Resentment, Apathy Spell Disaster for a City in Denial

Aproducer on whose film I happen to be doing a bit of consulting called me not long ago to set up a dinner meeting.

She was staying near the ocean; I live in Mid-Wilshire. “Where shall we meet?” I asked.

“Somewhere in between,” she said.

I suggested a fashionable restaurant on La Brea.

“Could we make it somewhere else?” she asked.

“Have you had a bad experience there?”

“No,” she said. “It’s just that driving up La Brea from the freeway you have to pass all those burned-out buildings. It’s depressing. It puts me off for the whole evening.”

The buildings were among those destroyed in the troubles last spring. And I recalled our conversation--and the willful denial it implies--this week as I pored over The Times Poll that formed the centerpiece of this newspaper’s four-part exploration of Los Angeles six months after the troubles.

For those who wonder why the reconstruction has foundered so badly, the Times survey, conducted by John Brennan, frames its answers with extraordinary clarity.

More than half of the poll’s Anglo respondents say they visit South Los Angeles less than once a year. More than a third say they never have been to one of the neighborhoods where the majority of their fellow Angelenos who are African-American live.

When asked whether they thought conflicts and divisions inflicted by the troubles were healing or getting worse, more than half of all respondents said things were staying the same. That figure included 61% of Anglos, 52% of African-Americans, 49% of Latinos and 61% of Asian-Americans.

A decisive majority of all four ethnic groups said their neighbors had responded to the troubles with either resentment or indifference. Similar majorities said racism and brutality still were the common currency in the Los Angeles Police Department.

For anyone who cares about the future of this place, these numbers delineate the contours of civic disaster. Yet few of the people with whom I spoke this week said they found them particularly surprising.

Earlier this week, for example, I discussed The Times Poll’s findings with a political activist who has been involved in local affairs since the early 1970s. The survey’s results, he said, were “depressing, but not surprising.”

“For the past 10 years, it’s been clear to anybody who takes the time to look around and think about what they see here that this city is like two ships passing in the night. It’s tempting to say that those ships finally collided during the riot. But they didn’t,” he says. “What really happened was that one ship crossed the other’s wake and the passengers got bounced around a bit. Now, all they want to do is put the deck furniture back in its proper place so they can get back to sunbathing.

“The Times Poll validates once and for all the lesson many of us already have drawn from our own experience: Most of the people who live in Brentwood and Chatsworth and West Hills have no sense of connection to the people who live along Normandie, where the riot started, or in Pico-Union, where there was so much devastation. Until some one makes that connection, I’m not sure what can be done about our real problems.”

City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who represents the mostly white, heavily Jewish 5th District, agrees. As chairman of the council’s Budget and Finance Committee for the past decade, he has come to see what he calls “parochialism” as a force whose divisiveness nearly equals that of racism.

“Just look at what happened with Proposition N,” he said, referring to the recently defeated ballot proposition that would have added 1,000 critically needed officers to the LAPD. The measure failed when it fell just three percentage points short of the two-thirds majority required to pass the tax increase to fund the project.

“Prop. N got 70% of the votes cast in my district and more than 70% in the three council districts where a majority of the voters are black,” Yaroslavsky said. “So, even though it lost, I think the fact that N got 63% of the vote is a moral victory, and a sign of the political maturity of people living south of Ventura Boulevard.

“But I also think the campaign showed something important about voters in other parts of the city, particularly in the north (San Fernando) Valley, where the campaign was lost. The argument you heard far too often out there--and in some other parts of the city--was, ‘Why should I vote for this? I don’t need more police protection. We don’t have any drive-by shootings here. Our kids are safe in their yards. Why should I vote to raise money here and spend it in some other part of the city?’

“You heard people saying, ‘Wait a minute--you’re going to tax me here in Porter Ranch to spend money in Watts, Pico-Union or Boyle Heights? I want my money spent on me .’ ” Somehow, these people conveniently forget that we tax people in Watts and Boyle Heights to finance flood control in the West Valley and automated traffic control along Ventura Boulevard, even though there’s no need for either one in South or East L.A. “What this city requires now more than ever is the political maturity to recognize that we are a kind of family and that, like a family, we have to be willing to sacrifice a little on each other’s behalf,” Yaroslavsky added.

As Los Angeles enters its most important mayoral campaign in two decades, it also needs to recognize that we are essentially on our own. Last spring, this city suffered through the worst urban riot in 20th-Century American history. None of the presidential candidates had anything substantive to say about that in their campaigns. Sacramento remains immobilized by its own gridlock.

If solutions are to be found, we must find them ourselves. Sometime later this year, we might have to confront a moment when the African-American men accused of beating Reginald Denny are convicted and the white police officers accused of violating Rodney King’s civil rights are acquitted. If resentment and indifference still describe our collective response to the moment, what might the consequences be?