
rioters smashed in last April and stole even his X-ray processor
and sterilizing machine, Faulkner keeps the plate-glass window
and door covered with protective plywood. He lives four blocks
from his office in the troubled south-central section and knows
that little has changed since the riot. So the boards, he said,
will stay.

"When they'll come down, I don't know," said Faulkner, who is
African American. "Too many things are happening."

Jin Chang also has that nervous feeling, plus anger, plus help-
lessness. "I drink more, I smoke more," said the Korean-American
merchant who lost one liquor store to arson and the stock of
another to looters. Chang said he will be ready with a gun if
anarchy breaks out again, as he fears. "Why not? If they try to
break in my store and try to come in, I have to stop them."

More than six months after this polyglot metropolis descended
into a hellish nightmare of fire and death, the specter of more
violence looms over life here, and a score of residents said the
spring trauma has fundamentally changed their city.

Anger about the verdict in the Rodney G. King beating case and a
perception of generalized judicial bias still fester. Bitterness
is setting in among those who feel that local and federal author-
ities are ignoring a clear mandate to address the uprising's
underlying social causes, such as joblessness and poverty. Polar-
ization among Latinos, blacks, Asians and whites has become more
pronounced, with disputes over jobs and resources ratcheting up
the level of agitation in an edgy city.

Asked in a Los Angeles Times poll last month whether the city was
healing, 55 percent of 1,383 residents surveyed said things were
staying the same, and 25 percent said they were getting worse.
Only 16 percent felt that the city was less divided. All racial
and ethnic groups surveyed responded similarly.

More than 50 people died, more than 1,500 buildings were des-
troyed or damaged and nearly $1 billion in property damage
resulted from three days of anarchy that began April 29, hours
after four white police officers were acquitted on 10 of 11
charges in the videotaped beating of King, a black motorist who
led police on a chase.

In a city where tension between police and black and brown
residents has been near a boiling point for years, the verdict
unleashed a torrent of rage that quickly turned from uprising to
free-for-all. Although the violence was portrayed widely in
black-white racial terms, Latinos predominate in neighborhoods
where rioting occurred and 51 percent of those arrested were La-
tino, compared with 36 percent who were black.

The four officers are to be tried Feb. 2 on federal civil rights
charges, and residents nervously await the outcome. They ex-
pressed concern too about a trial not yet scheduled for four
black men charged in the videotaped beating and robbery of Re-
ginald O.  Denny, a white truck driver, at the start of the riot.

The riot left political casualties as well and a city leadership
in flux. Tom Bradley, the five-term black mayor, announced that
he would not seek reelection. District Attorney Ira Reiner, cri-
ticized for his failure to secure convictions of the officers,
quit his campaign. Although a new police chief, Willie L. Willi-
ams, is in command, police morale still hugs the ground, and a
commission appointed to study the riot concluded that police
remain ill-prepared to handle large-scale violence. The panel of-
fered biting criticism of former police chief Daryl F. Gates,
ousted after a bitter struggle to retain his 19-year job, but
profiting from the police spectacle through book sales and speak-
ing engagements.

In south-central, where only a few markets and fast-food shops
have been rebuilt, the charred remains of mini-malls and liquor
stores pock the inner-city landscape, silent testament to an ur-
ban rescue effort that some residents said has involved more
words than deeds.

"People are becoming extremely frustrated, which is the reason I
am trying to make sure that we are pro-active, that we are doing
something," said Danny Bakewell, leader of the Brotherhood
Crusade, a south-central development and social-service program
that helped to negotiate the post-riot truce between the predom-
inantly black Crips and Bloods gangs.

To make sure blacks are included in newly created jobs, the
crusade has forced 10 construction sites to close until black
workers are hired. "I am saddened that we have to go through such
drastic means," Bakewell said. "But I guarantee you: If people
don't feel there is some hope through responsive and vigorous
leadership, we're getting ready to get an instant replay of what
we saw on April 29 because people are saying,

The explosive anger of April may be worsening now, said Sandra
Cox, a black psychologist who assembled bilingual mental-health
workers to begin counseling shellshocked south-central residents
soon after the riot.

Then, President Bush and Democratic nominee Bill Clinton visited
hard-hit areas and promised more jobs, better law enforcement and
a rebuilding effort. Expectations soared, Cox said, but talk of
an urban agenda faded. Six months later, she said, "Nothing's
changed."

Marcenus Earl, 22, a Watts resident whom Cox hired because he
comes from a gang-ridden community and can identify with its con-
cerns, said word on the street is that what happened last spring
was "only a taste of what we can do."

Poor Latino immigrants also remain "frustrated," said Carlos Va-
querano, an official of the Central American Refugee Center
(Carecen) in the Pico-Union section. These south-central Latinos
were angry enough to take to the streets, he said, because
"there's a lot of immigrants who are discriminated against. They
don't have political representation. They don't have a community
infrastructure. They get a lot of harassment from INS (Immigra-
tion and Naturalization Service) and the police."

Some people here said they feel that, at the very least, those
who took to the streets did force society to pay attention to
their poverty, joblessness and problems with law enforcement. "We
have now recognized the existence of these problems," Vaquerano
said. "Even Bush came and said poverty is the problem here. Who
ever heard of Pico-Union before?"

Loretta Millard, a hairdresser at the Magnificent Brothers shop
in the Crenshaw district, said the riot also brought respect. "At
first, I said they were stupid," said Millard, who is black. "But
shortly after, I thought if this wouldn't have happened we
wouldn't have gotten any recognition. So, it had to happen to get
our point across."

But the Rev. David Herrera, pastor of Nativity Roman Catholic
Church in south-central, suggested that rioters evoked fear, not
respect. "The people here clamor for self-esteem," he said of his
predominantly Latino congregation. "We want to be respected. We
say, well, we burned things down and looted, and now we're
respected. . . . You have to distinguish between respect and
fear. You can inspire fear in people by carrying guns, but that
doesn't really build community."

Los Angeles is at least 40 percent Latino, 37 percent Anglo, 13
percent African American and 9 percent Asian-Pacific islander.

Although cooperative efforts are underway to build bridges
between these diverse groups, ethnic politics in the city appears
to be polarizing, said Ted Hayes, a black advocate for the home-
less. He formed New Day L.A.  after the riots to build a
private-sector bridge between financial resources of the predom-
inantly white west side and economic development needs of the
south and east sides.

"Each ethnic group in town is looking after itself," Hayes said.
"At least the leadership is leading them that way."

Marcia Choo, who runs a dispute-resolution program with the Asian
American Legal Center, said she sees people "getting ethnocen-
tric, and they're retrenching in their old positions. I see peo-
ple with a zero-sum mentality - if somebody gets something, it's
at everybody else's expense. It's me, myself and I or my group."

Latino activists protested outside City Hall two months ago, say-
ing that Latino riot victims were being shortchanged in riot aid
and news coverage.

Latino groups also were angered when Bakewell's efforts to have
more blacks hired at construction sites resulted in the shutdown
of projects where Latinos worked. "I know you have a right in
demanding that blacks have a place in this, but how about
respecting our community?" Vaquerano asked.  "We're happy that
they have Latinos, but we are not prepared to sit back while
everybody else is included in the marketplace," said Bakewell,
who noted that his group seeks to have Latinos hired at sites
where they and blacks are not included.

Some black activists also have taken a stand against prolifera-
tion of liquor stores in their communities. After the riot, they
persuaded the City Council to impose tougher standards on is-
suance of permits for liquor merchants to rebuild stores lost in
the riot.

Korean merchants owned most of those stores. Ryan Song of the
Korean American Grocers Association of Southern California said
lawyers for the group may challenge the standards on grounds that
they discriminate on the basis of ethnicity.

Relations between black and Korean residents have been tense for
years and reached a flash point in 1991 after a Korean grocer
shot and killed a black teenage girl she suspected of shoplift-
ing.

All is not well between Latinos and Koreans either, Vaquerano
said. "There is some anger from the people who have been hired by
the Koreans because they don't pay them much, and they don't
treat them very well."

While the city's people of color jostle for standing inside a
city whose majority is composed of so-called minorities, there is
"eerie silence" from whites across town, said Angela E. Oh, a
Korean American and special counsel to the state Assembly's Spe-
cial Committee on the L.A. Crisis.

"I think they're just watching," Oh said. "I don't think they
think this concerns them."

Oh, who has spoken often around the city and state about the un-
rest and its causes, marveled at the isolation indicated by in-
quiries she hears from whites. "Tell us what happened," Oh said,
feigning a voice of confused curiosity that typifies her white
questioners. "And they're only eight miles away!"

Told of Oh's characterization of the predominantly white side of
town as eerily silent, Linda Friedland, a resident of a historic
neighborhood adjacent to Beverly Hills, agreed. "There is a
silence. . . . To the extent that I hear people talking about the
city, it's how to get out of it." Post-riot malaise is so pre-
valent that attendance at her neighborhood association meetings
is way down, she said.

People have stopped discussing the riot, said Friedland's hus-
band, Stephen. "What seemed exciting" about the city, he said,
"diversity and growth, no longer looks so exciting. It's omi-
nous."

As Angelenos watch and wait, they continue trying to make some-
thing good of what happened in April and May, or at least to make
sense of it.

"I think the city went through a really, really painful birthing
process," Oh said. "Do we ever know what a child will be when it
grows up?"< 02:28 11-18C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

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