The Price of Life in Los Angeles

By Margaret B. Carlson

The glittering enclave of restaurants, shops and theaters in Westwood Village, on Los Angeles' affluent West Side, seems a world away from the mean streets of South Central Los Angeles, where gang warfare took more than 100 innocent lives last year. But the ghetto violence occasionally spills beyond its borders. Last month Karen Toshima, a 27-year-old graphic artist, was caught in * the cross fire of rival drug gangs and died on the sidewalk outside a fancy restaurant. The Los Angeles establishment reacted with horror. Newspapers and television headlined the story for days. Police patrols in Westwood tripled, and the L.A.P.D. assigned a 30-member antigang unit to capture Toshima's killer. City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who represents Westwood and is a likely candidate for mayor, offered a $25,000 reward for information.

Across town, ten days later, Alma Lee Washington was sitting in her wheelchair in the doorway of her rundown two-bedroom house in South Central Los Angeles when hoodlums driving by opened fire with a .45-cal. handgun. Washington, 67, was killed by a bullet that struck her in the right eye. Yet her slaying got scant attention. Footage of the grieving family was not the top story on the evening news. The Los Angeles Herald Examiner buried her death in a small note. The Los Angeles Times, which had been splashing the Westwood shoot-out across the top of its metro section, treated the Washington killing as a short follow-on. Two officers were assigned to the case.

Death may be the great equalizer, but in Los Angeles some deaths are more equal than others. Black and Hispanic leaders angrily contrasted the uproar over Toshima's killing to the indifference about violence in their neighborhoods. "There is a deep feeling in the community that the philosophy of the police department is to 'let them kill each other' in South Central L.A.," says State Assemblywoman Maxine Waters. "The black community has known for years that a problem is not a problem until it hits the white community."

"That's empty, inflammatory rhetoric," responds L.A.P.D. Spokesman William Booth. Westwood got its beefed-up patrols, authorities say, because of the many well-heeled shoppers and tourists drawn there. But South Central residents have watched in recent years as the predominantly white precincts of the city defeated two proposed property-tax increases to add to Los Angeles' understaffed police force. Los Angeles, with 3.3 million people, has an authorized police force of just 7,350 officers; Chicago, with a population of 3 million, has 12,500. In the wake of Karen Toshima's killing, the Los Angeles city council voted to hire an additional 150 officers, for which it now must find $9.3 million a year.

Black leaders do not expect to see many extra police patrolling the beat in their districts. The L.A.P.D. has refused to make public how its forces are allotted. Councilwoman Gloria Molina claims that the department assigns police equally, whether the crime is the theft of a BMW in West Los Angeles or the killing of a black youngster in Watts. She has attached an amendment to the city budget to force Police Chief Daryl Gates to reveal his formula for deploying his forces.

Police have made arrests in both cases, but this is not likely to end the debate over life and death in Los Angeles. Not many of the 387 gang-related killings in Los Angeles County last year ended with a press conference announcing an arrest.

With reporting by Elaine Lafferty/Los Angeles