City Has Changed, but Not Roots of Unrest, Study Finds

Researchers studying Los Angeles’ spring unrest increasingly are drawing parallels to the 1965 Watts riots and other unrest of that era, despite the city’s vastly changed demographic mix.

Such issues as the isolation of inner-city residents, economic disparities, perceptions of political powerlessness and unequal treatment in the criminal justice system link those who engaged in looting or other violence three decades apart, the analysts believe.

While the April 29 verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating trial may have ignited the riots, they say, the tinder was many decades in the making.

“There were lots of people who were dissatisfied with what they considered a miscarriage of justice,” said Cynthia Hamilton, a professor of Pan African studies at Cal State Los Angeles. “But when you look at the intensity of the response, both in and outside of Los Angeles, then we’re talking about deep-seated ills that haven’t been addressed.”

Such views are buttressed by the findings of a state legislative committee which--in a report released Friday--concludes that the conditions that spawned the spring unrest were virtually the same as those that led to widespread urban disturbances in the 1960s.

The Assembly Special Committee on the Los Angeles Crisis,chaired by Assemblyman Curtis Tucker Jr. (D-Inglewood), found striking similarities in its own investigations and those of the McCone and Kerner commissions, appointed to probe the causes of unrest in the 1960s.

“Witnesses before the committee cited virtually every one of the 12 grievances set forth by the Kerner Commission--from poor recreational opportunities to discriminatory administration of justice--as a problem in Los Angeles today,” the report states.

There has been no lack of pop theories purporting to explain why violence erupted after a Ventura County jury failed to convict four police officers in the beating of motorist Rodney G. King. Explanations range from outrage at the verdict to opportunistic hooliganism.

But academics are only now beginning to conduct extensive riot-related research that attempts to answer the question conclusively.

Edward Ransford, a USC sociology professor, said Friday that he agrees with the Assembly panel’s ultimate conclusion that similarities between the 1965 and 1992 riots in Los Angeles outweigh the differences.

As a young graduate student at UCLA, Ransford produced a dissertation that profiled those black Watts residents who indicated that they supported the 1965 violence. He subsequently acted as a consultant to the McCone Commission, appointed by then-Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown to examine the causes of the Watts riots.

“What it boils down to is a profound alienation then and now,” he said. “feelings of being locked out, feelings of anger at being treated differently because of race--all of those are still the underlying factors.”

Still, some experts are not sure that sweeping comparisons to another era will hold true.

“What happened during the 1960s is a good basis for launching social science research, but I can’t absolutely feel comfortable that this is the solution,” said USC professor H. Eric Schockman, in response to the Assembly committee’s conclusions.

Schockman, associate director of the university’s Center for Multiethnic and Transnational Studies, agrees with some who argue that Los Angeles’ swelling immigrant population and ethnic cleavages supply enough variables to set the 1992 disturbance apart from others.

“The immigrant situation is clearly a wedge,” said Schockman. The civil disturbance “was an (anomaly) . . . where we finally saw a different constellation than in the past.”

The Assembly committee report gives a nod to Los Angeles’ vastly changed ethnic landscape. “In 1967, the Kerner Commission issued the famous warning that America was ‘moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal,’ ” the report notes. “Los Angeles is also moving toward a society divided by race--yet the fault lines here will be drawn in black, brown, yellow and white.”