Police Describe Efforts to Ease Racial Tension : Violence: Officers tell business owners they have begun meeting regularly with Korean merchants and black residents in the wake of confrontations in South-Central Los Angeles.

Police in South-Central Los Angeles have begun meeting regularly with Korean merchants and black residents to try to ease tensions caused by a string of violent confrontations in South-Central stores, an officer told a gathering of merchants Monday.

“We are trying to keep everyone as comfortable as possible,” Officer Bill Driver of the Los Angeles Police Department’s 77th Street station told the 100 businessmen attending the conference. “We are trying to keep everyone working together.”

Mayor Tom Bradley, speaking at the Conference for Small Merchants in South-Central Los Angeles, held at the Museum of Science and Industry in Exposition Park, said concerns over racial disharmony in the troubled community “were not the motive or design” of the conference. But he conceded that the meeting was being conducted in the wake of “an increase in ethnic tensions” between merchants and residents and “escalating anxieties between the African-American and Korean-American communities.”

Two Koreans and three blacks have been slain during confrontations at Korean-owned stores in South-Central Los Angeles during the last six months. Two Koreans were wounded last week during a robbery in Lynwood by two black gunmen.

Black community leaders--among them Danny Bakewell, president of the Brotherhood Crusade--have called for a boycott of stores operated by Korean merchants suspected of mistreating black customers.

Kevin Eliason, a spokesman for the Southland Corp., which operates 7-Eleven stores throughout Southern California, said his company urges its employees to avoid trouble with customers by using common sense and avoiding direct confrontations.

Noting that several deaths have resulted when shopkeepers resorted to firearms, Eliason advised against their use.

“We firmly believe that guns breed violence,” he said. “One gun in a store is one gun too many. . . . This isn’t Dodge City in 1876, this is Los Angeles in 1991.”

A member of the audience, recalling that store clerks who offered no resistance have sometimes been shot by robbers, asked Driver what he would recommend.

“I’d own a weapon to defend myself,” Driver admitted. “But if I could avoid it, I wouldn’t use it.”

At Bradley’s urging, Police Cmdr. Ronald Brooks, a fellow panelist, quickly added that while “Officer Driver is entitled to his own opinion,” the department does not recommend that shopkeepers keep firearms in their establishments.

During a break outside the museum auditorium, Alex Oh said he and his father, Thomas Oh, who operate a sporting goods store in South-Central Los Angeles, were attending the symposium “to learn how to ease tension between the races, to make us more comfortable with our customers.”

But the Korean-born father added that to him, it was not primarily a question of one race coming into conflict with another. Instead, he said, “it’s us merchants versus the customers who are trying to rob us. . . .

“It’s not a problem of misunderstanding,” Thomas Oh said. “At first, when I came here, I didn’t understand them (the black customers who account for about 70% of his business.) “But we’ve been doing business there now for 11 years, and now I have learned to understand them.”