COMMUNITY WATCH : Unknown Compton

It hasn’t been a good week for Compton. Residents of the city of 91,400 south of Los Angeles are understandably frustrated and irritated. Like all other cities, Compton has its problems . . . but that’s all people seem to focus on.

What attracted the interest of most outside of Compton was a videotape showing a city police officer beating a youth. The fact that the officer was an African American and the 17-year-old was a Latino has ignited long-festering tensions in the racially mixed community, whose power structure is dominated by African Americans and whose population is 51% Latino.

Compton was in the news again last week when Rep. Walter R. Tucker III, the city’s former mayor, was indicted by a grand jury on charges that he solicited and accepted $30,000 in bribes while mayor. He has denied the charges.

Lost amid the headlines are efforts to foster cooperation among the city’s black and Latino residents.

Compton Mayor Omar Bradley is organizing a town hall meeting. The city’s lone Latino school board trustee, Gorgonio Sanchez, is helping to put together a Latino affairs commission. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has offered the help of the county ombudsman and the Human Relations Commission as nonpartisan community mediators. And Compton’s Catholic and Protestant churches are establishing closer ties through the grass-roots Southern California Organizing Committee. Too often such efforts get lost in the shadows of what’s in the news spotlight.