THE KING CASE AFTERMATH : COUNTY REPORT. The Racism Issue : Suddenly County Wears a ‘Racist’ Brand : Reaction: Critics’ often-repeated charges have taken on the aura of truth, but local leaders defend their community.

With devastating suddenness, the Rodney G. King verdicts have put both Ventura County and Simi Valley on the map. In the view of critics nationwide, the county has shown itself to be a rural bastion of racism so insidious that it could block out the truth.

“I’ve won a thousand dollars in bets because I predicted this,” outspoken Los Angeles defense lawyer Stephen Yagman said after the not-guilty verdicts. “Who in the world would expect a bunch of Ku Klux Klanners in Simi Valley to find police guilty who had beaten up an African-American?”

Such comments have been repeated so often since a Ventura County jury in Simi Valley cleared four white Los Angeles policemen in the King beating that they have taken on the aura of truth.

Even state Sen. Ed Davis (R-Santa Clarita), a former Los Angeles police chief who has represented parts of Ventura County for years, suggested that it could have been a mistake to put a black prosecutor in front of a predominantly white Ventura County jury.

Local officials, though expressing surprise at the King verdicts, have jumped to defend Ventura County’s reputation, insisting that the county is no more racist than the nation as a whole and that it represents the best of America: strong families, proportionally high home ownership, low crime, respect for law and order, civic involvement and, to a large degree, racial harmony.

“This is a very emotional issue,” Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) said Friday from his hometown. “It gets very personal.”

Gallegly, a former Simi Valley mayor, sat next to civil rights leader Jesse Jackson on an airplane to Los Angeles Thursday evening, and the congressman said he tried to convince Jackson that he was wrong about Simi Valley and Ventura County.

“I told him that we have a great deal of pride on how we’re viewed from outside,” Gallegly said. “I told him that I very much resented the statements from individuals, many of whom had never even been in Simi Valley . . . and that a lot of inaccurate finger-pointing is going on.”

Assemblywoman Cathie Wright (R-Simi Valley) demanded an apology from Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco), a political ally for years, for comparing racial injustice in Simi Valley to that in Mississippi.

As for Ventura County juries, a number of local prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges have maintained that the panels have been scrupulously fair in cases with racial overtones.

“I’m proud to be a jurist of this county,” Superior Court Presiding Judge Steven Z. Perren said. “And I have no hesitation about the fairness of the people who are citizens of this county.”

Yet, the King verdicts have prompted reflection even among those who have made it a practice to defend the system here. Many say the verdicts show that it is time to heighten the county’s sensitivity to racial issues.

Assistant Sheriff Richard Bryce, whose department was shaken last year by 11 black deputies’ claims of harassment and institutional bias, said this county may be racially insensitive to blacks in particular.

“There is not the degree of sensitivity or experience with black issues that there might be in other counties like Los Angeles,” he said.

And Oxnard Police Chief Robert Owens, who is white, said he has felt the barbs of racism against his city since he arrived in 1970.

“Ventura County has not come out of the closet on the race issue,” Owens said. “We’ve not openly discussed race at all. There is a feeling, almost a hostility, among most other Ventura County cities that Oxnard has some built-in flaws because of its racial and ethnic makeup.”

By and large, racism is subtle here and not as bad as it was 35 years ago when “No Negros or Dogs Allowed” signs could be found in some businesses, black leaders said.

Still, it has only been 20 years since a county cultural heritage group considered allowing the site of a black man’s turn-of-the-century lynching to be identified as “Nigger Canyon,” said Fred Jones, former president of the NAACP Ventura County chapter.

And there has been a resurgence in racial incidents as Ventura County--still 66% white--has adjusted to being more racially mixed, minority leaders said. The fast-growing Latino and Asian communities now make up 26% and 5% of the county’s population, respectively. The black proportion has held steady at about 2%.

“The Rodney King verdicts have verified the fact that we have a lot of work to do in addressing the issue of police abuse and racism here at home,” said Marcos Vargas, executive director of El Concilio, a Latino social service organization.

“Oftentimes we become complacent because the racism here appears to be isolated and less overt,” Vargas said. “But we’re seeing it as a very real part of the daily life of children at school, people in the workplace and in the government policies.”

Indeed, in recent years Ventura County has been marked by a spate of racial incidents and controversies that have divided communities.

* Last week, a Latino activist in Camarillo filed seven complaints against the Sheriff’s Department, detailing incidents she says show a pattern of police harassment and brutality against Latino youths. The department said at least some of the charges have no foundation.

* Last month, a parents group in Moorpark petitioned the school board to stop forced busing to achieve integration in schools. “Many people have moved to Moorpark to get away from mandatory busing,” one parent said.

* In February, a Westlake fifth-grader dressed like Adolf Hitler, wore a swastika armband, and was awarded second place in an oratory contest after giving a speech sympathetic to the German leader and never mentioning the Holocaust. Jewish leaders protested and the school apologized.

* In October, Gallegly proposed a constitutional amendment that would deny citizenship to children born in this country to illegal immigrants. He said the change would save billions of dollars in public assistance and stop rewarding those who break the law. But Latino activists accused him of pandering to the worst instincts of his conservative white constituents. “Racial polarization is good politics,” said one.

* Last fall, 150 Ventura High School students signed a petition to start a White Student Union after a Black Student Union was formed at the school. One student said he admired Hitler because he “stood up for the Aryan race.” A week earlier the president of the Black Student Union was slugged as he left school by a man who yelled a racial slur.

* Last fall, police officers in Port Hueneme and Oxnard pleaded guilty to criminally assaulting Latinos while on duty in two separate incidents.

* Over the last two years, Latinos have filed numerous brutality claims and lawsuits against the Oxnard Police Department. In at least five cases, the district attorney, citing lack of evidence, declined to file resisting-arrest charges sought by police.

* Since 1989, at least four Jewish temples in Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks and Ventura have been repeatedly vandalized and marked by anti-Semitic graffiti. A Jewish memorabilia store in Ventura was also damaged. In some cases, authorities attributed the crimes to white-supremacist youths.

* In 10 hate crimes in 1988 and 1989, so-called skinheads allegedly beat a teen-age girl with a baseball bat, stabbed two people, were responsible for a fire-bombing and cross-burning and ransacked the Simi Valley home of a black teacher. “It’s a growing problem. They’re throughout the county,” Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury said.

* In 1988, a former Fillmore High School principal refused requests of Latino students to have a valedictory speech translated into Spanish, a policy since changed. In 1986, Fillmore was the only California city to endorse a statewide proposition supporting English as the state’s official language.

Many local blacks and Latinos say they do not need such a list to tell them that they are not altogether welcome in Ventura County.

John Hatcher, president of the county chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, was reminded of that in late 1990, when “We Is Apes” was sprayed in 2-foot-high letters on the garage of his Oxnard home.

Hatcher predicted when the beating trial was moved to Simi Valley in November that the four accused officers would be found not guilty. He said last week that the county’s political conservatism has bred racism among some residents.

After the Los Angeles riots began, Hatcher said, he got an anonymous phone call that parodied references to blacks on Los Angeles police radio transmissions after the King beating.

“You should be proud of yourself, gorillas in the mist, but if the niggers do here what they do in L.A. County, we’re going to hang you,” he quoted the caller as saying.

“That’s surface stuff,” Hatcher said Friday. “The stuff that’s not talked about is in the form of institutional racism. You start looking at the major department stores, you start looking at construction, at building, unemployment. Then start looking at . . . the sentences you get, and you start thinking something’s wrong here.”

Jorge Garcia, a political scientist who is dean of humanities at Cal State Northridge, said subtle racism has been a fact of life since his family moved to Simi Valley in 1975.

“We definitely have some problems with attitude here,” he said. “I get in trouble because I say residents here are the sons and daughters of Iowa, who have moved here and want to find Iowa on the beach.”

Garcia said he has encountered Latino stereotypes and biases at his children’s schools and soccer games. More than once, while talking with his children in Spanish at a neighborhood supermarket, Garcia has been interrupted by white customers who cautioned him to also teach his children English, he said.

When his son was in junior high school, the vice principal began a conversation with the boy by asking him if his father could speak English and if he had a job that would not allow him to come to the phone, Garcia said.

“Well, dammit, I have a Ph.D. I’m a university professor and a dean. That information was in a file in front of him, but he didn’t bother to check.

“It’s insensitivity. It’s ignorance. There is a lack of appreciation of others who are different.”

Minority leaders also note that while fast-growing Ventura County has become more racially mixed, its cities are no more integrated and government power still is out of reach for most minorities.

In fact, a Times study of 1990 census data found that Ventura County is still largely made up of highly segregated neighborhoods and that more whites live in predominantly white enclaves today than a decade ago.

About 57% of white residents now live in communities where at least four of five residents are white, compared to 53% in 1980. And four of the county’s five largest cities--Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley, Ventura and Camarillo--remain at least 77% white.

Conversely, the white population in fast-growing Oxnard, Santa Paula and Fillmore did not increase over the last decade. All three cities, traditional ports of entry for poor immigrant laborers, now have Latino majorities after tens of thousands of farm workers flocked there during the 1980s.

Though the number of white residents increased by 57,500 countywide during the 1980s, 83% moved to the predominantly white commuter cities and planned communities of the eastern county. Thousands were refugees from the urban ills of the Los Angeles Basin.

Stubborn racial segregation is principally the result of the inability of most minorities to afford housing in most areas of the county, but it also reflects substantial white flight out of Oxnard, Santa Paula and the San Fernando Valley, social scientists said.

The separation can be seen even in cities that are mostly Latino. For example, minorities make up as much as 99% of the population in parts of Oxnard, but that city’s beach communities are nearly 90% white. Similar segregation can be found in Santa Paula and Fillmore.

Ventura County Community College Chancellor Thomas Lakin, an African-American who was hired over several other contenders, said he has not experienced overt racism since he moved here from Los Angeles last year. But he said he has felt racial tension in visits to Simi Valley, Santa Paula and Fillmore.

“I’ve visited Fillmore four or five times, and you can see it in the housing patterns and you can just feel it,” Lakin said. “Do any black people live in Fillmore?”

Twenty-five blacks lived in Fillmore in 1990, 20 in Ojai and 78 in Santa Paula. About 1,500 lived in Simi Valley. More than half of the county’s 14,559 blacks lived in Oxnard.

Though one-third of Ventura County’s 669,000 residents are minority members, Latino and black leaders say they have made few inroads into the corridors of local power.

A Times survey last year found that Latinos held only 11.8% of city council and school board positions countywide but made up 26.5% of the county’s population. Just three of 52 council members and 14 of 92 school board members were Latino. No minority has sat on the county Board of Supervisors in this century.

Latino activists have fought to change the system by which city councils and school boards are elected. They say that current citywide, or at-large, races dilute Latino voting strength.

“The key question now is, will the change in numbers mean a change in power--political power, power for parents to have a say about the education of their children or about services Latino families will get from the county?” said Carmen Ramirez, a lawyer for low-income people in Oxnard.

A 1991 Times survey also found that despite a decade of affirmative-action hiring, white men still held a disproportionate share of local government jobs in Ventura County. They held at least two-thirds of all administrative posts in all but one city government, Oxnard’s, and in the county government.

Only in Camarillo did the overall percentage of minority workers exceed the percentage of minority residents of the city. Countywide, inequities were particularly glaring not only at top administrative levels but in jobs such as engineering and police and fire protection.

Officials in Fillmore, Ojai, Moorpark and Port Hueneme all said they did not specifically recruit minorities and gave no hiring preference to such candidates.

Indeed, that rejection of preferential hiring reflects a nationwide debate about whether affirmative action programs unfairly penalize whites, especially white men. President Bush initially rejected a civil rights bill last year because he saw job quotas in it.

The hiring and promotion of blacks has become a particularly sensitive issue in Ventura County government, where a black clerk, a black jailer and 11 black deputies have filed complaints about lack of opportunity.

The March, 1991, claims by 11 of 15 black sheriff’s deputies accused the Sheriff’s Department of discrimination in hiring, promotions, performance evaluations, salary and other personnel matters. The department is 86% white.

The deputies also complained of alleged racism and sexism by 65 fellow officers, ranging from derogatory jokes to a death threat. The deputies said the department failed to adequately investigate such incidents or discipline the officers involved, and that officers sometimes retaliated against the whistle-blowers.

In one case, the department later acknowledged its deputies had made racial remarks on two occasions, and that one deputy sold a knife with the Ku Klux Klan insignia to another deputy. Officers were disciplined in those cases.

One black deputy--Kim Garrett--was promoted on the day the claims were filed, after he said he had been bypassed for promotion 24 times.

Sheriff John V. Gillespie organized a minority relations committee--with a Filipino lieutenant as its head--to investigate the black deputies’ charges.

At the peak of the controversy, the department placed Sgt. Kenton Rainey, a leading critic, on temporary paid leave, contending that he was under too much stress to work. Last week, the sheriff announced that Rainey, now back at work, has been appointed to the California Council on Criminal Justice, the primary advisory body to the governor and Legislature on criminal justice issues.

Richard Wittenberg, the county chief administrator, said the county is trying to recruit and promote minorities, but it takes time for minority members to reach management positions.

Nor does Wittenberg, whose Ventura temple has been vandalized and who was the first Jewish county administrator in California, think that it is fair to generalize about Ventura County.

“I think individually we all have to be more sensitive about race,” he said. “I don’t think you can make a judgment about an entire county.”

Times staff writer Mack Reed contributed to this story.

VIEWPOINT: Reporter Sherry Joe sees goodwill. B6

County Population Growth

Year Anglo Hispanic Black Asian Am.Ind. Total Pop. 1970 *75.0 19.6 1.7 n/a n/a 376,430 1980 72.4 21.4 2.1 3.0 0.9 529,174 1990 65.9 26.5 2.2 4.9 0.5 669,016

* Anglo percentage is an estimate, because precise data on Asians and American Indians for 1970 is not available.

Rate Your Racial Tolerance

USC sociologist Emory Bogardus devised this test in 1926 to measure Americans’ attitudes toward other ethnic and racial groups. Today, sociologists still use it as a litmus test for interracial attitudes.

Ask yourself whether you would agree to each of the seven following situations. Use the number of NO responses to find your level of tolerance for racial and ethnic diversity. The lower your number, the more willing you are to accept people of other racial and ethnic groups:

1. To close kinship by marriage.

2. To my club as personal chums.

3. To my street as neighbors.

4. To employment in my occupation.

5. To citizenship in my country.

6. As visitors to my country.

7. Would not exclude from my country.

About the test: Emory Bogardus and his associates conducted this survey five times, getting responses from about 44,000 undergraduate and graduate students ages 18 to 35, about 10% of them black. To the left are the respondents’ average levels on the seven-point scale for each year the survey was given, showing their acceptance of black Americans, which has increased over the years.

Year Average 1926: 3.28 1946: 3.60 1956: 2.74 1966: 2.56 1977: 2.03

Racial Profiles

Chart compares the percentages for each race in 1980 and 1990.

City Year Anglo Hispanic Black Asian Am. Ind. Total pop. Camarillo 1980 84.0 10.1 1.1 3.7 0.8 37,797 1990 80.0 12.0 1.5 6.1 0.5 52,303 Fillmore 1980 51.5 47.9 0.1 0.6 0.8 9,602 1990 39.0 59.0 0.1 0.7 0.5 11,992 Moorpark 1980 62.8 33.7 n/a n/a n/a 7,798 1990 70.0 22.0 1.4 6.4 0.4 25,494 Ojai 1980 89.8 8.0 0.1 0.9 0.9 6,816 1990 85.0 12.0 0.2 1.5 0.6 7,613 Oxnard 1980 42.9 44.4 6.1 6.1 0.9 108,195 1990 32.0 54.0 4.8 7.9 0.4 142,216 Port Hueneme 1980 66.2 22.7 4.5 5.3 1.5 17,803 1990 58.0 30.0 5.1 6.3 0.7 20,319 Santa Paula 1980 47.1 50.5 0.1 0.8 0.8 20,552 1990 39.0 59.0 0.3 0.9 0.5 25,062 Simi Valley 1980 86.6 9.3 1.1 2.2 0.8 77,500 1990 80.0 13.0 1.5 5.3 0.5 100,217 Thousand Oaks 1980 90.3 5.8 0.8 2.6 0.5 77,072 1990 84.0 10.0 1.2 4.7 0.3 104,352 Ventura 1980 82.8 12.1 1.1 1.5 1.3 74,393 1990 77.0 18.0 1.6 2.6 0.8 92,575 COUNTYWIDE 1980 72.4 21.4 2.1 3.0 0.9 529,174 1990 65.9 26.5 2.2 4.9 0.5 669,016