Official Negligence How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles

CHAPTER ONE
Official Negligence
How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD

By LOU CANNON
Times Books
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DREAM CITY
"Imagine Los Angeles in the first decade of the 21st century.... More different races, religions, cultures, languages and people mingle here than in any city in the world."
--"LA 2000: A City for the Future," a report of the LA 2000 Committee.

The last thing the leaders of Los Angeles expected in the early 1990s was that their city would become the scene of the nation's deadliest urban race riot since the Civil War. To the contrary, Mayor Tom Bradley was confident that the city he had led since 1973 was "at the brink of a great destiny," poised to become the multicultural crossroads of the world. His optimism was shared by the downtown financiers who had bankrolled his political campaigns and were his enduring allies. Together they had transformed a sprawling municipality once disparaged as forty suburbs in search of a city into a metropolis of chrome-and-steel skyscrapers, a magnet for investment from Canada, Japan, and other nations of the Pacific Rim.

Bradley and his backers as well as political leaders in Sacramento, the state capital, believed that California was essentially recession-proof. They foresaw neither an end to the cornucopia of defense spending which had funneled federal dollars into the state since World War II nor the collapse of what seemed a perpetual real estate boom. After five decades of steadily increasing values, even nondescript tract houses were selling for fifteen to twenty-five times their original price, and homes were considered better in vestments than certificates of deposit or mutual funds. Despite air pollution and crowded freeways, Southern Californians were convinced they lived in one of the best places on earth. In a 1943 article, Life magazine had described Southern California as "irresistibly attractive to hordes of people." The state's entire population was then just under 7 million, 2 million less than the 1990 population of Los Angeles County alone. But people continued to pour into Southern California in pursuit of the American dream that William Faulkner had defined "as a sanctuary on earth for individual man." As Life had put it, "Mister, this is dreamland."

Bradley was a visionary black man in a city that had come to reflect all the colors of the rainbow. When Bradley was a boy, Los Angeles had been the most white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant big city in the nation. By 1990, however, it had become a salad bowl of cultures in which 106 languages were spoken, a fifth of the residents had been born in a foreign country, nearly half the public-school children conversed in Spanish at home, and the Roman Catholic Church was the city's most influential religious institution.

The Los Angeles electorate did not reflect the rainbow composition of the population. Latinos, mostly of Mexican origin or descent, made up 40 percent of the city's population and Asians another 9 percent. But since many Latinos and Asians were ineligible to vote, they comprised only one-eighth of an electorate that in the early 1990s remained two-thirds non-Hispanic white and nearly one-fifth black. It was this older Los Angeles that had elected Bradley mayor five times, even though it was the newer city that captured his imagination. Economic forecasts assured him that Los Angeles was an engine of diversity propelling California into the leadership of a brave new world where goods and workers would flow freely among nations of the Pacific Rim. If demographics were destiny, then Los Angeles was the harbinger of a multicultural democracy without a racial or an ethnic majority. By the middle of the twenty-first century, or so demographers said, the entire United States would resemble the Los Angeles of 1990.

The mayor thought of Los Angeles as a harmonious city where Latinos, blacks, Asians, and whites worked together to enrich a region that would increasingly resemble the world with which it traded. A civic leadership often more attuned to what occurred in Tokyo or Mexico City than to what was happening in Watts shared this shining vision, which seemed real enough from the gleaming downtown skyscrapers that were the monuments of the Bradley era. But at ground level, Los Angeles looked squalid. In South Central and in the neighborhoods of Pico-Union and Westlake, west of downtown, ethnic diversity and growing population density produced unruly competition for the most low-paying and menial jobs. Poverty and discord rippled through forty square miles of mean streets. This Los Angeles was the city of which mystery writer Walter Mosley said, "It's a land that on the surface is of dreams, and then there's a kind of slimy underlayer."

But what Bradley called a "world city" was a concept more compelling than any ground-level reality. The mayor and his business allies commanded a city built by dreams. In this respect they were true to the promoters who had lured 1.5 million people to Southern California in the 1920s. "Los Angeles has touched the imagination of America," proclaimed a brochure of the period. "She has become an idea .... a longing in men's breasts. She is the symbol of a new civilization, a new hope, another try."

The belief that people could achieve in los angeles what they had been unable to accomplish elsewhere held resonance for Tom Bradley, who was an overachieving son of Texas sharecroppers. Lee and Crenner Bradley had quit school in the fifth grade and picked cotton for pennies in the sun-baked fields of Calvert, Texas. They came to Los Angeles in 1924 when Tom was seven years old, and it took Lee Bradley more than a year to win "another try" as a porter for the Santa Fe Railroad. This nomadic work and similar jobs that followed left the burden of raising a family to Crenner, who took in ironing and worked long hours as a maid to support five children. Even in the depths of the Depression, she never went on welfare.

The Bradleys were part of the largest wave of black immigration to reach California before World War II. The black population of Los Angeles doubled in the twenties, reaching 30,000 by 1930. The Bradleys lived on the East Side, an area now almost entirely Latino, and moved frequently. "Although I never asked why, I am sure some of our moves had to do with our not being able to pay the rent," Tom Bradley later recalled. He was ten when a white friend told him that his parents had forbidden him to play with colored children. Much later, after he was an adult, white homeowners tried to prevent Bradley and his family from moving into a neighborhood where no blacks lived.

Bradley was a tall and handsome young man who read widely and was fortunate to have teachers who encouraged him to ignore the standard counseling that black students should take vocational training and work with their hands. His idol was Jesse Owens, the black track star who had upstaged Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Bradley won a track scholarship to the University of California at Los Angeles, becoming one of a hundred blacks in a student body of 7,000. But in 1940, with California still in the grips of the Depression, Bradley took the police entrance examination, scored 97 percent, and was invited to become a police officer. Being a cop meant having job security, something his parents had never known, and Bradley quit UCLA in his junior year to join the mostly white and strictly segregated Los Angeles Police Department. The LAPD provided a pathway to success for Bradley, who attended law school at night, passed the bar, and entered politics after retiring from the department in 1961.

Bradley started out in public life as a "Negro politician" involved in black causes and representing a city council district with a black plurality. But he was from the beginning an apostle of diversity who reached out to people of all ethnic groups and political affiliations, a prerequisite for political success in a white-run city where the local offices, as elsewhere in California, are nonpartisan.

It was the 1965 Watts riot and the damage it inflicted on the city's reputation that gave Bradley a chance to become mayor. After the riot, the business community was anxious to project a more progressive image of Los Angeles and more willing to take a chance on a black man whose dignified personality and police background made him relatively reassuring to whites. Still, when Bradley first ran for mayor in 1969, he narrowly lost to the incumbent Sam Yorty, a durable demagogue who conducted a race-baiting campaign and suggested that Bradley would clamp down on the LAPD in retaliation for the humiliation he had suffered while working in a segregated police department. Yorty had started out in the 1930s as a far-left Democrat and moved right across the political spectrum without changing party registration. He was a classic California lone-wolf anti-politician who had mastered the art of appealing to white resentment and knew how to stir a crowd. Yorty did particularly well in the San Fernando Valley, where conservative homeowners were not quite ready to elect a black.

By 1973, however, even conservatives had become disillusioned with Yorty. Bradley defeated him in a rematch and presided over the creation of modern Los Angeles. His commitment to downtown development guaranteed him the backing of a financial elite alarmed by the loss of business to suburbia, while his race and mild liberalism made him an ideal advertisement for a city that had begun to promote diversity. Until his image was tarnished by conflict-of-interest charges late in his fourth term, Bradley remained popular with blacks, Jews, Latinos, and moderates of all races.

Bradley's greatest political triumph was bringing the 1984 Olympic Games to Los Angeles. At fifteen, he had peeked through the fence around the Los Angeles Coliseum to watch the 1932 Olympic Games, and later he ran the 440 on the Coliseum track then used by UCLA. As mayor, he pressured a divided city council to ratify a contract with the International Olympic Committee that it had initially rejected. Bradley went down to the Pacific Coast Highway on July 21,1984, to watch football hero O. J. Simpson, the pride of the University of Southern California, carry the Olympic torch into Santa Monica. When Bradley saw an onlooker climb a cactus, oblivious of the thorns, to get a better view of Simpson, he knew the games would be a huge success.

Fortune smiled on Los Angeles during the summer of 1984 in the form of exceptionally mild and smog-free weather. Despite a boycott by the Soviet Union and its eastern European dependencies, a record number of 140 nations participated in the Los Angeles Olympics, the first such international competition to be privately financed. Spectators also turned out in record numbers, ignoring terrorism scares. From the moment that Rafer Johnson sprinted up the steps of the Coliseum to light the Olympic torch and Vickie McClure sang "Reach Out and Touch Somebody's Hand," the games were a public relations triumph for Bradley, who was cheered by a crowd of 55,000 when he was introduced for the first Olympic baseball game. When the Games ended on August 12 in the glow of $500,000 worth of fireworks and the landing of a fake spaceship, Los Angeles was reluctant to see them go. The United States had won a record eighty-four gold medals, and most Americans did not seem to mind that the gold had been devalued by the Soviet boycott. The Olympics had brought $3.3 billion into Los Angeles, created 74,000 temporary jobs, and produced a surplus of $222 million. It had been the most profitable sporting event in world history. But to the mayor, the real story of the Olympics was diversity, not dollars. In the fierce but peaceful competition of the athletes from many nations, Bradley saw an advertisement for his world city.

In 1985, during his fourth mayoralty campaign, Bradley proposed developing a "strategic vision" for Los Angeles. The mayor's critics, of whom there then were few, called the idea a political stunt, but after he was re-elected, Bradley asked eighty-five leading citizens, the LA 2000 Committee, to prepare a blueprint for the future. In 1988, they produced a plan, "LA 2000: A City for the Future," which optimistically discussed issues of growth management, education, housing, transportation, and environmental quality.

"Just as New York, London and Paris stood as symbols of past centuries, Los Angeles will be THE city of the 21st century," the report declared in a particularly exuberant paragraph.

The potential for Los Angeles as a prosperous international center for communications, trade, investment and culture is immense. It will be a leading hub of world trade, especially as the United States gateway to the Pacific Rim nations, where the combined economies are expanding at the rate of $3 billion a week toward a projected 27 percent share of the world's gross product before the end of the century. Los Angeles can be a leading financial center and a communications axis where major business enterprises from all over the world will want to have a headquarters, a branch office or a manufacturing facility. Los Angeles can continue to be a magnet that attracts people from every nation as a place of opportunity as well as a pace-setter that shapes cultures worldwide through its leadership in science, technology and education as well as in the arts and entertainment industry.
The belief that a dream or an idealized vision can be imagined or proclaimed into existence is part of the essence of Southern California. It was the secret of Ronald Reagan's popular appeal and the key to the "magic" of Hollywood. In an epilogue to the LA 2000 report, historian Kevin Starr suggested that the very existence of Los Angeles represents a triumph of vision and will over material circumstances." Los Angeles did not just happen or arise like so many other American cities out of existing circumstances," Starr wrote. "Indeed, for a long time it had none of these. Los Angeles envisioned itself, then externalized that vision through sheer force of will, springing from a platonic conception of itself, the Great Gatsby of American cities."

Since Los Angeles lacked the raw materials of a city and since most of the region was a desert, it was able to grow only by imposing its visions on others. Water was imported from northern California at a heavy cost to once-wild rivers and the magnificent estuary known as the San Francisco Bay Delta. The Owens Valley was also sacrificed. Los Angeles created a deepwater port, developed a flourishing citrus agriculture that it then displaced with subdivisions, and built a splendid rail transit system that was removed to accommodate freeways and the automobile culture.

One of the downsides of a society created by a triumph of will is that its members, having persuaded themselves that anything is possible, are susceptible to self-deception. The LA 2000 report itself was clouded by miscalculation. "Every economist I talked to had said that California's economy was so broad-based and had such a critical mass that it would resist a recession," said Jane Pisano, president of the Los Angeles 2000 Committee. "Then the report was published and the bottom fell out of the economy. That was not supposed to happen."

In fact, "every economist" had underestimated California's dependence on military spending, a mainstay of the state's economy since the defense plants and shipyards of World War II had ended the Depression. California had become prosperous, said Richard Riordan, Bradley's successor as mayor, because it had been "subsidized by people around the world to build things to kill people." During much of the Cold War the state routinely received $80 billion to $100 billion a year in federal defense dollars. Even as late as 1992, when military spending in California had declined to $51 billion, the state was still absorbing 21 percent of the national defense budget. "The California economy was on steroids," said Kevin Starr.

It was an apt metaphor. California had become economically muscular by injections of federal defense spending, and the state suffered withdrawal symptoms when the dosage was reduced as the Cold War wound down. From 1988 to 1993, California lost 140,000 aerospace jobs at a time when the state was growing so rapidly that it needed to create 200,000 new jobs a year just to stay even. The aerospace collapse sent an enormous ripple through the economy, as housing construction nose-dived and the thinly stretched real estate bubble burst. Subdivisions were festooned with "for sale" signs in front of homes that often sold, if at all, at prices far below the listed values. While relatively few poor blacks or Latinos were directly employed by aerospace companies, they held jobs in the markets, shops, restaurants, and service stations along the Los Angeles County coast and into Orange County. Many of these jobs vanished. One economist put the California employment loss over seven years at 300,000, including jobs from military-base closings.

The severity of the downturn robbed Californians of their optimism. By 1992, the year of the Los Angeles riots, 93 percent of those surveyed by California pollster Mervin Field, said the state was undergoing "bad times"--up from 24 percent in 1989. Field, who had been sampling California public opinion for nearly a half century, had never before found such high levels of pessimism. What seemed most significant to him was that many Californians doubted that their state would ever recover its former luster.

The effect of the aerospace collapse rippled through South Central, mingling with other currents to create the economic context of the 1992 riots. Los Angeles had been a center of traditional manufacturing for three decades after World War II, but ten of the twelve largest non-aerospace plants had closed between 1978 and 1982 in the face of foreign competition and rising production costs in Southern California. One of the plants that shut down was a General Motors assembly line in South Gate, a blue-collar community east of South Central that employed substantial numbers of blacks. The exodus of the automobile industry from Southern California was completed in 1992, when GM shut down a Van Nuys plant that had produced more than six million vehicles over forty five-years, shifting production of its Chevrolet Camaros and Pontiac Firebirds to a plant in Canada.

The point was sometimes made that thousands of automotive jobs were created in places like Irvine, La Jolla, and Newport Beach to offset the job losses in South Gate, Van Nuys, and Pico Rivera, where Ford had closed a plant in the early 1980s. But the new jobs were research, design, and sales positions for foreign-car makers in relatively remote and sanitized suburban communities. There were few new jobs for blue-collar workers. South Central, the historic industrial core of Los Angeles, lost 70,000 jobs in the 1978-82 plant closures and continued to hemorrhage through the rest of the decade while most of California prospered.

By 1990, apparel manufacturing was the only substantial industry within easy driving distance of South Central. Apparel was also the only manufacturing industry that continued to grow as the California economy declined, and its growth was greatest in Los Angeles County, which in 1991 employed 99,400 of the state's 141,000 garment workers. The downtown garment district on the northern rim of South Central is home to the California Mart, a three-million-square-foot complex that boasts of being the world's biggest apparel market. It also harbors over-heated sweat shops where garment workers produce ready-to-wear clothing at piece rates.

Ironically, the "world city" celebrated by Mayor Bradley was one of reduced wages and expectations. While almost as many apparel jobs were created in Los Angeles County during 1990-91 as were lost in the aerospace industry, the median annual wage was $17,000 in garment work compared to $45,000 in aerospace. Since it took 2.5 garment jobs to equal the purchasing power of a single aerospace job, consumer spending declined, as did government revenues from sales and income taxes. Nor were the new, low-paying jobs available to everyone. Latino and Asian immigrants held two-thirds of the jobs at the garment factories, and blacks held very few. This intensified racial and ethnic friction within South Central, where immigrants also competed with African Americans for living space. By 1990, the Latino and black populations of South Central were nearly equal in a community that had been two-thirds black in 1980.

The aerospace collapse came at a time when social services in California, especially in poor communities, were strained. The Reagan administration had eliminated the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) and virtually dismantled the Job Corps. California had also paid a heavy, if delayed, price for Proposition 13, the 1978 initiative pushed by populist Howard Jarvis at a time when the state legislature was hoarding budget surpluses and property taxes were sky-rocketing. The measure had been opposed by almost every public official, including then-governor Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown and then-San Diego mayor Pete Wilson, but it was approved overwhelmingly by tax-weary California voters.

Proposition 13 was cheered by homeowners because it fixed property taxes at a low level. But it also undermined the ability of local governments to pay for public services and had the radical effect of taking fiscal authority away from local governments and placing it in the hands of the state. After the initiative passed, these local governments sought help from Sacramento, and a chastened legislature distributed the accumulated surpluses to cities and counties. This delayed the negative impact of Proposition 13, but over time, the view that local governments could provide the same services with a shrunken tax base proved as much of an illusion as the myth of permanent California prosperity. As the aerospace and real estate collapse reduced state revenues, the state reduced aid to local governments and cities and counties in turn cut services. In Los Angeles County, this forced closure of medical trauma centers and libraries and deferred purchases of police cars and emergency communications equipment. When the riots came, the LAPD responded to emergencies in cars that had been driven 100,000 miles and tried to answer calls over radios that often didn't work.

Since blacks made up more than 22 percent of the Los Angeles municipal workforce, they were disproportionately affected by the budget squeeze. Mayor Bradley had made a point of hiring minorities and promoting them. But Los Angeles had only 2,600 more municipal jobs in 1991 than it had in 1973, the year Bradley became mayor. This was a 6 percent growth rate in city jobs while the population was increasing by 670,000, or 24 percent. Only a thousand more blacks held city jobs in 1991 than when Bradley took office.

The combination of disappearing jobs and reduced services was devastating in South Central, where blacks suffered, as in other inner cities, from a terrifying trend of family breakdown. But the national stereotype of a black underclass in which fatherless families lived on welfare checks did not accurately describe the poor in South Central. Poverty in Los Angeles was "notable for its diversity," as one study put it. Men comprised 43 percent of the poor. Only 25 percent of the adult poor in Los Angeles collected any form of public assistance.

What may have hurt South Central as much as family breakdown was the exodus of the growing black middle class during the 1980s. Middle-class people of any race tend to move out of South Central as soon as they are financially able to do so, and blacks are no exception. The black population of South Central in 1990 was down 122,000 from a decade before, a 17 percent decrease. Meanwhile, the black population grew by 50 percent or more in 60 Los Angeles County communities, including many in which blacks were a tiny minority. Felicia Bragg, a teenager in Watts at the time of the 1965 riot who retains familial ties with the community, notes that the increased mobility of blacks deprived Watts and much of South Central of middle-class role models close to home. "Racism had a good effect on us because even middle-class blacks had to live with us ... they couldn't move," said Bragg, who moved to Pasadena. Most of the people who couldn't move were desperately poor, however, and many were unemployed. A year before the 1992 riots, 40,000 South Central black teenagers between the ages of sixteen and nineteen were out of school and out of work.

Latinos in South Central were also poor. While they were more likely to be employed and have intact families than African Americans, they worked for such low wages that their poverty rate was nearly identical with that of blacks. Most Latinos who had lived in Southern California for a decade or longer were from Mexico, and they frequently found themselves in competition with new arrivals from Central America as well as with blacks. One study based on census data showed that the poverty rate in Los Angeles increased 50 percent from 1969 through 1989, while remaining nearly static in the nation. Of South Central's 630,000 residents, 92 percent were black ...included 40 percent of the children.

George Deukmejian, the Republican Governor of California during most of the 1980s, was isolated in Sacramento, nearly four hundred miles away, and knew even less than the Los Angeles elite about what was happening in South Central. Deukmejian, cautious and conservative, had been a state legislator from Long Beach before becoming attorney general. He won the Republican gubernatorial nomination in 1982 and faced Tom Bradley, the Democratic nominee, in the general election. That same year, gun-control advocates qualified a handgun-registration initiative for the statewide ballot. The measure spurred a heavy turnout of white, conservative voters who defeated the initiative and in the process helped Deukmejian win a narrow victory.

Deukmejian was an unassuming and unimaginative governor with a passion for prison building. He easily won reelection in 1986, with Bradley again his opponent. In 1989, after a crazed gunman killed several children with an assault rifle in a Stockton school yard, he courageously defied the gun lobby and signed a bill banning various assault weapons.

Deukmejian was the Calvin Coolidge of California. Like Coolidge, he was a decent man devoted to family and friends. Also like Coolidge, he was oblivious to portents of economic catastrophe. In 1990, the year he retired as governor, he agreed to a state budget that was balanced on the breathtaking assumption that California's economic growth would continue unabated after the end of the Cold War. After the election, Deukmejian casually told governor-elect Pete Wilson that state revenue collections had been below estimates since July, the first month of the new fiscal year. As they talked, a Deukmejian aide arrived with news that revenues had taken an especially precipitous downturn in October. In fact, Deukmejian had left his Republican successor a $7 billion deficit which would grow to more than $10 billion and cast Wilson as the Herbert Hoover of the California economic decline.

It would later be said in defense of Deukmejian that the world changed too abruptly for him to foresee the aerospace decline. Certainly, he had no warning of either the collapse of communism or the subsequent worldwide recession. But the reduction of defense spending had been in the offing since late 1987, when President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed a treaty to reduce U.S. and Soviet intermediate-range nuclear weapon arsenals. Aerospace companies had not waited until the Berlin Wall fell to begin laying off workers. At Hughes Aircraft Company, the largest industrial employer in California during the 1980s, chief executive officer Malcolm Currie, early in ...came endemic in the industry. Lockheed and other aerospace giants followed suit.

Small businesses in California were also quicker than political leaders to read the tea leaves of decline. Business start-ups began falling in 1987. They continued to fall for the next five years. This information was available to the Deukmejian administration, if anyone had sought it, at a state agency down the street from the Capitol. While there was no comparable data on the exodus of established businesses, organizations led by the California Chamber of Commerce were complaining that the state suffered from overlapping federal, state, county, and local regulations that made obtaining even the simplest permit agonizing and time-consuming. Peter Ueberroth, a Bradley ally who had organized the 1984 Olympics and was named by Governor Wilson to head a Council on California Competitiveness, described the regulatory system as a "well-oiled, job-killing machine." A 1991 survey of executives by the California Business Roundtable found that 25 percent of them had plans to relocate their businesses outside of California.

Most residents of south central did not have the luxury of packing up and leaving for an industrial park in Utah or Nevada. The comment of one black gang member accurately reflected the outlook of many African-American males. "It's like we're animals left in a cage, and you're feeding us nothing but poison," said Freddie (FM) Jelks. "Hunger is going to make me eat it." Jelks at twenty-eight was the father of four and, like one in six black males over the age of sixteen, an ex-convict. He had frequently applied for work but never held a job.

Alicia Aguilar, thirty-two, immigrated to Los Angeles from Toluca, Mexico, and sewed blouses in an overheated factory run by Koreans in the garment district. She worked from 7:00 A.M. until 6:00 P.M. six days a week on piece rates, receiving the equivalent of the minimum wage only if she completed 10 blouses an hour, 110 blouses a day, 660 blouses a week. She lived in a one-bedroom South Central apartment with her husband and their three boys, aged ten to thirteen, who slept together in the living room. "There was more room in Mexico," she said. Aguilar's dream was that her boys would study and have careers so she could return to Mexico. Since her husband also worked, there was no one to supervise her young children, who were cared for by a neighbor when they arrived home from school.

What happened to the children of Jelks and Aguilar had more to do with the future of Los Angeles than all the visionary gush in the LA 2000 report. But the prospects of the poor did not engage the leaders of Los Angeles as South Central became the breeding ground for a riot that would dwarf Watts, and they ignored a perceptive report that pointed out the problems while there was still time to solve them.

Unlike the expansively funded LA 2000 Committee, the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations had a small budget and a tiny staff. But in 1985, the year Mayor Bradley proposed a "strategic vision" for Los Angeles, the commission and the even smaller Los Angeles City Commission on Human Relations worked together to analyze conditions in South Central twenty years after the Watts riot. The two commissions took testimony from eighteen analysts and community leaders and issued a report called "McCone Revisited: A Focus on Solutions to Continuing Problems in South Central Los Angeles." The title referred to John McCone, a former Central Intelligence Agency director who had headed the inquiry into the 1965 Watts riot. "McCone Revisited" was issued on plain paper, written in uninspired prose, and had no illustrations. It lacked the artiness and optimism of the lavishly designed LA 2000 report, offering only a somber and dispassionate assessment of what had happened in South Central since the 1965 riot. Improvements in transportation and health services were duly noted, but "critical problems" in employment and social services had not improved since Watts, while other "critical problems" of education and housing had become worse.

"McCone Revisited" gathered dust for seven years. It was not mentioned by the LA 2000 Committee report in 1988 or, as far as I am aware, in any other of the many surveys of Southern California life that proliferated in the 1980s. Nor did the report or the deteriorating conditions for African Americans attract attention from national or local media. "Latinos and diversity were the new media fashion in the eighties," recalled Jay Mathews, then the Los Angeles bureau chief of The Washington Post. "Blacks were the old minority, on the way out. Racial tension was unfashionable as a media story. Black frustration and the reaction of blacks to the police was a twenty-year-old story. It was old hat."

The frustrated complaints of the jobless poor were drowned out by happy talk about the region's future. Many reports that purported to discuss "Los Angeles" were actually broad-brush examinations of regional attitudes. For example, RAND, a Santa Monica-based think tank, conducted telephone interviews with 1,230 people for the LA 2000 Committee. Only 187 of those interviewed were South Central residents and only 46 of these respondents were black. Anyone too poor to own a telephone--and the 1990 census found 11,111 such residents in South Central--was automatically eliminated.

South Central and its poor black and Latino population was invisible to most non-Hispanic whites in Southern California before the 1992 riots. Blacks made up 47.6 percent of South Central's population in the 1990 census, but only 13 percent of the city population, 10.5 percent of the county population, and 6 to 9 percent of the regional population, depending on how the region was defined.

There is no universally accepted definition of Southern California. Social historian Carey McWilliams used the traditional "south of Tehachapi," a reference to the mountain range that reaches the Pacific Coast north of Santa Barbara. This included Santa Barbara County south of these mountains, all of Ventura, Los Angeles and Orange counties, and western Riverside, San Bernardino and San Diego counties, which were also divided by mountain ranges from the inland desert. RAND surveyed residents of "the larger Los Angeles region" of Los Angeles County, northern Orange County and, curiously, eastern Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Dan Walters in The New California referred to an "uninterrupted, sprawling megalopolis" extending from Riverside County on the south and east to Ventura County on the north and west. "They are, in effect, the boroughs of one continuous city that's nearly 100 miles long and 75 miles wide, even though their residents try to separate themselves from Los Angeles by postal designation or city limit lines," Walters wrote.

South Central lies at the heart of this "continuous city," surrounded by elevated freeways that enable millions of passersby to avoid this poorest section of Southern California. Within the area bounded by these freeways, South Central occupies nearly forty square miles in a city of 479 square miles and a county of 4,079 square miles. South Central had a population of 630,000 in 1990. The city of Los Angeles had a population of 3,485,398 and Los Angeles County, which contains 88 separate cities and 163 identifiable communities, had a population of 8,863,154. These official figures are, in fact, probably low because they don't take into account the illegal immigrants, called "undocumented workers" by Latinos. These immigrants are a source of cheap labor for businesses and Anglo homeowners, but increase the competition for scarce jobs and living space in South Central and other poor areas. Blacks felt particularly threatened by the immigrant influx, which helped keep wages down.

In spite of the boosterism of many southern California leaders in the 1980s, there was a vague but growing sense of foreboding that all was not well. This was reflected in the 1988 RAND survey, whose respondents were wealthier and better educated than the overall population. Of those responding, 83 percent said life was good, but 43 percent were pessimistic about the future. Even the hyper-optimistic LA 2000 report sounded an uneasy note in a paragraph sandwiched between passages that discussed the "impressive strengths" of the region. "Los Angeles is rapidly becoming a bimodal society as the number of mid-level jobs fails to keep up, widening the disparity between high-skill, high-paying jobs and low-skill, low-paying jobs," the report said.

A few months after the LA 2000 report was submitted to Mayor Bradley the Los Angeles Times published in its April 2, 1989, Sunday magazine the results of a survey on "The Quality of L.A. Life." Based on a poll of 2,046 Los Angeles County residents, this survey produced the then-surprising statistic that 48 percent were considering moving, a majority outside the region and many to another state.

The survey was accompanied by an article on the lives of six families that catalogued horror stories of congestion, traffic problems, and crime. Laura Bowen's Volkswagen convertible had been stolen three times during her first year in Los Angeles, and budget cuts had eliminated the music program at her daughter's elementary school in affluent Toluca Lake. Pam Herbert, a college student, had been harassed by leather-clad high school students known as "mall rats." Salvador Mariscal, a farmer, had moved from Mexico to join his children in Los Angeles. He detested the food, was frightened by the freeways, and had bought a cow to remind him of home. Melinda Garcia, a psychologist, was dismayed by cross-burnings and vandalism of synagogues that received little attention from the media. "There's a mystique that this city is tolerant, and it's not true," she said.

Both the RAND and the Los Angeles Times surveys found that crime was overwhelmingly cited as the worst feature of life in Southern California. Fear of crime was greatest among blacks, who were most apt to live in high-crime areas and were statistically the most frequent victims as well as the most frequent perpetrators of crime. The Times recounted the experiences of Maurice and Paulette Bennett, who lived with their three children in Inglewood, a stable city with a black majority that is home to the Forum, where the Los Angeles professional basketball and hockey teams play, and the Hollywood Park racetrack. Life had been good for the Bennetts until their working-class neighborhood was invaded by youthful cocaine dealers. "This is no place to raise kids," Paulette Bennett had decided. "I'm afraid one will get jumped."

The fears of the Bennetts reflected an attitude of the 1980s that at first glance seemed to be disputed by the facts. Personal and household crimes in the United States declined from a peak of 41 million in 1981 to 34 million in 1990, while surveys were showing increasing public concern about crime. This apparent contradiction was partly because such usually non-violent crimes as burglary and auto theft declined sharply while violent crime fell only slightly. Citizens were understandably less concerned about the inconvenience of burglary than with the possibility they might be mugged, robbed, raped, assaulted, or killed.

In addition, the comforting statistics concealed a trend within a trend. All categories of crime decreased early in the decade, but the crime rate turned upward again in the mid-1980s, spurred by an epidemic of crack cocaine. Within Los Angeles County the rate of violent crime rose steadily from a decade low of 1,179 incidents per 100,000 inhabitants in 1984 to 1,601 in 1989. The increase in violent crime fed the public's fears and put pressure on Southern California law enforcement agencies to "do something" at a time when police forces were feeling the impact of cumulative budget cuts.

What Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates decided to do was launch Operation Hammer, a series of street sweeps of gang-infested areas in South Central. Starting in April 1988, as many as a thousand police officers moved from neighborhood to neighborhood, arresting hundreds of suspected gang members and drug dealers. Gates believed that such "proactive" policing was necessary to bring the gangs to heel. But while the sweeps inconvenienced drug dealers, gang killings and assaults continued to rise steadily.

Then on August 1, 1988, eighty Los Angeles police officers, acting on a tip, descended on four apartments near Thirty-ninth Street and Dalton Avenue that they believed were gang-controlled crack cocaine houses. They smashed toilets, destroyed furniture, broke windows, and wrote pro-police graffiti on an outside wall. Thirty-three African Americans were arrested, and some said they were cuffed around by police. Although this accusation was never proved in court, the raid became a costly embarrassment to the Los Angeles Police Department. The tip had been wrong. The raid yielded less than an ounce of cocaine and six ounces of marijuana and resulted in a single successful prosecution on a minor charge. Dozens of officer participants were disciplined, and three were prosecuted on felony vandalism and other charges. While the officers were eventually acquitted by a racially mixed jury, the city paid out $3.7 million in civil damages. Police Commander Chet Spencer, who presided over a disciplinary hearing of the one officer to admit wrongdoing, concluded that the incident was "an extremely dark day in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department."

South Central wanted, needed, and deserved police protection. While some activists described the LAPD as an occupying army, polls showed that a majority of blacks and Latinos were supportive of the police. One objective measure of the community's attitude was the consistent support given by South Central voters, especially blacks, to ballot measures that would have raised taxes to pay for additional officers or better police equipment. Such measures usually failed to win the two-thirds margin required by Proposition 13 (which itself had not received the support of two-thirds of the state's voters) because white, conservative voters in well-off areas were unwilling to tax themselves to pay for extra police. Poor, law-abiding citizens in South Central could not afford the luxuries of gated communities or private security forces. They wanted more police protection than they were receiving.

What the people of South Central did not want was to be treated with contempt or prejudice. Operation Hammer removed hundreds of gang members from the streets, but also resulted in the rounding up, and sometimes the roughing up, of teenagers whose crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Thirty-ninth and Dalton raid strained fragile ties between citizens and a police force that under Chief Gates resisted "community policing," in which neighborhoods are enlisted as allies of the police. But neither South Central nor the LAPD was a monolith, and individual officers in high-crime precincts often developed ties with citizens who favored a crackdown on the gangs. These ties were most apt to be with Latinos. The Latino fear of black gangs was an unpublicized element of the Thirty-ninth and Dalton raid, which was partially provoked by threats made to a Latino family living in a house between the four apartments that were ransacked by police. An instructive poll showed that Latinos critical of the LAPD were most apt to fault police for slow response to emergency calls, while blacks were more apt to cite racism or harassment.

Blacks, particularly young males, complained that they were often stopped by police and "proned out"--made to lie face down with legs and arms spread and palms up--for minor traffic violations or for no reason at all. Such indignities had been a prelude to the Watts riot. After Watts the LAPD instituted race-relations training, and a steady influx of black and Latino officers had changed the composition of the once white police department. The proportion of blacks within the LAPD became roughly equivalent to the proportion of blacks within the city population. Nevertheless, many blacks were convinced that they were persistently mistreated by police officers of all races.

The neglected "McCone Revisited" report had addressed this issue in 1985. While the report took note of programs designed to improve community relations and the recruitment of minority police officers, it found that "the issue of equitable law enforcement continues to be one of the contentious and serious problems for residents of South Central Los Angeles." The report urged Mayor Bradley and the city council to ask police commissioners and Chief Gates to develop a plan "to improve police-community relations, police-community communication and the current allocation or deployment formula [of police] in South Central Los Angeles." Its bureaucratic language notwithstanding, "McCone Revisited" was a valuable and distant warning of the troubled situation in South Central, had anyone in authority chose to heed it.

But no one was paying attention. Nothing was done to make law enforcement more equitable, nor was action taken on the report's recommendations to reduce infant mortality and improve housing and education in South Central. No notice was taken by Chief Gates, who often dismissed concerns about police-community relations by saying that he was greeted in a friendly fashion whenever he visited South Central. No notice was taken by Mayor Bradley, who was too absorbed in downtown development and his vision of a world city to focus on the growing poverty and violence in his own backyard.

"McCone Revisited" was issued when Bradley and Los Angeles were basking in an Olympics afterglow and Southern California was still a place of dreams. The mayor had no inkling that his visionary dream would become a nightmare.