Minorities

A confidential memorandum delivered to some Los Angeles City Council members estimates that a proposed agreement in a Police Department discrimination lawsuit, scheduled for a vote today, would cost the city $28.6 million to $35.4 million over its 18-year life span. The memo rocked the growing debate on the issue, emboldening critics appalled at its price tag and infuriating supporters who say the estimates are inflated and misleading.

When it comes to age, culture and language, the teachers and students in Westminster's literacy program could not be more different. But those barriers seem to dissolve when the two groups come together under Project SHUE, a 5-year-old program that unites white senior citizens and primarily minority children to share with and learn from each other.

Joe Friday would hardly recognize the men and women who inhabit Los Angeles Police Department squad rooms today. In Friday's era, when the nation's image of the LAPD came largely from "Dragnet," the picture of a police roll call was one of white men, their hair closely cropped, their faces newly shaved.

The young and the restless occupied the thoughts of many of the 2,500 news directors and executives gathered at the Los Angeles Convention Center this week. No, the attendees at the 51st annual convention of the Radio-Television News Directors Assn. (RTNDA), which winds up today, were not talking soap operas. But several participants expressed alarm during the three-day event over a survey that underscored the growing generation gap in the dwindling audience for network television news.

Unable to rally enough votes either to approve or kill a proposed consent decree that would set aggressive hiring goals for women and minorities at the Los Angeles Police Department and strip the department of power to investigate complaints regarding discrimination, the City Council on Wednesday postponed discussion of the matter until Friday.

On the eve of a scheduled City Council vote with potentially huge implications for the Los Angeles Police Department, the Police Commission voted Tuesday to oppose the deal, and the city's two most prominent leaders struck different tones, with the police chief expressing guarded support for an agreement and the mayor opposing the proposal as written. "I think they ought to put it on hold," Mayor Richard Riordan said of the council, whose members are deeply split over the proposal.

Anti-affirmative action measures would deplete the number of California's African American and Latino primary care physicians, many of whom already are overburdened with minority patient loads, researchers at UC San Francisco say in a study published today. "Dismantling affirmative action programs, as is currently proposed, may threaten health care for both poor people and members of minority groups," concludes the study, which is being published today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) warned Monday that the Republican Party may be going too far in trying to end affirmative action programs and that it is arousing fear of a return to the policies of segregation. Gingrich said the party should "spend four times as much effort reaching out to the black community to ensure that they know they will not be discriminated against, as compared to the amount of effort we've put into saying we're against quotas and set-asides."

Reacting to a study that shows minorities are more likely than whites to live near hazardous waste treatment plants and dumping centers, Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alarcon called Wednesday for the formation of a task force to reverse such inequities. The proposed "environmental justice task force" would try to reduce the number of hazardous sites built in minority communities and would call for measures to lessen the impact of existing sites on those neighborhoods, he said.