Riots Los Angeles

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), locked in a tough primary election battle in Orange County, dispatched a telegram Wednesday to President Bush demanding the quick deportation of illegal immigrants arrested during last week's riots in Los Angeles. Rohrabacher said he was angered after learning that U.S. Atty. Gen. William P. Barr was not proposing any special effort to have foreign-born suspects deported.

Reacting to an independent report attacking the lack of "rhyme or reason" in governmental responses to last year's riots, the Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday unanimously approved a series of measures aimed at trimming the red tape that businesses face in rebuilding their damaged or destroyed properties. More than 14 months after the civil disturbances, the council directed city building permit officials to coordinate all rebuilding activities at a single "one-stop" counter in City Hall.

Los Angeles police and county sheriff's deputies are preparing to go on tactical alert when verdicts are reached in the Reginald O. Denny beating trial, but officials predicted Thursday that there will be no replay of the rioting that shook the city in 1992. The departments are activating essentially the same mobilization plan that was employed earlier this year when verdicts were announced in the Rodney G. King civil rights trial.

BEVERLY HILLS 1. Beverly Hills was relatively untouched by violence, but a police chase that began within the city early Thursday ended in a fatal car crash in Hollywood. The car's three occupants--two men and a woman--were killed when the vehicle hit a fire hydrant just off Santa Monica Boulevard and flipped on its top.

South Los Angeles--the epicenter of the deadly rioting--lagged far behind the rest of the county during the 1980s in nearly every measure of prosperity, and has a higher poverty rate now for its families than it had in 1965, according to new Census Bureau figures. The statistics underscore numerically the social problems that have plagued the area since the Watts riots more than a quarter century ago: joblessness, hopelessness and a crippling lack of skills and education.

Four Los Angeles police officers won acquittals Wednesday in their trial for the beating of black motorist Rodney G. King, igniting renewed outrage over a racially charged case that had triggered a national debate on police brutality. Hours after the verdicts were announced, angry demonstrators torched buildings, looted stores and assaulted passersby as civic leaders pleaded for calm. Gov.

Almost two months after the Los Angeles riots, detectives say they have made little progress in solving the homicides stemming from the unrest and indicate that most cases may never be cracked. Arrests have been made in four of the 33 cases in which civilians took the lives of fellow civilians. The bulk of the homicides have been difficult to solve, authorities said, because investigators got a late start, most attacks were random and cooperative witnesses have been scarce.

As symbols of the riots, they are indelible. As people, they are barely known. Even some of their neighbors do not know who they are and what they have done. In the 1 1/2 years since four Angelenos, watching television in different locations, rushed to the intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues to rescue Reginald O. Denny, their extraordinary courage has been overshadowed by the powerful images of mob violence. Damian Monroe Williams is much more of a household name than Bobby Green.

The raging fires have long been extinguished, but fear still engulfs the daily lives of untold numbers of Los Angeles residents, one month after the worst civil unrest in a century ripped through city streets.

An estimated 30,000 people--some wearing white headbands of mourning, some carrying brooms and plastic garbage bags--marched through Los Angeles' Koreatown on Saturday in a massive show of support for beleaguered merchants. "It hurts right here," said marcher Joyce Kim of Diamond Bar, putting her hand over her heart to show anguish over the Korean-owned stores that were looted or set afire since the Rodney G. King verdict. "Koreatown is all our family."