Coalition Geared to Averting Riot Not Eager to Disband : Community: We CARE says it wants to keep a good thing going, and it wants answers to the death of a man after a police pursuit.

By the time the verdicts were announced in the federal trial of four police officers charged in the beating of Rodney G. King, We CARE had been preparing for a month.

The broad-based coalition of Pasadena community groups had staged forums on race relations, held feverish late-night planning sessions and sketched out an elaborate contingency plan in case of a repeat of last year, when not guilty verdicts in the state trial of the four officers sparked days of rioting.

We CARE members were ready to hit the streets, social service agencies planned to open their doors for rumor control, and Pasadena officials were prepared to rush to a city-owned cable TV station to try to keep the public informed.

Then, in a few moments of high drama Saturday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, all the tension seemed to dissolve, with a federal jury finding two of the Los Angeles officers, Sgt. Stacey C. Koon and Laurence M. Powell, guilty of violating the Altadena man’s civil rights.

The next question is: What now?

Does We CARE--a seemingly motley alignment of groups and individuals, with membership ranging from the president of the Old Pasadena Business and Professional Assn. to the directors of civil rights organizations and former street gang members--fade away?

Most of the 125 or so members say not.

“We all agreed we wanted to do something,” said co-chairman Alan La Sha. “The issues we were dealing with weren’t going to stop when the trial was over.”

There will be other verdicts, members say. And the two convicted officers have yet to be sentenced.

“If they mess around and only give them one year, everything is going to go,” predicted one member who works with gang members.

Of immediate importance is the troubling death of Michael Bryant, a popular Pasadena barber, last month after a lengthy pursuit. Bryant died after police shot him with a Taser stun gun, hogtied him and laid him on his stomach in a police car.

Last week, after a month without a coroner’s report, the We CARE membership packed a Pasadena City Council meeting to demand action.

A coroner’s report has since been released--indicating that Bryant died from acute cocaine intoxication and asphyxiation from restraint procedures--and the chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has promised to press for an investigation by the Justice Department.

On Tuesday, Pasadena police officials gave the council and an audience composed largely of We CARE members an unusual report on the ongoing investigation of Bryant’s death, including a step-by-step account of the 30-minute pursuit and arrest.

Coalition leaders have vowed to continue pressing for more answers and for prosecution of the police officers who hogtied Bryant.

But some wondered whether such a diverse coalition could hold together.

Porfirio Frausto, a blunt-talking landscaper who chairs Pasadena’s Affirmative Action Commission, said he has noticed few businesses in the central commercial districts displaying the We CARE posters, for which they had paid $10 apiece. Maybe that suggested a weak commitment on the part of merchant groups, Frausto said.

“I was a little disappointed,” he said. “Maybe they thought they were buying fire insurance.”

With their bright yellow T-shirts, emblazoned with the slogan, “Holding the peace while working for justice,” coalition members were a visible presence in Northwest Pasadena on Saturday.

That morning, many of them had clustered in a meeting room of the American Friends Service Committee on Fair Oaks Avenue, hugging and clasping hands as a big-screen television set broadcast details of the verdicts.

Shirley Adams, director of the Pasadena branch of the Los Angeles Urban League, arrived with a box full of pastries, and Tony Henry, director of the American Friends Service office, speculated about the meaning of it all.

“There’s an attitude that the police are the sentencers and executioners, and they don’t have to respect citizens’ rights,” he said.

Then somebody asked Tim Rhambo, a street worker with the program Day One, about his reported plan to lead a march to Old Pasadena, the city’s commercial and entertainment center. The idea was to raise the consciousness of merchants and patrons of the area, said Rhambo, who advises a group of activist young people called Youth Against Injustice and Racism.

“They (Old Town merchants and patrons) don’t know what’s going on up here,” he said.

Maybe so, several members suggested, but the timing for a march was wrong.

“Right now, everything is cool,” Frausto said. “I hope people don’t perceive you as wanting to incite.”

Rhambo decided, for the moment, to rethink the plan.

That’s the way We CARE (which stands for Community Activists Responding Effectively) operates, with no bylaws, little formal structure, and seat-of-the-pants consensus planning.

So far, the approach has worked amazingly well. The organization was born last year at the height of the riots after the first King trial on state charges.

A group of community leaders hastily pulled together the organization to try to defuse the deep anger in the minority community after the verdicts were read in a Simi Valley courtroom.

“We wanted to make sure that what was happening in Los Angeles didn’t happen here,” Adams said.

During those tense April and May evenings, We CARE members--many of them parents--went from hot spot to hot spot. Often, a show of parental authority was enough to cool things down, Adams said.

“In one case, a community member saw a teen-ager out there,” Adams recalled. “She said, ‘Don’t you know me? I’m So-and-So’s mother. You’ve been to my house. Go home.’ ”

Scenes like that were repeated over and over, We CARE veterans say.

At the same time, the city’s cable TV station, KPAS Channel 55, was broadcasting a call-in show led by Mayor Rick Cole in an effort to squelch rumors.

The result was that, as Los Angeles burned, damage and injuries were kept relatively low in Pasadena, though emotions were just as high, city officials say.

By late afternoon on Saturday, about 35 We CARE members had gathered in the Jackie Robinson Community Center to talk about what could happen that evening. Maybe the celebrating had occurred too soon, said Patrick Williams, who co-chairs the group with La Sha.

“There’s no telling how everybody feels about the verdicts,” Williams said. “There could be somebody in a back yard somewhere making mayhem.”

The members agreed to stay alert and go into action if trouble developed. They also talked about keeping the organization going.

“There’s a whole lot of work to be done,” La Sha said. “This was one case, one verdict. It doesn’t change the fact that there’s still racism; there’s still social injustice.”

By early evening, it was apparent that, like other heavily policed communities, Pasadena would be quieter than usual. Some We CARE members accompanied police on patrol.

“It was quieter than Easter,” said Frausto, one of those who accompanied officers. “It was so quiet it was eerie.”

At the City Council’s regularly scheduled meeting Tuesday, Cole lauded the group. “The community owes a great debt of gratitude to these people,” the mayor said, nodding toward a group of We CARE members.

La Sha and the other graciously accepted the praise. But for La Sha, who works as director of the city-funded AIDS Resource Center, it was with the knowledge that there would be less benign feelings down the road.

“We may not be as popular as we are now,” he said. “We’re going to be asking some hard questions and putting some pressure on people.”