COLUMN ONE : How Good a Student Is L.A.? : Miami made missteps in trying to rebuild after devastating riots. Now, some wonder if Los Angeles will learn from that and attack the causes of urban unrest.

Twelve years before Rodney G. King, there was Arthur McDuffie.

As in the King case, there was a chase. McDuffie, a black motorcyclist, led police on a high-speed pursuit through the streets of Miami. There was a beating. McDuffie died after police struck him repeatedly with heavy flashlights and then tried to cover up it up by staging an accident scene.

There was a trial--before an all-white jury after a change of venue out of Miami--that ended in the acquittal of four police officers. And there were devastating riots that lasted three days, claimed 18 lives and caused $100 million in damage.

Then there was the aftermath.

Miami was not able to substantially improve conditions in its inner city, defuse racial tensions or greatly improve police relations with the African-American community. The problems continued throughout the 1980s, and Miami ended up enduring three smaller-scale riots.

Now, as Los Angeles awaits the verdicts in the federal trial of officers accused of violating King’s civil rights, many community leaders wonder if Southern California can learn from Miami’s mistakes.

The parallels between the two cities are striking.

In both cities, massive immigration--of Asians and Central Americans in Los Angeles, Cubans and Haitians in Miami--has contributed to new social tensions. The riots of 1965 in Watts, 1980 in the Liberty City and Overtown sections of Miami, and 1992 in Los Angeles all were triggered by police encounters with minority residents.

Each instance produced studies and reports calling for the revitalization of inner-city neighborhoods as the solution to underlying problems. Yet massive doses of national attention and federal aid has frequently failed to prevent renewed violence.

Such a history raises a host of complex, unsettling questions for local and national leaders: Why have Los Angeles and Miami been unable to change course despite experiencing major riots? How can the cities learn from each other? Will attention focused on Los Angeles in the aftermath of last year’s disturbances result, finally, in an effective national policy that attacks the underlying causes of urban unrest?

“Los Angeles should look very carefully at what happened to Miami in the years after the McDuffie case,” said H.T. Smith, a Miami lawyer and activist in the African-American community. “Because if L.A. doesn’t learn from Miami’s lessons, one thing will happen for sure: The city will burn again.”

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Miami offers a model of failure as Los Angeles attempts to rebuild its inner city, civil rights activists say. During the 1980s, much of the money targeted to rebuild riot-torn areas of Miami was spent on projects outside these neighborhoods and did not benefit inner-city residents, said Johnnie McMillian, president of the Miami-Dade branch of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

Shortly after the Miami riots, then-President Jimmy Carter established a federal task force to devise an economic recovery plan for the city. As in Los Angeles today, local, state and federal agencies as well as area business leaders were expected to cooperate in rebuilding the city’s hardest-hit neighborhoods.

The Miami Chamber of Commerce raised several million dollars to create jobs and build a business assistance center. A state-created revitalization board played a key role in opening Miami’s first black-owned bank. And federal Small Business Administration money was made available.

But, according to studies, most of the efforts fell far short of their goals.

“The impact of the SBA loans during the year following the riot was to facilitate the re-establishment of numerous businesses affected--but not in Liberty City,” according to a book on the 1980 riots co-authored by Marvin Dunn. “Indeed the real impact . . . seems to have been to help drain riot-damaged businesses away from Liberty City rather than to keep them there.”

Dunn, a psychology professor at Florida International University, said he sees Los Angeles heading down the same flawed path.

“If (Miami) took every new job that has been created for blacks since 1980, it wouldn’t amount to more than 500, yet we raised millions of dollars to try to do just that. We tried some of the same things that you are now talking about in L.A. . . . Your ills are not going to be cured that way.”

Although Miami has been the subject of much criticism, it also has created some programs that are used as models for other cities. These programs are being employed as South Florida gears up for another explosive, racially tinged trial. Next month, there will be a retrial of William Lozano, a Latino police officer convicted of fatally shooting an African-American motorcyclist in 1989, which sparked rioting in Overtown.

The Dade County Community Relations Board is compiling a weekly “tension chart,” which assesses the community’s volatility on a 1-10 scale based on police reports, demonstrations, impressions of staff members and other criteria. The board is sending crisis prevention workers into neighborhoods to diffuse tensions, will provide gavel to gavel coverage of the trial on cable television, and will sponsor discussions using volunteer attorneys to explain complex rulings. The board also is sponsoring a weekly radio show, featuring judges and prominent attorneys, during which residents can call in and ask questions.

If people understand the complexities of the trial, they will be less likely to riot even if dissatisfied with the verdict, said Lloyd Major, executive director of the board. “People will still be angry, but they may not be as shocked by a verdict if they are brought along through the whole trial,” he said.

Los Angeles has introduced several similar concepts--including Mayor Tom Bradley’s Neighbor to Neighbor program--although it remains to be seen how successful they will be.

But many analysts believe that local initiatives alone cannot solve the intractable problems of the inner city and that a comprehensive, integrated national attack, much like the 1960s war on poverty, must be planned.

The key question, many experts say, is whether cities such as Los Angeles and Miami--and the national government--have the political or moral will to undertake such a massive chore. Many are pessimistic and see the costs of years of neglect in a new generation of troubled inner-city youths.

“Unfortunately, things have not changed much for the part of the population that is most likely to riot,” said University of Miami history professor Whittington Johnson. “There is a whole new generation that doesn’t mind resorting to violence if things don’t go their way.”

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Before the McDuffie verdict was announced, the Miami police were about as well prepared as the Los Angeles Police Department was last April when jurors in the state King trial found the four officers not guilty on all but one count. The Metro-Dade Police Department had nothing more than a one-page riot guide. The only precaution taken by police was deploying one extra patrol car in largely African-American Liberty City.

Just as LAPD officers did at the intersection of Florence and Normandie, Miami police pulled patrol cars out of the area where the riots began, creating “a vacuum that served to increase violence,” according to a Ford Foundation study.

And just as truck driver Reginald O. Denny was 12 years later, three whites in Miami were dragged from their cars at the riots’ outset. They were beaten to death, and police later arrested five young black men in connection with the killings.

After the Liberty City unrest, the department compiled a book-length riot plan with voluminous charts, graphs and maps. In the years after the McDuffie case, Miami police have pioneered riot-control tactics now studied by departments nationwide.

If there is any hint of a civil disturbance in Miami, the city of Miami police and the Metro-Dade police--the larger law enforcement agency that patrols unincorporated county neighborhoods--block streets with barricades and police cars to seal off the area.

Specially trained “field force” units of about 50 officers then swoop in from strategic posts. Sometimes, just the sight of several field force units--carrying body-length riot shields, wearing helmets with face masks, and marching and banging their nightsticks on their shields in unison--will break up a gathering, said Angelo Bitsis, spokesman for the Miami police.

“If they’re throwing a rock, they go to jail; if they have a gun, they go to jail; if they have a Molotov cocktail, they go to jail,” Bitsis said. “You can’t torch a building or cause any problems when you’re behind bars.”

The Liberty City riots differed dramatically from previous disturbances in the United States, according to a Ford Foundation report.

In the past, riots usually began with an incident on the street--usually a police beating, shooting or arrest--then escalated. But the McDuffie killing had occurred five months before the riots and inner-city residents appeared willing to let the justice system run its course. And, according to the study, no one was prepared for the assaults on motorists because that kind of violence was “unprecedented in this century.”

“Miami was taken by surprise, partly because this was a new kind of riot, something that didn’t follow the pattern of the past,” said James J. Fyfe, a Temple University professor of criminal justice and a former New York City police officer. “But there’s no excuse for the LAPD. They should have learned from Miami and been better prepared.”

Los Angeles police will not make the same mistake again, Chief Willie L. Williams has vowed, and he has assured residents that police are prepared for any level of civil disturbance. In an attempt to improve relations with minority communities during the past year, the department has initiated community policing on a limited scale.

Miami area police also have tried to improve relations with inner-city neighborhoods. Metro-Dade police, who have made more progress than other law enforcement agencies in the region, created a unit to patrol housing projects by foot. And Miami police have built a substation in Overtown. Both departments have hired more minority officers--Miami also has an African-American police chief--and contend that disciplinary procedures against officers who use excessive force have been improved.

Still, Miami-area police have put more emphasis on developing civil unrest tactics and have not “devoted the same time, money and energy dealing with the causes for civil unrest,” said McMillian of the NAACP. Not enough progress has been made on such issues as instituting civilian review panels, creating widespread community-based policing or improving police sensitivity to minority communities, McMillian said.

“There were a lot of promises made after McDuffie, but there is still a great amount of distrust between the police and the black community,” McMillian said. “If they had been truly working on the problem since 1980, we would have had more to show for it by now.”

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Just north of downtown, in the shadow of Miami’s shimmering skyscrapers, there is block after block of ramshackle apartment buildings, crumbling housing projects and boarded-up storefronts. Throughout the neighborhood there are empty lots--some the sites of buildings burned during the riots--encircled by chain-link fences topped with razor wire. This is Overtown, site of several riots during the 1980s.

Nearby is an area called Mud Flats, a dank, Third World-like village beneath a freeway overpass. Dozens of makeshift hovels--built from cardboard boxes, metal sheeting, plywood or tarpaulins--are scattered across the dirt.

“People living in this kind of poverty, so close to the affluence of downtown . . . it doesn’t take much to make them mad,” said Nathaniel Wilcox, director of a Miami civil rights group. “You brutalize people living like this, and they’re going to take to the streets and riot right quick.”

The underlying causes of the volatility in Miami and Los Angeles are the deterioration of inner cities, the lack of political power and diminished economic opportunity, said McMillian of the Miami NAACP. But an inability to reform police and justice system decisions that are considered slanted, McMillian added, have proven to be the main flash point for riots.

During the 1980s, African-Americans in Miami were woefully underrepresented in city and county government and were repeatedly frustrated by their lack of political clout. Until this year, there was only one African-American city commissioner and one African-American county commissioner--in a city that is about 20% African-American. Only a handful of the county department heads are African-Americans, and there are few high-ranking African-American police officers at the station houses.

“When you have no political or financial muscle, riots are the only method of protest that is left to you,” said Major, of the Dade County Community Relations Board. “Riots are an indication that the system has failed.”

For Miami during the 1980s and Los Angeles in 1992, longstanding poverty has been exacerbated by racial divisions, urban affairs experts say. In both cities, the influx of immigrants has created resentment in inner-city neighborhoods and sparked a number of racial incidents.

Anger in Miami’s African-American community over the increasing influence of Cubans--and complaints over government aid to Cuban immigrants--surfaces frequently, Major said. And inner-city blacks, he said, are frustrated by frequent comparison to the Cuban immigrants. Many who fled Cuba in the 1960s were well-educated, successful entrepreneurs who soon succeeded in Miami--economically and politically.

“There was a lot of tension and competition over jobs right away,” Major said. “And when the Cubans rose and the blacks stayed the same, it created anger and frustration that continues today. . . . No other city in the country had to absorb as many people from a single culture at one time.”

In Overtown, the only thing that has changed in the past decade is the further deterioration of the area, said Wilcox, who heads People United to Lead the Struggle for Equality (PULSE). Wilcox, who was raised in Overtown, hopped in his car on a recent afternoon, drove through his old neighborhood and stopped at a corner with a check-cashing center and liquor store. He spotted an old friend, a man who had lived in the area for more than 30 years.

Willie Starks, a retired plumbing supply salesman and pastor of a neighborhood church, told Wilcox that in the past decade there has been little change in the way officers police the streets of Overtown. He pointed to a nearby intersection and described a recent incident.

“Right there, a young black man was being arrested for a stolen car and police handcuffed him and then slammed his face against the car,” Starks said. “I saw that boy covered with blood.

“Police have bridged a few gaps, but they’ve got a long way to go. As long as Miami police view this neighborhood as the jungle and don’t get some serious attitude adjustment, nothing will change.”

Times staff writer Carla Rivera contributed to this story.