Fear, Anger Voiced in Citywide Town Meeting : Communities: TV hookup gives cross-section a chance to speak. A plea for hope and calm is heard.

They are the people who quietly go about their lives in Los Angeles, working and going to school as they struggle to make sense of a place that often makes no sense. Crying to be heard, they came from all corners of this fractured, fragile city, carrying anger and frustration and fear:

A Korean-American businessman who yearns for security, finding it not in the police but in a company named Smith & Wesson. An African-American woman from Baldwin Hills who is tired of seeing the media portray her people as thugs. An Anglo woman from the San Fernando Valley who thinks the school system is beyond repair. A Latino lawyer from Hollywood who says that what the justice system lacks most is justice.

These are the unheard voices of the City of Angels. On Sunday afternoon, they did something they have never done before. Through satellite and microwave technology, they talked to one another--and to the city at large. The format was a live, televised “Town Hall Gathering,” broadcast on KABC-TV from 3 to 6 p.m.

The show came at an extraordinary moment in the city’s history, a time when officials are publicly calling for peace while preparing for another round of possible civil unrest after the soon-to-be-concluded trial of four Los Angeles police officers accused of civil rights violations in the beating of Rodney G. King.

Although the program touched on everything from child care to the possible breakup of the Los Angeles school district to what officials are doing to stem the tide of businesses leaving the area, the fear that Los Angeles may erupt again provided a constant thread in the discussion.

There was also an ever-present subplot: the inevitable comparisons between the trial of the four white officers, who are accused of beating a black man, and the case of three black men accused in the beating of white trucker Reginald O. Denny.

“Wrong is wrong,” said Barbara Jefferson, a 62-year-old resident of the Crenshaw district. “It was wrong for Rodney King to be beaten and it was wrong for Reginald Denny to be beaten.

“We need to focus in on what is facing Los Angeles at this given time and moment, of what’s going to happen, so that the everyday (person), maybe somebody who’s not so learned, is not so sophisticated or educated, can understand what is about to happen. The whole world is looking at us now.”

The show was staged on the 25th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. In a plea for calm, West Los Angeles resident Sandy Champion invoked the slain civil rights leader’s name:

“Everybody seems to be preparing for the negative instead of hoping, as I feel and as Martin Luther King taught and preached, that we should be nonviolent,” he said. “I think all this talk about preparing for the worst is not the way we should do it. We should be hopeful. And, yes, there have been some injustices but I think we should wait and see before we react, give the justice system a chance.”

The program, staged in cooperation with Mayor Tom Bradley’s Neighbor to Neighbor program, featured more than 300 community activists, city officials and just plain folk, as well as two videotaped messages: one from actor Edward James Olmos, the other from President Clinton.

“The challenges and the trials ahead will not only be in courtrooms,” Clinton said. “The challenge is to draw strength from our diversity every day, in every part of your community, to draw together and to keep up the dialogue with each other, even under stress.”

As the cameras cut back and forth between the network’s main studio in Hollywood and six satellite locations throughout the city, there were plenty of questions about Los Angeles’ problems. Leonard Broom, a longtime resident of South-Central Los Angeles, did some of the asking.

“Justice begins at the top and not the bottom,” he declared. “We know it took years for all this to happen. What we want to know is what you are going to do about it?”

But there were few answers--especially from those in a position to give them.

In a brief message delivered at the outset of the program, Bradley talked wanly of the need to quell rumors of a potential riot--and then left the studio before he could be asked any questions. Police Chief Willie L. Williams--who drew praise in Clinton’s videotape for helping to make the program possible--did not show, sending an assistant chief who pleaded with residents not to stereotype the police.

Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti was asked, point-blank, whether there will be justice in the city. His reply was an honest one--”I can’t guarantee justice,” he said--but the audience hooted and booed. Later, a frustrated Garcetti acknowledged: “I understand there is no credibility in the criminal justice system--it is lacking.”

Peter V. Ueberroth, co-chairman of Rebuild L.A., fared little better. A man in the audience wanted to know what the group was doing about companies leaving Los Angeles, taking away jobs that could help inner-city residents.

“That’s the government’s role,” Ueberroth said. “RLA is not in the business of trying to keep business in town.”

Curiously, with the city 15 days away from a mayoral election that features two dozen candidates, there was little talk of politics. Only once was the name of a candidate mentioned, when a man in Koreatown said he would be voting for Richard Riordan.

There were poignant moments: an 11-year-old schoolgirl who said she wished her elementary school had metal detectors so that she would not have to worry about children carrying guns; a tearful mother whose son was shot to death at Fairfax High School this year; a young black boy from West Los Angeles who told how the police pulled over his older brother and accused him of driving a stolen car--only to find out that he owned it.

“They didn’t even apologize,” the boy said plaintively.

And there were hot exchanges as well, such as the cross-city debate between Jill Reiss, a San Fernando Valley activist who is pressing for the Valley to secede from the Los Angeles Unified School District, and Leticia Quezada, a school board member who was stationed in East Los Angeles for the broadcast.

Although the topic was schools, the underlying issue was--not surprisingly--race. Over the groans and boos of the audience, Reiss maintained that the proposal to break up the district would not divide the huge school system along racial lines.

Over the airwaves, Quezada shot back: “It does in fact create segregation, racial divisiveness.” And that, the school board member said, “is frankly something that we don’t need anymore of in Los Angeles today.”

Times staff writer Josh Meyer contributed to this story.