Fear and hatred linger 10 years after LA riots

By ANDREW GUMBEL

LOS ANGELES - At the intersection of Normandie and Florence Avenues, centre of the 1992 riots that devastated South Central Los Angeles, the theme yesterday was harmony.

To mark the 10th anniversary of the worst unrest to hit any American city in 50 years pastors, civil rights workers, musicians and politicians all accentuated how far the city has come in healing the wounds of racial division, economic despair and deep suspicion of the city's trigger-happy police department.

Such optimism was understandable. But it told only one part of a complex and not necessarily heartening story.

The economy has brightened considerably from those days. The LA police is no longer headed by a right-wing white bruiser who made distinctions in public between blacks and "normal people" - both of Daryl Gates' successors have been African Americans.

And there has been considerable diversification in the local population. Many more black Angelenos have entered the middle class.

The Latino population of South Central has doubled from just over 25 per cent to just under 50 per cent.

The Koreans, whose corner stores were targeted by rioters in 1992, have largely moved out. But they have prospered in a buoyant Koreatown on the other side of the Santa Monica freeway.

But some of the underlying causes of the riots have not gone away. LA remains the US city with the broadest gulf between rich and poor. An estimated 30 per cent of the city lives beneath the poverty line.

And while some parts of South Central have improved, wide areas are as desperate as ever.

Central Avenue, once South Central's main street, is devoid of the most basic services. Empty stores are sealed with metal shutters. There is a fear-ridden loneliness to the district. The silence is punctuated only by the sight of young black men being body-searched by police on the lookout for drugs and illegal weapons.

Three blocks west of the Florence-Normandie intersection, on April 29, 1992, five young black men walked into a Korean-owned liquor store, swiped two dozen bottles of whisky and whacked the owner's son, David Lee, over the head with the words: "This is for Rodney King."

That day an all-white jury had returned not-guilty verdicts for four white police officers who had been caught on videotape viciously beating King.

Those verdicts were the fuse that lit the entire powder keg. Four days of burning, looting and shooting left 55 people dead and streets in ruins.

The community leadership had nothing to do with the violence, but it seems doubtful that the desperate African Americans who smashed windows and fired at motorists could have mounted such an uprising without the incendiary political backdrop.

Now LA's black leadership overwhelmingly speaks for the burgeoning middle class, which is genuinely interested in building community relations.

South Central's new Latino majority might be poor, but it is a poverty still tinged with optimism. New immigrants believe they are better off than, say, in rural Mexico, and unlike many African Americans they have faith in their children's future, in their ever more successful political leaders, and in LA's resurgent union movement.

In this way, South Central has effectively been split in two. There are still many thousands of marginalised black families, but they no longer have a voice to articulate their despair. Because of the escalating war on drugs and the massive increase in incarceration for petty offenders, one in three black men from South Central is behind bars.

Because the black political leadership has switched priorities from criticising the LA police to championing its favoured candidates for the position of chief, the outrage at police shootings, beatings and evidence-planting has abated.

Just one riot anniversary event has addressed poverty and police brutality.

Fifty people showed up to air their grievances - nothing compared with the thousands who thronged to the official events - and they were surrounded by six LAPD squad cars ready to move at the first sign of trouble. That tells something about the political mood of LA, 10 years on.

- INDEPENDENT