Thousands Expected at Anti-Crime Rally : Protest: The Saturday event has been dubbed “Turn the Tide.” Organizers are comparing it to the civil rights demonstrations of the ‘60s.

One of the largest and most diverse crowds ever to protest crime in Los Angeles is expected to gather Saturday at Exposition Park for a rally and 2-mile march that organizers are comparing to the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s.

The event has been dubbed “Turn the Tide” by the advertising executive who once employed Karen Toshima, the 27-year-old graphics artist struck down by gang gunfire near UCLA two years ago. This time, the divisive questions of race and economics that surrounded her death appear to have coalesced into a common goal.

Four church-based community groups, with the help of corporate sponsors, estimate that they will turn out more than 10,000 people. From 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., they will chant, sing and pray, make demands of politicians, share stories about lost loved ones and walk hand-in-hand down graffiti-splashed streets.

“Folks who really weren’t talking to each other before . . . are going to be in one place, joining hands and taking a stand,” said Tony Massengale, a South-Central Los Angeles activist and an organizer of the rally. “I don’t think that’s ever really happened here before.”

The bulk of the crowd will come from the ranks of the four groups--UNO, SCOC, EVO and VOICE--that for years have pushed a progressive agenda rooted in empowerment of the poor.

Spelled out, they are the United Neighborhoods Organization, based in East Los Angeles; Southern California Organizing Committee, which covers South-Central Los Angeles; East Valleys Organization, which represents the San Gabriel and Pomona valleys, and Valley Organized In Community Efforts, the voice of the San Fernando Valley.

Their unique alliance claims a constituency of nearly 250,000 families throughout the county, the vast majority of whom are low-income minorities fed up with the deterioration of their neighborhoods.

But a mainstream media blitz has made it likely that some of the city’s more affluent enclaves also will be represented.

KABC Talkradio, a co-sponsor of the event, has spent considerable air time urging its listeners, many of whom are college-educated and middle-class, to attend. Vons grocery stores have printed information about the rally on more than 1 million plastic bags distributed at 75 stores across Los Angeles. Main Street Dairy, formerly Carnation, has done the same with at least 12 million milk cartons.

“At first, some people said this kind of thing isn’t our audience,” said Nelkane Benton, KABC-AM’s director of community relations. “I said, ‘Exactly.’ . . . It’s not about any one person or any one neighborhood. This is a call to action for the entire community.”

Whether the entire community heeds that call remains to be seen. Although organizers say the march is only the first step in a long-term effort to reclaim their neighborhoods, they concede that they have taken on an opponent much larger than themselves.

The gang population of Los Angeles County has exploded from about 25,000 members in 1980 to an estimated 80,000 today. Gang-related murders last year were up as well, from 452 homicides in 1988 to 554 in 1989.

Last month in Pomona, for instance, just a few hours before several hundred people gathered to launch the “Turn the Tide” campaign, a 7-year-old boy was fatally wounded by shotgun pellets sprayed into his living room from a passing car.

“We definitely feel some anxiety over dealing with a problem that nobody in this country has figured out how to deal with very successfully,” said Larry McNeil, regional director of the Industrial Areas Foundation, the umbrella organization encompassing UNO, SCOC, EVO and VOICE. “Most of the issues we’ve taken on in the past have had some chance of winning.”

In 1977, the predominantly Catholic and Latino UNO, the first of the organizations to form, began by crusading against unsanitary conditions in the supermarkets of East Los Angeles. Its leaders were schooled in the confrontation politics of Saul Alinsky, the late social reformer who gained fame by rallying Chicago’s Irish slums into a power bloc.

Since then, their gospel--that organized people beat organized money--has been borne out time and again. They and their sister groups have fought successful battles to help raise the state minimum wage, ban assault rifles, tow abandoned vehicles from city streets and secure more than $1 million in surplus Olympic money for youth sports programs.

In the process, they have commanded the attention of a wide range of public officials, including Mayor Tom Bradley and Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, both of whom will be among the participants in the Saturday rally. Demands, which have not yet been specified, will be made of them to commit more funds to the fight against crime.

“ ‘Turn the Tide’ . . . will provide an avenue for people to actively participate in solving this crisis,” Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.) said.

Perhaps the most ambitious goal of these grass-roots groups, however, is the current push to build an alliance with the missing link in their political map: the Westside.

Support from the city’s liberal elite could lend superpower status to the coalition, which traditionally has been rooted in the barrios and ghettos of Los Angeles, many activists say.

An alliance with the Westside would help empower people, “even those who consider themselves powerless,” said Sister Carmel Somers, lead organizer for VOICE, a coalition of churches and synagogues.

Crime, having left no part of the city untouched, probably has been the most potent issue transcending those boundaries. To drive home the point, several of the groups have rented buses and taken high-powered Westsiders on guided tours of inner-city neighborhoods most ravaged by drugs and gangs.

“They know how to push the right buttons,” said Stanley K. Sheinbaum, editor of New Perspectives Quarterly, who has hosted several meetings with the organizations at his Brentwood home. “They sure as hell are going to be a force.”

Added Geoff Cowan, chairman of the city’s Ethics Commission and a participant in those meetings: “It’s extremely important for the Westside to be connected to other parts of the city. It gives an opportunity to people who have wanted to do something but didn’t know what to do.”

The story of “Turn the Tide,” begins with a 32-year-old Van Nuys ad man named Rob Frankel who, until two years ago, didn’t care much about any of this. Then, on Jan. 30, 1988, his art director was struck down by gunfire as she strolled on a Westwood sidewalk.

“It took somebody being killed in Westwood to wake everyone up,” Frankel said. “I admit I wasn’t affected until then.”

The initial reaction to Toshima’s death was more divisive than unifying.

As police and politicians on the Westside rushed to catch the gang member suspected of the shooting, community leaders on the Eastside and Southside complained that carnage in their neighborhoods had seldom been accorded the same concern.

Frankel said he just needed to resolve something for himself, to “not let the score go unsettled.” He devised a slogan and an accompanying logo of an arrow curving skyward--both of which are trade-marked.

“You know, things are going downhill,” he said, “so let’s turn the tide, let’s turn them around and get them going up again.”

It was a concept without a constituency, though. So last year he turned to Community Youth Gang Services, the county’s gang-intervention agency.

Schuyler Sprowles, Reiner’s former press secretary and now a consultant with CYGS, first took the idea to KABC radio, “an across-the-board station that really reflected the middle class of Los Angeles,” he said. Then he called on UNO, SCOC, EVO and VOICE, “because we needed people, people who were really reflective of the issues.”

From that marriage, a movement was born.

“I think the Toshima murder signaled how deadly and costly this wave of violence is to everyone,” said Massengale, organizer of SCOC, a black and Latino group with ties to both Catholic and Protestant churches. “After all the sound and fury . . . that tragedy gave us the opportunity to really broaden and deepen connections.”

Those connections will get a chance to solidify Saturday when thousands are expected to gather near the Los Angeles Coliseum for a trek that will lead them east on Exposition Boulevard, south on Figueroa Street, west on Martin Luther King Boulevard and back up Menlo Avenue to Exposition.

The four groups guarantee attendance of more than 7,000 faithful from their ranks. They anticipate several thousand more, but how many actually show up is anybody’s guess.

One thing is sure. The rally will not be filled with platitudes. Many people will have come, say organizers, because violence has robbed them of something dear.

Ask Mary Jo Gruca, a staff member for the Industrial Areas Foundation and a former leader of the mostly Latino and Catholic EVO who has helped organize the event.

She will tell you that on Oct. 19, 1983, there were six murders in Los Angeles County. The one you’ll care about most will be the story of her brother, who was stabbed and burned to death by unknown assailants.

“I can still walk you through that night and tell you everything,” said Gruca, who had to identify the body. “What it looked like, what it smelled like, how it felt. That’s what’s real. If you can put that into words, that’s the motivation behind who we are.”