After the fire

L.A.'S ROUGH ROAD TO RECOVERY

Lawrence Tolli"ers barbershop in South Central Los Angeles is the kind of old school place where men come as much to talk as to get a haircut. Pictures of civil rights leaders bracket the mirrors in front of the swivel chairs, and on one wall hangs a Boston Celtics banner, a relic of the days when Bill Russell ruled the boards.

Politics, basketball, the nature of love or war, it's seldom hard to get a topic going. So it's no surprise that the reactions are intense when a visitor makes note of the fact that this April will mark 10 years since four white officers were acquitted in the beating of African American motorist Rodney King, verdicts that ignited a civil disturbance whose aftershocks are still being felt.

Tolliver remembers his ugly frame of mind as he walked several blocks to the melee that would turn out to be the flashpoint of those disturbances. "It was like turning the hands of time back to the South when a white sheriff who killed a Black person got off because the judge and jury were his white cronies," he says, "a stab in the heart."

Since then, though, Tolliver's perspective on the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has shifted, at least enough that he's posted a sign in the shop window declaring his support for a second term for Police Chief Bernard Parks, who is African American.

That support is rooted in a story he tells about his son.

A police officer pulled over Tolliver's son and falsely accused him of throwing a gang sign and driving without a seat belt. Tolliver complained. The patrolman, who'd been caught in a lie for the second time, was fired. "And he is a Black officer," Tolliver continues with satisfaction, then begins ticking off other improvements that he believes indicate that the department's reform efforts are working: Crime is down, the streets are cleaner and children are doing well, he says.

But Tony Wafford has to interrupt his friend. "Certainly you would have to give the recovery effort a D-minus," says the Hollywood publicist and activist. "The only reason you wouldn't give an F is because we are still here." And so it goes.

Depending on where you sit in Los Angeles today, either the city has made strides since those fateful days that resulted in 55 deaths and property damage that approached $1 billion - or it hasn't moved much at all.

Regardless of what anyone thinks about the success or failure of reform efforts, Los Angeles is a different city since those jury verdicts on April 29, 1992. There have been some dramatic demographic shifts. Latinos, for example, have overtaken African Americans in parts of traditional Black neighborhoods, such as Watts and South Central. It's a city that's made a seamless transition in political leadership, from Republican Mayor Richard Riordan to liberal Democrat Mayor James Hahn, and where the signs of redevelopment are everywhere -- from rebuilding in seedy Hollywood to the echo chambers of abandoned high rises downtown. A civic building boom - spurred by efforts at economic recovery since 1992 - eventually is to include a new concert hall, art museum and cathedral. The LAPD is much more diverse, by race and gender, than in 1992. National chain stores for the first time are moving into South Central, and, at least until the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, more African Americans than ever were working. But in general for African Americans and, to a lesser extent, Asians and Latino immigrants, the past decade has been one of hits and misses, and broken promises.

After the civil disturbances, a galaxy of corporate and government leaders pledged to rebuild the smoldering streets. And politicians and voters rushed to implement an ambitious federal blueprint to end police abuse. Yet, today, much of the community remains mired in poverty and decay. Another police scandal has erupted, worse than before, and, at last word, the federal monitor overseeing LAPD reform was complaining that some officers still feel the King beating was a good thing.

"No one is invested in getting at the root causes" of the problems, says playwright Anna Deavere Smith, whose drama Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 focused on the uprising. Whether it's economic reform or police abuse, the roots of the problems are deep, as many Angelinos have been learning in the last decade.

"Racism in America dies slowly, and to ask for change in 10 years for things that took 100 years to get that way is impossible," says the Rev. Cecil "Chip" Murray of the First A.M.E. Church in South Central.

These days In Los Angeles, there is another Black man at the epicenter of intense debate. There is a bit of irony in this, considering that 10 years after the verdicts surrounding Rodney King, that man is the chief of police, Bernard Parks. Parks, L.A.'s second Black police chief since the civil disturbances, has impressed some, including Tolliver, with his crackdown on police misconduct. He's angered others, mainly some members of the police department who believe he's taken his disciplinary campaign too far. Mainly though, Parks today is standing on the fault line in a city's seismic social shifts.

Parks rose to power from inside the ranks of the LAPD. He was a protege of former chief Ed Davis, just like his predecessor Daryl Gates, who headed the department during the King crisis, and whose leadership and racially insensitive comments helped cement the reputation of the LAPD as an organization sorely in need of reform.

Parks has instituted the strictest officer discipline in memory, ensuring that many African Americans, used to being splayed out on sidewalks, are instead treated with respect. He also made the rank-and-file more diverse: The 8,966 officers sworn-in last July were 55 percent minority, including about a third Latino, 14 percent Black, and 19 percent women (The city's Black and Hispanic proportions are 10.9 percent and 46.5 percent respectively.). His efforts won him some support in communities of color. And though bureaucratic squabbles over police reform continued, the issue largely faded from public view.

Then Rampart hit.

In 1999, officer Rafael Perez was charged with stealing cocaine from an evidence locker. Perez, part of an elite antigang detail working out of the city's largely Latino immigrant Rampart Division, admitted to shooting and paralyzing an unarmed Latino suspect, then planting a weapon on him to send the wheelchair-bound man to prison. Perez implicated dozens of officers in his own crimes and others. Suddenly, it looked like police abuse had not been pushed out, but simply moved underground. And this time Black and Latino officers were among the rogue cops.

Despite Parks' insistence that police reform was largely in place, several inquiries revealed that some crucial recommendations, including a computerized tracking system for problem officers, had never been implemented. The U.S. Justice Department threatened suit, and the city eventually capitulated to a court consent decree, placing police reform under the auspices of a federal monitor. Still, it appeared that Parks had largely escaped popular blame for the scandal, which occurred before his watch (while he was a high-ranking commander). Until now.

In February, Mayor Hahn stunned many in the city by expressing opposition to Parks' bid for a second term. Hahn cited his dissatisfaction with Parks' record on police reform, officer recruitment and morale, and community policing. In later public statements, he has also sounded the alarm about rising crime.

"Reforms that end up being negotiated in the consent decree - gathering data on racial profiling, making sure that when use-of-force instances are investigated that they're done fairly and quickly - those are the reforms that I am very concerned about, and I've been unhappy with the progress we're making on that," Hahn told National Public Radio.

Hahn's position tipped over the boiling caldron of L.A.'s racial politics. Hahn, the son of a white politician (Kenneth Hahn) with deep roots in the Black community, was elected with overwhelming Black support. He had remained silent on Parks during the mayoral campaign, which Black clergy and elected officials took for tacit support of the chief. Now many believe they have been betrayed.

The Police Protective League (PPL), the rank-and-file union that is seen as the voice of the mainly white old guard, had previously announced a million-dollar campaign to oust Parks. By echoing the league's concerns about police morale Hahn was seen in some quarters as union toady. The mayor's stated suppor for community policing was applauded by white homeowner groups.

Many Latinos rallied to Hahn's alarms about growing crime. In Boyle Heights, where the tally of innocents caught up in gang violence is on the rise once again, residents marched on Parker Center, the LAPD's downtown headquarters. Some of them are actively lobbying for a Latino chief; Hahn is widely rumored to be looking for one, in part to shore up his weak political support among Hispanics.

Asian Americans, on the other hand, support Parks for elevating more Asian officers to higher ranks than any other chief in history. Some white residents involved in the Neighborhood Watch program see Hahn's decision as a broken promise, too. The police reform movement traditionally has been led by African Americans. Some African American activists who have long battled for police accountability find themselves split on the Parks/Hahn issue. For some, that struggle involves balancing race, politics and genuine police reform.

Civil rights attorney Melanie Lomax, who was the first police commissioner during the King years to call for Daryl Gates' resignation, has been critical of Parks in the past, but now sees Hahn as capitulating to the PPL and short-circuiting civilian review of the chief.

"Parks was not a flawless chief in the sense that he initially resisted outside accountability, but he ultimately saw the wisdom and started to seriously address the Christopher Commission [headed by Warren Christopher, who later served as secretary of state in the Clinton Administration] reforms," says Lomax. "Now with this second attempt by police officers who have no stake, don't even live here, to derail a second Black chief of police, we're back, or nearly back, to where we've come from."

But Constance Rice, another African American civil rights attorney who has been at the forefront of police reform, believes that Parks falls short on the issue.

"The department is as close to claiming the Christopher Commission mandate to end its insular, retaliatory, paramilitary policing culture as Mullah Omar is to embracing feminism," Rice wrote in a Los Angeles Times editorial.

For decades, police abuse and violence fell heaviest on Blacks. The '92 disturbances were ignited by the King beating and subsequent acquittal of all four of the officers charged (two were later convicted in federal court of violating King's civil rights), but the fuse had been around for years. Then-police chief Gates was a hard-charging commander who used a paramilitary model for organizing his officers. And officers responded. Police fatally shot a string of unarmed suspects, including Eulia Love, an African American woman cut down in an incident that started over an unpaid gas bill. Gates also made a number of racial gaffes, including the statement that some Black people might respond differently to the police chokehold than "normal" people.

The LAPD pioneered the use of vehicles as "battering rams" to forcibly enter suspected crack houses. Many weekends, helicopters with searchlights circled South Central as police forced groups of teenage males to their knees for hours. The strong-arm tactics reached their apogee in August 1988, when some 80 officers, some swinging axes, ransacked four apartments on Dalton Avenue in South Central Los Angeles in search of crack cocaine. No charges were filed and only a miniscule amount of drugs was recovered. Little wonder the LAPD was viewed by many in the community as an occupying force.

Enter King, and the chance filming of his beating. Four of the many officers at the scene were criminally charged. Two weeks later, a Korean American shopkeeper in South Central, Soon Ja Du, shot an unarmed teenage girl named Latasha Harlins in the back of the head after a dispute over a $1.79 bottle of orange juice. Already bristling over a series of perceived slights from the Korean American merchants class in South Central, African Americans demanded a tough penalty. A white female judge reduced Du's sentence to 400 hours of community service and funeral costs. Because of the constant media coverage, the King trial was moved to Simi Valley, a mostly white suburb and home to a number of LAPD officers.

The city held its breath.

The verdicts landed like a kick in the teeth. The LAPD was accused of beating a graceless retreat from the resulting chaos. Gates eventually was forced out and replaced by Willie Williams, the reformminded African American former chief of the Philadelphia police force. The Christopher Commission had already identified pervasive structural problems underlying the King beating, including racism, sexism, and a failure to investigate and punish rogue cops and to track and fire problem officers. Voters three times approved reforms, including limiting the police chief to two five-year terms, and increasing civilian oversight by an appointed police commission and an office of inspector general. But reform has proved elusive. Williams, who was openly repudiated by the LAPD's old guard and tepidly supported by the political establishment, failed to win a second term. He was replaced by Parks.

Bernard Parks knows he's in a tough fight. But during an interview at the Parker Center, he doesn't seem too ruffled. The Rampart scandal, he says, was much smaller in scope than first depicted.

"What we've determined from Rampart is that, while it was very serious, we have not seen the same problems in other stations," he says. "The LAPD discovered it ourselves. People in management were disciplined, but there was no inference they participated, but they could have ended it much more quickly, when it was less of an eyesore." (Charges against eight officers have resulted from Rampart.) Though stopping short of calling himself a reform chief, Parks talks up his "accountability" program, which increased annual citizen complaint investigations from 2,263 to 5,624, and officer firings from an average of 19 to 33 a year. And he notes that crime, while rising, remains much lower than a decade ago.

Parks says Hahn's opposition to his reappointment came as a "shock," but, he insists, not a defeating one. "I don't look at this as a battle or a fight with the mayor," he told the Daily News of Los Angeles, later adding, "There are hurdles all the time. You have to do what you think is right."

The chief is counting on the police commission (which is appointed by the mayor, but can ignore Hahn's recommendation) to make good on promises to conduct a fair and independent review of his bid for a second-term. "I asked the mayor (about the commission's independence), and he said he would follow the process. I take that at face value," Parks has said.

But whoever occupies the chief's chair, changing the LAPD's entrenched culture may prove a fool's errand.

"There's a deeply ingrained organizational culture of arrogance. It hasn't changed, and at this point I'm at a loss how it would change," says Samuel Walker, professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and the author of Police Accountability. "I was at a meeting in December in Los Angeles where Parks and his chief of staff spoke, and I was appalled by what I saw, the very arrogant attitude."

Former LAPD assistant chief David Dotson, who supported Parks' 1997 appointment, agrees with Walker, and adds that the chief's Rampart inquiry "does not come anywhere near to identifying the breadth and depth of corruption problems in LAPD."

Even Parks expresses regret that reform lag time opened the department to "suspicions" that the LAPD wasn't willing to change. Certainly, hope is fading that diversifying the force, even at its highest levels, will prove a panacea.

"It doesn't make any difference what the color of the officer is, or whether you have a Black chief," says columnist Earl Ofari Hutchison, author of The Crisis in Black and Black. "Racial profiling still exists. Shootings of unarmed African Americans and Latinos still exist. Fundamentally, there has not been a substantive change in the police department."

Getting more support at the federal level may be more difficult these days. The Bush administration's Justice Department is unlikely to sue to enforce the consent decree, given the president's stated opposition to federal intervention. And the LAPD's problems, like everybody else's, have been overshadowed by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

"The biggest problem is that post911, civil liberties are taking a back seat to security. An increase in police power won't be good, no matter who the cops are," says Los Angeles-based activist and mystery novelist Gary Phillips.

But police reform was only one part of the puzzle in Los Angeles in the aftermath of the '92 disturbances. Economic reforms were just as key. The South Central Los Angeles of the King era was a decaying bulk reeling from years of disinvestment dating back to the 1965 Watts riots. Within days of the disturbances, the late African American Mayor Tom Bradley appointed entrepreneur Peter Ueberroth to head a private foundation called Rebuild L.A. to turn it around. Ueberroth, czar of the wildly successful 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, sought $500 million in corporate investment to make the riot-torn area an inner-city showcase. (A study at the time said it would take $6 billion in investment and 75,000 new jobs to transform the area.)

While some corporations ponied up, notably Ralph's supermarkets, the execution never came close to fulfilling the promises. Vons grocery store, for example, pulled out after building only four of 12 promised stores. After one year, the group was renamed RLA. In 1994, Ueberroth left and the focus shifted to promoting small business through loans, networks and equity funding.

Linda Griego, who headed that effort, says former President George Bush was no help. "I had people (in the administration) say, `why should we reward neighborhoods that destroyed themselves?'" Griego recalls.

The state, under Republican Governor Pete Wilson, sat on its hands. The 1994 Northridge earthquake was a double blow. According to its original mandate, RLA's doors closed in 1997; the effort was succeeded by a small research and job training operation. Corporate spending by 1996 totalled $388.6 million. In retrospect, the whole effort seems doomed, coming as the city's old corporate power structure - aerospace and oil - was disappearing, and the economy was in the tank.

"The whole Rebuild L.A., as a formal entity, was goofy, a way for the Bradley administration to get rid of the issue, to say a private/public partnership would somehow take care of it, and it couldn't," says Phillips. In the mid-'90s, new opportunities emerged. Largely as a result of the civil unrest in L.A., Congress created federal "empowerment zones," conferring tax breaks on companies doing business in poor neighborhoods. But in 1994, the Clinton administration turned down L.A.'s empowerment application.

"The city wrote a totally terrible application," says Chris Hammond, who is developing several large projects in South and Central Los Angeles. "The mayor (Republican businessman Richard Riordan) never centralized the economic development forces to get things done."

After pleas from Riordan, Los Angeles was finally awarded $430 million in federal loan commitments to underwrite a community development bank. Riordan persuaded 22 banks to kick in another $310 million. However, loan defaults were high, few new jobs were created and the bank today is "almost out of business," Hammond says.

"It was more of a booby prize than a consolation prize," says John Bryant, of Operation HOPE, a nonprofit economic empowerment agency.

Korean Americans, who suffered nearly as much economic damage in the civil unrest ($350 million to $400 million) as everyone else combined, received next to no help, says Charles Kim, executive director of the Korean American Coalition. In the face of a grassroots campaign to limit liquor stores and their unattractive nuisances - public drunks, loiterers few of their 1,871 South Central convenience stores were allowed to reopen. A $250,000 city project to convert the stores to coin laundries yielded only three new businesses, Kim says.

"Nearly $10 million was raised from [South] Korea and here privately to support the victims, but that was not enough," says Kim. "Many people also lost their homes, or declared bankruptcy."

Where corporations and government failed, community groups tried to fill the gap. The Urban League paired with Toyota to open an automotive training center that has placed 900 people in jobs, League president John W. Mack says. First A.M.E. Church's Fame Renaissance projects include business incubation, home and business loan aid and economic development. Bryant's Operation HOPE helps homeowners and businesses obtain loans, and provides banking, economics and digital technology education. Community Build Inc., whose founders include Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), offers a high school diploma program and job training, and developed a theater, coffee house and commercial project in Leimert Park.

In response to recent welfare-to-work programs, as well as the uprising, the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP sponsors a job readiness and linkage program to train students to work in entertainment and clerical fields, says chapter president Geraldine R. Washington.

But the need was too great, participants say. Contrary to common wisdom, land in South Central is expensive, toxic cleanups and teardowns drive prices up even further and capital is out of reach. In 1998, the city finally got its empowerment zones, and the economy began to boom. Black entrepreneurs stepped forward, including marquee names such as former basketball great Magic Johnson and football star Keyshawn Johnson, a Los Angeles native. With fellow celebrities Jheryl Busby and Janet Jackson, Magic Johnson purchased Founders National Bank (since renamed Founders Bank of Commerce), and began trying to undo decades of lenders' redlining against African Americans.

The Magic Johnson Theaters in L.A.'s largely African American Crenshaw district opened, and almost immediately became one of the top-grossing movie complexes in the United States. Additional supermarkets were built, though the community could use more, says City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas. Parks, libraries and affordable housing projects replaced some of the rubble-filled empty lots left from the disturbances, and, with new Mayor Hahn's recent commitment to a $100 million housing trust fund, more is on the way. Streets are better maintained and alleys are cleaned up. Hammond's 280,000-square-foot Chesterfield Square retail development in South Central, anchored by a top-of-the-line Home Depot, is near completion.

"It had little to do with the civil disturbances and a lot to do with the economics of the retail side," Hammond says, explaining the success of his development.

Magic Johnson tried to develop the ambitious Santa Barbara Plaza adjoining the Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw Mall, an Art Deco architectural gem, but ran into problems with Ridley-Thomas, the local councilman. Today, Crenshaw Mall is preparing for a new Wal-Mart to replace the Macy's that closed in 1999. One disappointment is that the projected new merchandisers aren't of the same caliber as the upscale homes in nearby Leimert Park, Baldwin Hills and View Park.

"I don't see Nordstrom coming in, or a Bloomingdales," says Hutchison.

Modest development has also come to the working-class parts of South and South Central L.A., including the intersection of Florence and Normandie, the civil disturbances' flashpoint. Auto Zone manager Juan Vaca says his store is "one of the top" money-makers in L.A. Many of the successful small business owners are not Black but Latino, like the Ricalday family, whose Latino-oriented Rosa's Party Supply is doing "very good business" against stiff competition, daughter Maria Ricalday says.

But Latino immigrants were hurt as badly by the uprising as African Americans and Korean Americans, says Angelica Salas of the Coalition for Human Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. "The situation has escalated where we now have a super-- exploited class of Latino immigrants working in the garment industry, domestic jobs, gardening and as restaurant cooks and cleaners, who aren't even making minimum wage," Salas says.

African American population numbers, and political power, are on the wane. Local Black politicians worry that an upcoming redistricting could cost them one of their three city council seats. Black-brown tension has eased in recent years, but the two groups still compete at the bottom of the economic barrel. Black unemployment in 2000 plunged to 7 percent, the lowest rate on record, but many of the new jobs were low-paying. In 1992, the average yearly wage in South Los Angeles was $28,573, 84 percent of the county median. By 2000, South Central's $29,505 average wage represented only 70 percent of the median.

Clearly, South Central has miles to go to resemble the "suburban" mecca an enthusiastic Ueberroth prophesied in the days after the disturbances. "What I find fascinating is that 2002 in some ways is the same old jive, but in some ways the game is different," says Phillips.

"I'm not all doom and gloom, but I'm not all Pollyannaish either. The need is so great that even if we were going at warp speed, it's still too slow," says Rev. Murray.

Back at the barbershop, the guys are winding down, having dissected everything from Enron to President Bush's tax plan, airline safety and the "Three Strikes" law. Tolliver says he doesn't think the community's ill will toward the LAPD would survive Chief Parks' forced departure.

"You want to raise voices around here, don't renew Chief Parks' contract," Tolliver says.

To Wafford, the problem is larger than the police; it's a question of accountability. The people with capital don't give it to the right people, he says. He'd like a report card of the progress of those who do get funding for development and other programs. "This is the community," Wafford says, "and most of the leadership doesn't even know our names."

Gale Holland is a freelance journalist in Los Angeles. She writes a monthly media column for the Los Angeles Times Sunday Opinion section.

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated Mar/Apr 2002
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