NEWS ANALYSIS : Has Police Beating of King Taken the Luster Off L.A.? : City: Videotaped brutality raises questions of how far ‘the new Ellis Island’ has come from racism of the past.

Like Selma, Ala., during the civil rights movement of the 1960s or Boston during the school busing crisis a decade later, Los Angeles finds itself in the aftermath of the Rodney G. King beating the principal player in a national morality play.

The specter of institutional racism has been raised in a city that prides itself in its ethnic diversity. People from all over the world are asking whether the nation’s new melting pot has become a caldron of racial hostility. As official efforts to resolve the crisis seemingly go nowhere, concerns are being voiced about whether the city’s century-old form of government is up to solving the problems of a modern multicultural society.

Ironically, the crisis comes at a heady time in the city’s history and challenges the city’s modern sense of itself as the “Capital of the Pacific Rim” or “the new Ellis Island.”

“Los Angeles is enacting the drama of the ‘90s,” said author Kevin Starr, who is writing a multivolume history of Southern California. “People are looking at L. A. and asking if local government, if traditional institutions can handle the pressure--the crime and poverty, the cultural and environmental tensions--that accompany the kind of social change Southern California is experiencing.”

The images of white Los Angeles police officers beating a black motorist raises a vexing question. Is Los Angeles really all that changed? Or did George Holliday’s now infamous home movie capture the ghosts of the Zoot-Suit riots, the Sleepy Lagoon frame-up and other horrors from a racially troubled past the city would prefer to forget?

There have been videotaped police beatings in at least a half-dozen other cities. But none caught the eye of the world like the King incident.

“People tend to look to Los Angeles,” said the black mayor of another city who asked to remain anonymous. “L. A., or Southern California, has always been seen as the laboratory for the nation, as the the place where ideas and trends are tried out first.

“So, if you have an experiment go awry, it’s bound to make a big impression.”

Los Angeles City Councilman Robert Farrell, who is black, said the King videotape stood out in the minds of people because it represented something frighteningly American.

“It fit an American stereotype, a legacy of slavery--a gang of white men brutalizing a helpless black,” Farrell said.

Halford Fairchild, a black psychologist practicing in Los Angeles, agreed. “What was unmasked by this incident was the dark side of America.”

For Los Angeles, the fallout from the King beating is acutely embarrassing because the city has worked so hard in recent years to promote itself as a haven for people of all colors and creeds.

“The incident is painful because it forces us to look at the difference between what we are as a society and what we would like to be,” said Richard Weinstein, dean of UCLA’s School of Architecture and Urban Affairs.

Added Sharp James, the mayor of Newark, N. J.: “I think it has hurt Los Angeles because it contradicts the city’s image of a melting pot. You think of Los Angeles as this advanced, open society and all of a sudden it’s behaving like some Southern backwater.

“I saw people watching that videotape who cried. You can’t have a reaction like that without changing your view of the city.”

People were shocked to see it happen in Los Angeles because “they have such a benign view of the city,” said Xavier Hermosillo, a public relations firm executive and the founder of a Mexican-American business association.

“I heard people asking: ‘How could it happen in L. A.? It’s such a laid-back place, not violent like New York.’ ”

Protests have poured in from everywhere--the mayor’s office received phone calls from as far away as Hong Kong, Japan and Australia. One East Coast mayor compared Los Angeles to Montgomery and Birmingham in the days of civil rights violence in the South. In Seattle, a city councilwoman concerned about police brutality proclaimed “we are committed to seeing to it that Seattle does not become another Los Angeles.”

“I’m not sure I can remember a local issue that has provoked so much discussion from so many quarters,” said talk show host Michael Jackson, whose Los Angeles-based program has been on KABC radio for 23 years.

In fact, Los Angeles has not received so much attention since the 1984 Olympics, heralded then as the dawn of the city’s golden age.

In opinion polls and on talk shows such as Jackson’s, people are asking hard questions about “the system.” Is the Police Department racist? Should the mayor of Los Angeles be granted the authority to fire the chief and other city department heads--a prerogative enjoyed by most mayors? Can a City Charter drawn by a group of wealthy, white, middle-class businessmen nearly a century ago be responsive to a modern society where minorities are in the majority?

Some critics suggest the beating revealed a character flaw in the city.

“An incident like this exposes a darker side of the city which I think many people experience in Los Angeles,” said Larry Josephson, a commentator on National Public Radio who broadcasts part of the year from Los Angeles and part from New York. “Underneath the city’s have-a-nice-day facade, there is a meanness or a coldness. It’s just not as friendly as it seems.”

Others see the beating as evidence that the city still has enmity against nonwhites. The officers who stood by while comrades worked over King have been likened to the policemen who did not nothing to stop a mob of several thousand Anglo servicemen from clubbing scores of young Mexican-Americans in an infamous rampage, known as the Zoot-Suit Riots, in downtown Los Angeles 50 years ago. The riots followed another ugly episode--”The Sleepy Lagoon” murder case in which anti-Mexican feeling led to the wrongful convictions of 17 Mexican-Americans on a variety of charges. They were later exonerated.

One person who saw connections between the King beating and Los Angeles of old is Robert Towne, who wrote the screenplay for the movie “Chinatown”--a blend of history and fiction that paints a hauntingly sinister view of the city’s early power structure.

Towne said the beating reminded him of events that preceded the 1965 Watts riot.

“It’s not like anything in this city since Watts, where the Police Department failed to see what they were dealing with was not a bunch of hoodlums but a social revolution,” Towne said.

The screenwriter stressed he was not predicting that the King beating would lead to another riot, but just noting that “the same fundamental insensitivity we hoped was dead and buried has raised its ugly head once again.”

When cities become victims of their own bad publicity, the results can be devastating. Officials in Phoenix estimate the city is losing more than $140 million from boycotts by groups protesting Arizona’s refusal to adopt a holiday in honor of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Boston and Philadelphia lost substantial convention business, according to surveys, after the cities became known as hotbeds of police-community hostility during the 1970s.

In Dallas, it took 20 years, a popular TV show and a national political convention to erase the image of the town that killed President John F. Kennedy. With the 1963 assassination, the city’s reputation for social intolerance was etched deeply on the national consciousness. For years, conspiracy theorists chewed on the notion that the President’s assassin was the agent of right-wing Dallas billionaires.

A city that falters in front of the whole world may have to spend years proving it is not a loser.

In Los Angeles, the process is off to a slow start.

The debate over Police Chief Daryl F. Gates has deteriorated into a paralyzing struggle between the mayor and City Council, and doubts about the Police Department have mushroomed into skepticism about local government in general.

“The whole issue of who is in charge and how do we govern a city of this complexity is now on the table,” said Jane Pisano, president of the 2,000 Partnership, a coalition of academic, civic and business leaders.

As Towne put it, there is a disturbing “appearance of a moral vacuum at the top of city government. It lets you know that this city is not working as well as it once did.”

This line of discussion inevitably leads back to the City Charter--a document drawn up in the early 1900s by reform-minded Anglo entrepreneurs who wanted an antidote to the widespread governmental corruption of the day. The charter brought about a Civil Service system that was meant to ensure basic city services were run by professionals beyond the reach of political hacks.

Today, that mechanism is under attack because, critics argue, it protects Gates from being held accountable for his occasional racially tinged comments. Minority leaders in particular have argued that such comments encourage racism in the Police Department.

“The (governmental) system wound up causing more problems than it solved,” said UCLA’s Weinstein.

Weinstein said the insulation of high-ranking public officials from political accountability can be blamed in part for a variety of Los Angeles problems related to public safety, planning, transportation and the environment.

“The system fails to provide where the buck stops,” he said. “And when the public can’t focus the blame where it belongs, they are inclined to throw everybody out of office.”

Not everyone would junk the system. Starr, the writer, and others contend that it would be a serious mistake to scuttle something that has gotten the city this far.

“Los Angeles is the most complex city in the country,” Starr said. “It requires the skills of expertly trained professional managers, and you can’t get those people to work for a highly politicized city.”

He noted that Civil Service protection, by requiring a quasi-judicial review before someone can be fired, provides a degree of fairness that might be sorely missed if the system is revamped.

Starr asked: “Who is to say the next department head (under fire) isn’t a black or a Hispanic or an Asian? How will we protect that person’s rights?”

There are also those people who do not believe the King beating put the city’s soul in peril. Among those people are several black mayors who visited Los Angeles last week.

“I think people separate the incident from their overall view of the city,” said Mayor W. Wilson Goode of Philadelphia. “I don’t think the city need suffer that much over it.”

Not so sanguine is Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley.

“Clearly, our city’s reputation is on the line,” said Bradley late last week, as he prepared for a trip to Taiwan, Korean and Japan. His aides said the mayor’s hosts have made clear they want some explanations about the entire King episode.