South-Central L.A. Becomes a Laboratory for Researchers : Aftermath: Educators, artists and conferences worldwide focus on the causes and effects of the days of civil unrest.

Picking through the ashes left behind by the Los Angeles riots, researchers from an array of academic disciplines have turned South-Central Los Angeles into a giant laboratory where everyday life is now the subject of research projects, symposiums and scholarly discourse.

Are the residents in riot-damaged areas still suffering from stress? How do customers and merchants interact at the corner liquor store? What should the civil unrest properly be called? The questions being asked vary with researchers’ areas of expertise--art, film, psychology, epidemiology, urban planning and more.

“There has been a steady stream of researchers from all over the world who have come to Los Angeles since the riots,” said Leo Estrada, a UCLA demographer who is on the Rebuild LA board of directors and engaged in riot-related research. “You really can’t travel around the country without hearing academics referring to what happened.”

Even before the civil unrest, Los Angeles’ trend-setting nature and multiethnic population made it a popular focal point for scholarly inquiry. But some academics say the pace has quickened since the city’s core erupted in flames April 29.

Now, riot-related courses are offered at local universities, professors are scrambling for riot-related research grants, and graduate students are reworking their dissertations to add riot themes. In addition, professional organizations in such disciplines as film studies, political science and urban planning have put a riot spin on their annual conventions this year.

“The riots have energized scholarship on the inner city,” said Michael Brintnall, director of professional affairs for the American Political Science Assn., which held a special program on the riots at its convention in Chicago last week. “Scholars who were working in this area are now focusing much more intensely and others have begun looking there too.”

Researchers who were working in South-Central before it became so hot are now sought after for panel discussions, consultations and articles. Some grumble about colleagues who they say have just discovered the inner city.

“There’s a lot of jumping on the bandwagon,” said James Johnson, who heads UCLA’s Center for the Study of Urban Poverty. “People who didn’t know where South-Central was want to look at the community now. Some of it may be good, but some of it isn’t going to be worth reading.”

Residents who all of a sudden find themselves under the microscope react differently. While some resent the intrusion or question the researchers’ motives, many others relish academia’s focus on their lives.

Zita Lopez, 41, a Mexican immigrant, opened her South-Central Los Angeles home to a film crew from USC’s School of Cinema-Television and became part of a documentary on post-riot Los Angeles. The interviews were agonizing, she said, but she persisted so others might know the struggles of her life.

“I got very nervous and I was scared,” she said. “They were asking me about my life and my family. I don’t like to talk about myself usually, but I thought it might help things. I’m a single mother and I have two sons. It’s been hard.”

There are signs that the attention may be around for a while. Several national funding agencies report that research money applied for in the last few months probably will not be doled out until 1993, when the studies will begin in earnest.

Jeff Lustig, director of the Center for California Studies at Cal State Sacramento, has begun organizing an academic conference on riot-related research. It will be held next spring, on the one-year anniversary of the riots.

The devastation in some neighborhoods produced what some researchers consider ideal experimental conditions.

Dr. Richard Scribner, a USC epidemiologist, has just completed a study showing a statistical connection between the concentration of liquor outlets in certain neighborhoods and alcohol-related arrests. Now, with many of the stores burned down in South-Central, he has an opportunity to test his hypothesis further.

“This is a wonderful opportunity,” said Scribner, who works in the Institute for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Research. “It’s a natural experiment. Now we have subjects and we have dramatically reduced the density of the outlets. We never could have created that.”

David Boje, an organizational behavior professor at Loyola, had been studying the empowerment of public housing project residents at Nickerson Gardens in Watts. Since the riots, the sprawling development has become a focal point of concern for the Bush Administration and Boje predicts that his findings will be much more in demand.

The rioting has also pushed entire universities to action.

At USC, which sits amid riot-damaged neighborhoods, administrators had been talking about setting up an ethnic studies center for two years. After the riots hit, the project was put on the fast track.

Two months after the verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating case, the Center for Multiethnic and Transnational Studies was born.

“I don’t think there’s any question that the riots have had an impact on all of us,” said USC Vice President Alvin S. Rudisill, the center’s interim director. “The administration was going to put the center off for a year because of financial constraints, but then the riots hit and we saw that this was a historic moment, a time to galvanize our focus on ethnic studies.”

The civil unrest is finding its way into many classroom lesson plans.

The videotape of the King beating will be shown during class time in a course at UC Irvine on social disobedience. UCLA Extension is offering a series of evening seminars called “Agenda for Justice in a Multicultural City.”

Students who enroll in UCLA’s new “Asian-American Communities and Urban Unrest” course will tour several riot-torn neighborhoods, meet with community leaders and prepare rebuilding solutions for their final projects.

Outside the classroom, UCLA researchers have spent the summer documenting the riot-damaged buildings surrounding Florence and Normandie avenues. They have put together a three-dimensional computer image of an 80-block area surrounding the riot flash point that will be used to show the community how proposed rebuilding efforts will look. A similar model is planned for the Pico-Union area.

Some projects stray far from traditional urban affairs. Experts in film studies analyzed the King beating videotape at their convention in May and decided that members of the jury in Simi Valley were probably numbed to the severity of what occurred because of the repeated showings in court.

Another professor stumbled upon his riot-related project.

Michael Brodsky, an art professor at Loyola Marymount University, was preparing a montage of still photographs based on television images just before the not guilty verdicts were handed down. When he began work, all he could find on television were flames.

“I didn’t set out to do a riot piece but I was pulling images from TV and all I had were the riots,” he said. “The riots became the focus of the media so it became the focus of my work. I was stuck in the house and my neighborhood was on fire. What else could I do?”

His creation, 48 abstract panels showing images of the city’s eruption, was shown last week at an international art exhibit in Holland.

Most local projects under way are designed to help the rebuilding effort, and experts say the community will benefit from the scholarly attention.

Psychiatrists at USC are developing a training model to help teachers handle post-traumatic stress disorder among their students. And the Historical Society of Southern California is compiling a list of books and movies on multiculturalism for high school teachers. The Haynes Foundation, a local group that funded the $7,500 project, thought that such a resource would be needed when classes resume this fall.

A group of UCLA professors is preparing a position paper summarizing research on the causes underlying the riots. The research will focus on how jobs, education, housing and community issues combine to create patterns of socioeconomic success or failure.

“A very specific objective of our work will be to bring informed discussion to bear on the deliberations of the Rebuild LA committee,” said Allen Scott, director of the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies and one of the principal investigators.

Analysts at RAND in Santa Monica are busy on a similar effort, compiling a book of essays on urban issues for publication in the fall.

“We looked inward after the events to determine what it is we have to say about what happened,” said project director Jim Steinberg. “One aspect of this whole project is that we are participants in a community here and we wanted to feel like we were contributing to solving this local problem.”

Such sentiments are common among researchers, who are studying phenomena not too far from their homes or offices.

Outsiders, however, seem most concerned with preventing such occurrences from erupting in their towns.

“What I sense is that people don’t want what happened here to happen there, wherever they are,” said UCLA’s Estrada, who spoke with researchers from Japan, France and several American cities last week. “They ask: ‘How did people get so frustrated?’ They’re concerned that the conditions might be replicable. The more similarities they see the more it scares them.”