Unhealed Wounds

By Richard Lacayo

) For decades Los Angeles was America's dreamland, glistening with promise and expectation. It was the city of tomorrow, a constant experiment that seemed to produce a life-style without trade-offs. A garden in the desert. A melting pot that was seldom stirred up. An economy that moved in only one direction. Most things new and fresh in America seemed to start there: everything from car loans to health clubs to Chino-Latino cuisine. For a while there were no limits: on growth, on space, on creativity, on wealth, on tolerance of the new and the foreign. Never mind the earthquakes, the smog, the religious cults. Those were just the shadows around an otherwise Utopian vision. And the new arrivals to the City of Angels and its palmy suburbs just kept on coming.

Many people began to sense that America's second largest city was growing but not maturing. The formal notification arrived a year ago this month, when the city exploded in the worst riots in modern American history. Since then the city's features have been held up to a far different light. Much of what seemed modern and alluring about Los Angeles now seems terribly shortsighted and ugly. The ethnic patchwork appears to be a map of bunkered enclaves. Its center cannot hold because the city doesn't have one. The land without limits keeps running into dead ends: not enough money for schools, housing for newcomers, jobs for the working class, room to move. The laboratory of change produces the latest in urban ills: crack cocaine, gang culture, police brutality, civic indifference, a spectacular gap between rich and poor. Increasingly, the rest of America hopes the latest in L.A. trends will stay right where they started.

If the picture looks bleak from afar, it is even worse from the pavement in the scarred city. In the immediate aftermath of last year's riots, which left 53 dead and $500 million in property damage, the city rallied together for a moment of giddy anticipation that the trauma would lead to a massive refurbishment. Not just of the charred buildings but of the city's values, political leadership and sense of shared responsibility. It didn't last long. L.A.'s wealthy classes quickly fobbed off the burden of reconstruction to small volunteer organizations and an overstretched investment drive; the lame- duck mayor receded into city hall; the Federal Government turned its back; minority groups fumed about the patronizing attitude of their would-be helpers; police remained mostly unrepentant about the Rodney King beating; and gangs declared a truce but kept on selling drugs and robbing people.

What has aggravated the city's racial divisiveness is the lack of a strong economy to rebuild on. Los Angeles remains mired in a three-year recession, with a countywide 10.4% unemployment rate, 3 1/2 points higher than the U.S. average. In poor black neighborhoods, the rate is as high as 50%. The peace dividend of the post-cold war era has landed like a bomb in the Los Angeles area, wiping out 110,000 defense-industry jobs so far and possibly another 50,000 more by the end of next year. Many manufacturing jobs, which supported the city's working class, have evaporated because of corporate cutbacks. L.A.'s South Central district lost more than 70,000 jobs in the 1970s and '80s; the poverty rate for area families now is higher than it was at the time of the Watts riots in 1965.

The withering economy has strapped the ability of the city to provide help for those hurt by the riots. This year's municipal deficit of $500 million is equal to 22.5% of its budget, forcing the city to cut back on everything from sports programs to library hours. The school system is running on empty too, with a $400 million deficit. Teachers have endured a 10% pay cut already this year, and threaten to strike soon. Some parents in the mostly white San Fernando Valley want to break up the school district into smaller pieces so that they will be unburdened of the financial drain of schools in L.A.'s poor neighborhoods.

All this might be surmountable if the city had stronger political leadership, but 20-year mayor Tom Bradley has assumed emeritus status even before his term expires on June 30. The chaotic mayoral race, with its 24 candidates, has so far failed to produce a leader who shows full promise of pulling together the city's four main constituencies: blacks, whites, Latinos and Asians. Antagonism among those groups has failed to soften in the year since the riots. According to a UCLA survey, while 88% of blacks and 76% of Latinos in Los Angeles were likely to support increases in spending to help the poor, only 61% of both whites and Asians agreed. The percentage of L.A. blacks who felt that American society owed their "ethnic group a better chance in life" rose from 55% before the Rodney King verdict to 75% afterward. "Even after the most devastating riot of this century, few minds were changed about how society works, and the disadvantaged felt ever more aggrieved," observed Lawrence Bobo, a sociology professor who conducted the survey.

Ready or not, the city is being tested again. The outcomes of two cases, the second trial of the police officers who beat Rodney King and the scheduled trial this summer of three black men charged with assaulting white truck driver Reginald Denny, will determine just how much anger is pent up in the city's poor districts. In the well-off neighborhoods, the fear of new riots rose on an updraft of rumor. This time the gangs would not be content to bounce the rubble in their own neighborhoods but would descend instead on the suburbs. On a radio call-in show, a young gang member said he plans to raid the "three Bs," meaning the rich domains of Brentwood, Bel-Air and Beverly Hills. One rumor had it that thugs planned to disguise themselves with stolen police uniforms.

A scene that many Angelenos worry about at night took place recently at the Imperial Courts housing project, a low-rise sprawl of faded blue pastel walls and barred windows in the mostly black district of Watts. John Beatty, a big, bearded African American, is coordinator of an alternative school that tries to rescue dropouts. Two weeks ago he led eight teenage boys in a discussion to caution them about events that might grow out of the King and Denny cases. All the boys agreed on the likely outcome: trouble. And if violence were to break out again, they told him, they fully intended to go looting.

"There are going to be 7,000 police out there," a dismayed Beatty warned. "The shopkeepers this time are armed and are going to protect themselves. There will be a curfew. So someone's going to get hurt."

"I've been shot before!," one answered.

"Well, you don't want to get shot again," was Beatty's reply. But to a combustible teenager raised in the wreckage of South Central, the sensible answers don't always carry much weight.

Chief of Police Willie Williams, imported from Philadelphia after the riots to replace the truculent Daryl Gates, was intent on not repeating Gates' mistakes of last year, when police were deployed to riot zones too late and in insufficient numbers. In addition to providing his force with new gear, including bullet-resistant helmets, rubber bullets and spray cans of disabling gas, Williams brokered a mutual-aid pact with other Southern California cities. In the event of trouble, up to 20,000 out-of-town reinforcements could be moved in.

Probably Los Angeles' most self-delusional response to the riots was to put too much store in the Reaganesque idea that the entire job of turning the city around could be accomplished by a volunteer group headed by a miracle-working entrepreneur. Mayor Bradley appointed Peter Ueberroth, former baseball commissioner and the organizer of the profitmaking 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, to head an organization called Rebuild L.A. One of the first mistakes, as Ueberroth himself admits, was the name, which was too expansive and has been changed to RLA, intended to sound like the more neighborly phrase "our L.A."

With his characteristic booster spirit, Ueberroth overestimated what his group could do. He spoke of making the riot-torn parts of the inner city the safest in Los Angeles. Using numbers provided by a study group he commissioned, he set out to raise $5 billion in private-sector investment over five years to bring at least 75,000 jobs to neglected parts of the city. By the group's own definition, that area encompassed 163 sq. mi. with 2.5 million residents.

In the dark days just after the riot, Los Angeles needed a dose of hopeful talk. But people who came to Rebuild L.A. looking for quick help to rebuild ruined businesses were disappointed. RLA had no money of its own to disperse. It was conceived to facilitate the efforts of others, a mission that presumed there would be a multitude of efforts to facilitate. Ueberroth hoped that the rebuilding drive would rest on a tripod of government, private-sector and community-based efforts. But government on all levels shrugged and turned out its empty pockets. An emergency urban-aid package of federal dollars, proposed as the smoke of Los Angeles was still clearing, died amid congressional bickering last year.

At the same time, Ueberroth found himself initially scorned. He approached mostly big corporations at first, urging them to invest cash in the poor neighborhoods, but found them wary. He ran into resistance too from minority business people, who resented him for playing the role of the Great White Hope. As the months wore on and much of inner-city Los Angeles remained in ruins, citizens found it easy to blame Ueberroth for letting them down.

While everyone griped, RLA learned lessons and began making headway. The group calculates that it has arranged $450 million in private commitments, and hopes for $2 billion by next April. Ueberroth proudly points out that RLA has persuaded supermarket chains to rebuild 29 burned-out stores and build 15 new ones. RLA has also attracted some major corporate investments, including $20 million from ARCO for such purposes as job training and small-business loans. "That's tangible, touchable, accountable investment by the private sector," says Ueberroth.

To the satisfaction of minority groups, Ueberroth is turning his hopes toward the small businesses he was accused of ignoring earlier on. In the months to come, RLA will try to provide inner-city entrepreneurs with tens of millions of dollars in expansion loans from private donations and some federal funds.

In Watts, long stretches of storefronts that were damaged in last year's rioting remain scorched and shuttered. Joblessness is worse than it was before the "rebellion" -- as the April upheavals are often called by residents -- in part because so few of the small businesses that were burned out have returned. On closer inspection, though, the change in RLA's emphasis is visible. In the Latino neighborhoods of East L.A., RLA has helped one new business get a start, Homeboy Tortillas, a food-processing company that employs ex-gang members. "RLA has been very helpful in opening up doors," says local real estate investor John Shegerian, 30, who started the business with neighborhood priest Gregory Boyle. "Homeboy is a paradigm for the public and private sectors coming together. We're not making lots of money. But we're getting by and keeping people off the street."

The city's 145,000 Korean Americans, whose small businesses suffered half of all the financial damage in the riots, have armed themselves with weapons and a new taste for civic activism. The pain of the riots is still fresh. At the Korean-American Food and Shelter Relief Center on Crenshaw Boulevard, a refuge and canteen originally set up for people burned out in the rioting, Korean volunteers dispense food to 200 families a day. "We must rebuild L.A. in our hearts," the Reverend Hyun Seung Yang repeats earnestly, stressing the conciliatory message he often delivers at meetings with black clergymen in South Central.

He also concedes that the Korean community "cannot relax." What he means is evident from the sight of squads of Korean youths outfitted in black jackets marked KWT, for Korean Watch Team. They patrol the Korean enclave with carbines. Last summer Korean Americans organized a candlelight demonstration at city hall to protest continuing violent crimes against merchants.

Not since Chicago in the 1930s has a city been held hostage by such a large ^ army of street gangs, who terrorize merchants and peddle drugs. Los Angeles County has an estimated 130,000 gang members, who tote ever increasing firepower. (Of 20,000 weapons that disappeared from shops during last year's riots, only 3,000 have been recovered.) In a survey of 1,159 residents of four inner-city neighborhoods conducted for RLA by Yankelovich Partners Inc., people were asked to list the most important problem in their community: gangs were mentioned most often, by 32% of respondents, followed by crime (24%), drugs (12%) and lack of jobs (7%).

A delicate truce prevails among black gangs, including some affiliated with the Crips and the Bloods, who conduct much of the city's drug business. Arranged among the gangs themselves and nurtured by community groups, the truce is meant to curb the turf wars that cut down members and bystanders alike. Yet gang killings hit a record high last year, accounting for 430 of the city's 1,100 murders, in part because efforts to extend the truce to the Latino gangs of the city's east side have failed. The rising body count is due partly to the popularity of multivictim drive-by shootings. "The gang age is getting much younger," says Danny Hernandez, founder of the Hollenbeck Youth Center in the mostly Chicano Boyle Heights. "It used to be 17 or 18. Now it's 10-, 11- or 12-year-olds doing the triggering. And now they spray the areas."

A reason that the L.A. police were so ineffectual in dealing with street crime is that the city skimped on its budget for so long. Los Angeles has only 1.3 officers per 1,000 citizens, compared with 5 per 1,000 in New York City. Williams, 49, the city's first black police chief, has won points with inner- city residents for many conciliatory gestures. In a town accustomed to faceless cops in prowl cars and helicopters, the new chief is promoting community policing, which encourages contact between officers and the neighborhoods they patrol. "Willie Williams is the best thing that's happened to this city," says Bernard Kinsey, the co-chairman of RLA. "He's been getting his officers to work at treating the citizens as customers. They used to give immigrants $52 jaywalking tickets; that was a week's wages in some cases. He's saying, 'Let's look at the human side of things, maybe just give a warning this first time, and make a friend of the guy.' "

Williams impressed his rank and file with his decisive response in halting a miniriot last December in South Central. The chief immediately dispatched 300 | officers in riot gear to the scene, where they quelled the melee with rubber bullets. "At least he grabbed the bull by the horns," commented a 27-year officer at his retirement party. Yet the police force suffers from poor morale, and most officers still chafe at Williams' attitude that the police are public servants rather than a repressive force. Some thoughtful cops recognize the problem. "The public has to remember that we are their police force," says homicide detective Rick Wermuth. "If they don't recover some confidence in us and return some support to us, we'll all be headed down until we sink into some lawless new wild West."

Effective police work will only go partway toward solving the real problems of Los Angeles. No matter what the outcome of the King trial is, L.A.'s days of anxiety will continue. The city will suffer its uneasy dreams of fire so long as nearly every aspect of local life -- schools, police, municipal government, race relations, the economy -- provides tinder. Having imagined many times in recent weeks how their city might go up in flames, Angelenos have yet to imagine how it might survive.

With reporting by Jordan Bonfante and Sylvester Monroe/Los Angeles