Understanding the Riots Part 4 : Seeing Ourselves : MIAMI : ‘L.A.’s image has been crushed.’

Los Angeles and Miami are often thought of as twins--fraternal twins, perhaps, where differing physical characteristics are merely a thin veil over identical souls.

The two cities always have had a lot in common. The sunshine, the palm trees and the beaches long have been magnets for dreamers, either on a week’s vacation or a lifetime quest, and both became the capitals of unthemed Disneylands even before Walt. Each is a city of immigrants.

Now the cities are linked in another way, as blood brothers, splattered by racism and riots.

During the 1980s, when Miami was convulsed by three major uprisings, this city also struggled with refugees and a hectic drug trade that once led warring cocaine cowboys to stage a midafternoon shoot-out in the parking lot of one of the city’s most upscale shopping centers. Finally, Hollywood pulled it all together in “Miami Vice.”

Los Angeles--or maybe all of Southern California--is now in a similar fix. The Hollywood icon, spelled out most clearly in the giant hillside letters, has collapsed in an earthquake of violence. Tinseltown has gone the way of Atlantis.

The city’s problems remain. But already Los Angeles has a new image--on an 81-second videotape of a man named Rodney G. King being pummeled over and over again by a gang of officers from the Los Angeles Police Department who were found to be not guilty of committing a crime.

For many blacks, that videotape may run forever.

“It ranks with (Birmingham, Ala., Police Chief) Bull Connor and the fire hoses, or Emmett Till (beaten and killed by a mob in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman),” said H. T. Smith, a Miami lawyer and activist in black affairs. “We used to see the glitz, Hollywood, people doing good and getting along. Now we see hate, brutality, racism, blatant, unrepentant injustice. For my lifetime, the Rodney King beating will be an important part of history. L.A.’s image has been crushed.”

The Miami Herald ran an article the other day discussing reaction to the riot. (The headline: “S. Florida experts: L.A. police bungled handling of uprising”). In the story, a former Miami police chief recalled that after the 1980 riot here, in which 18 people were killed, several LAPD officials visited to see how local cops performed. “They were highly critical and said that would never happen in L.A.,” Bobby Jones, the former Metro-Dade police chief, told the Herald.

Smith said: “Americans have always needed a vivid mental image of objective injustice before they would take action to change the status quo. Maybe this is it.”

In her book “Miami,” Joan Didion wrote of this city: “The feel was that of a Latin capital, a year or two away from a new government.” The image Didion seemed to suggest was instability, transitoriness, volatility.

To many observers here, that now sounds more like L.A. than Miami. “Before, L.A. was La-la Land, Hollywood,” said Elaine Silverstein, a partner in a large Miami advertising agency and frequent visitor to Los Angeles. “Now it’s seen as a city in turmoil, dangerous, not a safe place to go, and that’s very frightening.”

If handed the L.A. account, Silverstein said, “I would start by telling the truth. Tell what’s being done to secure the city, and then solve the problems.

“But clearly,” she added, “it’s not a quick fix.”