Riots Los Angeles

For weeks now, Tony Everfield has been planning a June vacation with his three children to Disneyland. But after watching two nights of rioting across Los Angeles on the television, Everfield was racked Friday by second thoughts. "I don't want my kids involved in seeing the violence," said the Oakland chef. "Los Angeles was a beautiful city. It just looks awful from what I've seen on the news. It will frighten the hell out of you.

The passage of time has smoothed some of the edges that the 1992 Los Angeles riots carved into citizens' psyches. During the decade that has passed since the city endured three days of looting and burning and 54 deaths, residents gradually have come to view their city more positively, a Los Angeles Times poll has found.

Somehow, somewhere along the line, connections had been frayed and confidence lost. Conceived in the ashes of Watts, this was supposed to be a municipal administration built to absorb ethnic shocks. In a city of so many colors, of so much wealth and poverty, it was expected to keep the peace. But on a single evening in late April, the flames that lighted the Los Angeles sky revealed that despite its multiracial hues, Mayor Tom Bradley's model City Hall was powerless to keep the lid on.

The progress in black-Korean relations since the 1992 riots is measured by the friendship that Kapson Lee and Arlene Whitfield are cultivating. It's measured by the fact that the Rev. Antony Beckham, a black man, pastors a church of Koreans. It's measured by the way young Koreans and blacks hobnob at a Chinatown hip-hop nightclub.

At the intersection of Florence and Normandie, where television cameras caught the violent early moments of the Los Angeles riots, the 8-Trey Gangster Crips have established their stronghold. From this corner, where trucker Reginald O. Denny was brutally beaten, the loose affiliation of about 350 gang members claims an impoverished territory that runs roughly from Gage Avenue on the North to Manchester Avenue on the South and from Van Ness Avenue on the West to Vermont Avenue on the East.

In a rare display of unity, representatives of more than two dozen Latino activist groups and social service organizations will join in a Latino Unity Forum today with the aim of developing a program for political empowerment in post-riot Los Angeles. Organizers hope that the forum will lead to the creation of a Latino Federation that will unite the divergent elements of a community that includes fourth-generation Mexican-Americans and recently arrived Salvadoran immigrants.

Long regarded as a leading laboratory of urban policing techniques, the Los Angeles Police Department also has been a school for scandal. And in an era in which the department is still grappling with how best to implement the reforms proposed by the Christopher Commission, it is helpful to recall the persistence and solubility of past problems. Four decades before the furor over the videotaped beating of Rodney G.

In the shadow of a flaming mini-mall near the corner of 5th and Western, behind a barricade of luxury sedans and battered grocery trucks, they built Firebase Koreatown. Richard Rhee, owner of the supermarket on the corner, had watched as roving bands of looters ransacked and burned Korean-owned businesses on virtually every block. But here, it would be different. "Burn this down after 33 years?"

Timothy Goldman was thinking nonstop about the verdicts in the Rodney G. King case last Wednesday when he gathered up his new video camera and headed for the intersection where rioting is said to have started. The 32-year-old amateur photographer's dramatic footage taken at Florence and Normandie avenues caught Los Angeles police officers apparently fleeing in the face of an angry crowd, which then attacked and beat passing motorists, looted stores and set fires.

For Lee Minikus, it was just another arrest. On Aug. 11, 1965, the California Highway Patrol officer pulled over a 21-year-old Watts man whom he suspected of drunk driving and took him into custody. Minikus had no inkling that it would spark one of the worst urban upheavals in U.S. history. "That was all there was to it," said the now-retired officer, sitting in the living room of his Laguna Niguel home. "It was just a normal, routine traffic stop."

Standing in front of his splendid Victorian above Tacoma's Commencement Bay, Jeff Stvrtecky speaks of his years spent in the middle of Los Angeles as if recalling a long-ago, passionate relationship that just couldn't last. "There was a time when I loved L.A. so much . . . the culture, the fun, the sun. . . . I couldn't imagine being anywhere else," he said as the midmorning sun burned away the Puget Sound fog. "But you go through stages in life, and other things become more important."

A decade after the Los Angeles riots, increasing but still uneven signs of economic rebirth are scattered throughout South-Central Los Angeles. On a corner once home to a rundown strip mall and a shuttered industrial plant, residents pack a spotless Starbucks coffee shop to socialize over $3 lattes.

Bobby Green is sitting on his couch in suburban Rialto, talking about the night 10 years ago that he saved a man's life, a moment that made him a hero to most and a traitor to others. Back then, in the first hours of the Los Angeles riots, Green was sitting on another couch, this one in South-Central Los Angeles. He was watching a black man on live TV smash a brick, then another brick, into the head of a white truck driver, who lay writhing on the pavement.

Scores of fans angry at being shut out of an overcrowded free concert in Hollywood on Monday broke through barricades and rushed the stage, throwing rocks and bottles and damaging cars and equipment before they were dispersed by police. No one was seriously hurt, but at least six arrests were made after the disturbance at the scene of the aborted concert by the band System of a Down, said Deputy Chief David Kalish of the Los Angeles Police Department.

On the dirty, crowded sidewalk in front of the Los Angeles Criminal Courts building in downtown L.A., Isabel Barajas marched back and forth in hunger and silence for four straight days this spring. Lawyers, judges and jurors streamed in and out of the dull gray building. Few took notice of the 48-year-old widow dressed in black and waving placards, on a hunger strike to demand justice for a son imprisoned for a 1992 murder she believes he did not commit.

Anna Deavere Smith--writer, actress, chronicler of living events--is in a convertible, driving the mostly healed streets of Los Angeles. She is seeking remnants of the riots, set off nine years ago by the acquittals of the police officers who came upon Rodney G. King one fateful night.

Twenty-five years ago, Marlen E. Neumann set out to heal a riot-torn city. Alongside seven other members of a state commission appointed to investigate the causes of the 1965 Watts riots, Neumann spent more than three months walking the scorched earth of the district--interviewing residents, scrutinizing conditions, gauging the anger that for six days had rocked Los Angeles. "That community needed answers," said Neumann, the sole woman appointed to the riot commission.

Some of the events that have shaped Los Angeles: 1941: The Arroyo Seco Parkway, later the Pasadena Freeway, is completed, the first stage in a freeway master plan that made post-war suburban sprawl possible in the Los Angeles area. Feb. 19, 1942: Amid war hysteria, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order No. 9066, authorizing the internment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans--75,000 of them U.S. citizens--along the West Coast.

After the Los Angeles Lakers brought home the National Basketball Assn. title in June, 250,000 people filled downtown streets for a mostly peaceful and joyful parade and celebration. Among those celebrating was Mayor Richard Riordan, who proclaimed: "They are the first champions of the 21st century, the start of a great dynasty." During the parade, the Lakers and their families rode on four double-decker buses, waving to cheering fans.

Los Angeles police fired rubber bullets Sunday into a crowd of people demonstrating against police brutality near the LAPD's downtown headquarters, breaking up an unauthorized splinter group of marchers who threw bottles, vandalized bus stops and yelled obscenities.