You see the wobbles the minute you hit the streets. On the corner of San Pedro and 53d a Broadway Gangster Crip named Antoine says, “If they don’t convict those dudes of beating that man, it’s gonna happen again. I know I’m gonna do everything I can to make it happen. I got a 14-shot Beretta and I ain’t worried about no police or anybody else.” Behind the counters in South-Central, Korean-American women bundled in $450 bulletproof vests make change while their husbands lay down $299 at the gun store for modified AK-47 assault rifles. Since there isn’t much left to burn in South-Central, gangbangers mutter about hitting the three B’s: Beverly Hills, Brentwood and Bel Air. Most of the talk is probably bluster: scaring rich folks is a lot easier than actually redistributing their income. But taking no chances, the Bel Air Association has asked its homeowners for $100 apiece to beef up security, while at the Beverly Hills Gun Club, patrons have nearly doubled their purchase of ammunition.
To nurse Los Angeles through these fevers, Mayor Tom Bradley has developed a number of antitoxins. He is relying heavily on what he calls his “neighbor to neighbor” plan. Last December the city’s Housing Authority spent $125,000 to support 500 volunteers who are ready to chill out tindery neighborhoods at the first spark of violence. Since then, the city council has doled out an additional $800,000 to community groups and redrawn the city’s curfew law, making it far easier for the mayor to close down the town during emergencies. In other respects Bradley’s leadership has been lacking. He is not running for reelection. After 20 years on the job, he looks exhausted, and his once keen sense of timing has abandoned him. Last week he set off on a two-week business trip to Europe, leaving 24 local pols squabbling to replace him in next month’s mayoral election. Politically, Los Angeles is rudderless.
What then of Peter Ueberroth, the can-do millionaire who ran baseball before he formed Rebuild L.A. to raise the inner city from its ashes? Despite his energy and good will, Los Angeles is still no phoenix. Ueberroth said it would take $5 billion and five years to breathe life back into the most ravaged parts of Los Angeles. So far corporations and small businesses have raised $500 million to help; but only 18 percent of the commercial buildings destroyed in the last riot have been rebuilt. Jane Pisano, dean of USC’s School of Public Administration, sees “some signs of forward progress” over investment in the inner city. “But there’s very little that’s tangible,” she says. “The amount of change has been very small. What has occurred is in no way on a scale that could meet the need.”
A more encouraging development came with the departure of Police Chief Daryl Gates, whose tolerance for brutality and dawdling fanned the last riot. Willie Williams, the new chief, an African-American whose last post was Philadelphia, now says that 7,000 of his 7,708-strong force will be on duty when the King verdict is rendered. The mayor’s office has been lobbying federal Judge John Davies to delay the announcement of the verdict until officers can reach potential hot spots. “Your police department-my police department is going to be there,” Williams promises.
If needed, the LAPD should perform better this time. Since taking over last summer, the new chief has changed the department’s training, organization and direction. At the same time, the city council has provided $1 million for improved riot gear. For the past four months, rotating groups of officers have been practicing with rubber bullets, pepper gas and other less lethal forms of crowd control. Williams has also taken care to establish better coordination with the L.A. Sheriff’s Department, the California Highway Patrol and the National Guard. “The guard will be ready,” promises Gov. Pete Wilson, but, he also says, he doubts “it will be required.”
Williams has tried earnestly but with mixed success at best to improve community relations between the cops and the streets they police. “Where you going, black bitch?” two cruising white cops recently yelled at a 38-year-old mother in South-Central, who says she prefers the guard to the police for riot duty: “By the time the police show up to a shooting, everybody on the block could be dead.” On the better side of the tracks, another officer spoke to businessmen at the Farmers’ Market in comfortable mid-Wilshire. David Macari, owner of the Kokomo Cafe, went to the meeting looking for help on such matters as evacuation routes and came away with “more misgivings than allayed fears.” Among other things, the officer handed out a little flier titled “What to Do During a Riot.” Sample tips: Obey the curfew. Limit calls to the police department to emergencies. Take your valuables home early. Do not panic! “It was strictly sink or swim, kids, you’re on your own,” Macari recalls. When somebody asked, “Does this mean we should arm ourselves and sit on the rooftops?” Macari said the response was, “Well, it’s your constitutional right to bear arms.”
Los Angeles is now heavily armed and should be considered dangerous. At the Loans ‘R’ Us pawnshop, Greg Davenport gets a.380 magnum out of hock, predicting that if the King 11 verdict is another acquittal for the four police officers who beat him, the reaction will be the same: a spasm of violence, though perhaps not on the scale of last year’s riots. “I’m getting this out because I need it,” he said. “I need to carry it all the time. I hate L.A.” All parties to the last fight appear to share an equal level of distrust and hostility. The California Department of Justice reports 65,923 gun sales for the month of December, breaking the record set the month after the last riot; last year sales for Los Angeles were almost three times higher than those for any other county in the rest of the state. At the Western Gun Shop, the only legal gun store in Koreatown, manager David Joo says he’s selling so many automatic rifles he hardly has time to eat lunch. “Last time we fired only warning shots,” he recalls. “Now people are angry. They’ll shoot to kill.”
Throughout L.A., the Korean community suffered $400 million of the $780 million in riot damages. Volunteer vigilantes now patrol Koreatown in cars from 8 p.m. until past midnight. “We keep our arms in the trunk,” says Eddie Kim, 30, a member of the Korea Young Adults Team of L.A. Jong Min Kang founded the organization as an answer to some race-baiting lyrics by the African-American rap artist Ice Cube. The KYAT of L.A. is controversial even within Koreatown. “Korean-Americans can’t take the law into their own hands,” warns Bong Hwan Kim, executive director of the Korean Youth Community Center. In reply, Kang says, “We are a community group. The police know us. I just want to tell our people, ‘Don’t be stupid-don’t make the same mistakes’.”
At the same time, in the view of many African-Americans, Korean-Americans, particularly merchants, are often insensitive to them. During a forum for mayoral candidates at a hotel in Koreatown, one voter stands up and asks Nate Holden, an African-American, “Do you think you are taking Korean-Americans for granted?” “Heck no,” Holden shoots back. “I don’t take anyone for granted and I don’t like the question.” Standing by his side, Michael Woo, a city councilman who is the front runner, says soothingly, “I’m running for mayor of the entire city.” In private, however, Woo tells it like it is: “Conditions haven’t substantially improved since last year. Maybe it’s worse interms of racial tension and frustration.”
That abstract analysis gains strength and grittiness from the attitude of the streets. On the corner of 105th Street and Normandy in South-Central, two gangbangers named Baby Nicci, 19, of the 10-5 Gangster Crips, and Baby Capone, also 19, of the 103rd Street Underground, sit talking about King’s can’t-we-all-get-along plea during the last riot. “If we could have all got along we wouldn’t have tore up the city,” says Baby Nicci. “We ain’t been getting along,” agrees Baby Capone. “What the f–k we gonna start now for?” “It’s gonna be a lot of deaths, man,” predicts Baby Nicci. “It’s gonna be like a war.” And Baby Capone doesn’t like the odds. “I think a lot of us are going to be suffering more than them,” he says. “The police are ready.”
In the houses and apartments around San Pedro and 53d in South-Central, African-Americans and Mexican-Americans coexist at the bottom of the heap, united by drive-by shootings and distrust of the police. The Latinos stick together; the African-Americans are more fragmented; but both are working to chill out the ‘hood. The Community Youth Gang Service deflates incendiary rumors. “I don’t get the feeling that there’s a stockpile of weapons with the gangs-nowhere near the group in Waco, Texas,” says Charles Norman, a CYGS operative. The agency, working with black churches, has organized teams of 20 men into a “keep cool” movement aimed at the streets. The Amer-I-Can Program founded by former pro-football star and actor Jim Brown is also sending 150 former gang members and ex-convicts to talk to inner-city kids, “These brothers can reach a thousand young brothers,” says Brown. “They’ve got the respect and they’ve got the power.”
The last stages of the King II trial will probably stretch into mid-April. The trial of three black men charged with beating a white truckdriver during the last riot could overlap the King case, giving everyone hair-trigger nerves. Among minority leaders, the fervent hope is that the King jury will convict the four police officers and defuse the tension. The prosecution’s case has been much more forcefully argued this time. Still, convincing the jury that the officers intended to rough up King may still prove difficult. So anything could happen. But many people of South-Central know what damage they inflicted on themselves in the last riot. The Rev. Chip Murray, pastor of the First A.M.E. Church, predicts that with National Guard units and police cars in place, any disturbance will more likely take the form of “a hundred little flare-ups” than the general conflagration did last spring. And that would be a victory of sorts. “L.A. can be a model in a positive way or a negative way,” says Maulana Karenga, chairman of the Black Studies Department at California State University in Long Beach. Thinking positive offers all sides their best hope.
