After Police Incident, Some Fear Inglewood Will Take a Beating

As a throng of protesters demonstrated last week outside the gas station where police had beaten 16-year-old Donovan Jackson, businessman Ken Moore was on the other side of Inglewood, keeping the latte flowing at his 17-month-old jazz and coffee bar, the Howling Monk.

Moore said he hoped for a just outcome to the beating investigation. But he was also worried that the hubbub will tarnish outsiders’ opinions of Inglewood--and harm the prospects for businesses such as his cafe, which has been drawing strong local crowds in the evenings.

The media are “showing people there was another Rodney King-type beating in Inglewood, so now they think that if things go [according] to pattern, the city will burn,” said Moore, 53. “That’s not the case. We have a rogue cop who went overboard. It’s nothing we did here in our community.”

For the last two decades, Inglewood, a city of 113,000 in southwest Los Angeles County, has fought to free itself from the ghetto image created by Hollywood. Like much of south Los Angeles in the 1980s and ‘90s, the city was plagued by recession, riots and crack cocaine. Its commercial core collapsed into empty lots and boarded storefronts.

But even through those years, and increasingly today, Inglewood has been home to middle-class members of minority groups who are offended when their city is lumped in with “South-Central L.A.”

When the 1991 movie “Grand Canyon” portrayed Inglewood as anarchic urban badlands, city leaders were so incensed that they threatened to ban movie production within their borders.Since then, Inglewood’s crime rate has steadily declined. As a result, City Administrator Joseph Rouzan said, big-name retailers such as Home Depot and Target moved to town in 2001, broadening the tax base for a city government that coped with a $4-million deficit in its operating budget last year.

The long-suffering downtown, meanwhile, underwent a multimillion-dollar face lift, attracting a few new businesses--among them the Howling Monk.

“I always thought, if we could suppress the crime problem we could attract business, and I do believe it has worked,” said Rouzan, who has been with the city since 1998. “Some businesses are coming here. But let’s be frank: Anytime a city is heavily populated with minorities, people get the subliminal message that it’s a bad place to be.”

Rouzan admitted that Inglewood still has a long way to go. Though it still bills itself as the “City of Champions,” the label has lost some glitz since the Los Angeles Lakers abandoned the Forum, which was one of the city’s primary attractions, for Los Angeles’ Staples Center in 1999. That blow to civic pride also meant the loss of about $1 million in yearly tax revenue.

And though cheerful, suburban side streets crisscross the city, Inglewood still has deep pockets of poverty. Unemployment in the city was 9.7% in June, compared with 7.1% in Los Angeles County overall, according to the South Bay Workforce Investment Board.

Inglewood’s median household income for 2000 was $34,000, about $8,000 less than that for the county as a whole, according to the South Bay Economic Development Partnership.

In the Inglewood Unified School District, 59% of students come from low-income families, making them eligible for free or reduced-price meals, according to statistics for 1999-2000.

The school district itself is in turmoil: Just 13% of 11th-graders score above the national average on standardized tests. Supt. James Harris resigned this month; he was the district’s fourth leader in as many years.

Bad Timing for City

An internationally televised police brutality scandal, Rouzan said, is the last thing the city needs while it is trying to land a Wal-Mart and a cineplex.

But some residents think 21st-century Inglewood can beat the bad press with its new momentum--and a little old-school improvisation. It is a point of local pride that, when the Lakers left town, a local church stepped in, buying the Forum. Now Faithful Central Bible Church uses the building for religious services, and rents it out for non-church events as well.

“I don’t think [the beating incident] will stop the city from moving forward,” said a real estate agent, Johnny Inghram. “It won’t make a difference one way or the other for Inglewood,” he said, except to the extent that civil suits arising from it are “going to be very costly to the taxpayers.”

Since the 1960s, Inglewood’s minority residents have been improvising an entirely new identity for their city after a white-flight phenomenon that dramatically changed its racial makeup.

There was a time when some homes in the 94-year-old city went on the market with restrictive clauses preventing sale to blacks and Latinos. When the rules on home ownership loosened in the 1960s and blacks moved in, whites began moving out. Many more abandoned the city after court-ordered school integration in 1971.

Inglewood was 96% white in 1960, and 21% white in 1980. It is less than 5% white today.

Despite a recent influx of Latinos, it is the city’s African Americans who have taken the political reins. The first minority mayor, now state Sen. Edward Vincent, was elected in 1983, and African Americans have since put their cultural stamp on the city.

One of Inglewood’s prettiest parks was renamed for Vincent a few years ago--despite some grumbling from a mostly white old guard. The plaza next to City Hall is named for Thurgood Marshall, and the city hosts one of Southern California’s largest parades each year in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.

Roosevelt Dorn, the city’s second black mayor, took office in 1997. The city’s other top positions--city administrator, city attorney and police chief--are now held by African Americans as well. Critics of the mayor admit that they have seen some improvements in Inglewood over the last few years, but they also worry that their government has become inaccessible since Dorn took office.

Contentious Politics

In 1999, voters passed an initiative rolling back elected officials’ salaries, which are among the highest in the region. But the city attorney ruled the rollback was invalid, and Dorn continues to be paid $94,500 per year, with the four council members receiving $47,244 each.

In 2000, the city earned the Black Hole Award from the California 1st Amendment Coalition, which alleged that it had repeatedly violated public disclosure rules. Around the same time, meeting times were changed from evening hours to 1:30 p.m. three weeks out of each month, with a fourth meeting each month still held in the evening.

“We have daytime meetings in a working community,” said Marilyn Douroux, a 34-year resident of Inglewood. “Now working people cannot attend. It’s these very behaviors of our leadership which have cast us in this [negative] light.”

But supporters of the mayor believe he should be able to take advantage of the improved quality of life when he runs for reelection in November.

In 2001, there were 4,654 major crimes reported in Inglewood, fewer than half as many as were reported in 1992. Also since 1992, robbery, aggravated assault and property crimes have all fallen by about half. Authorities attribute the improvement to aggressive policing--and a nationwide decline in crime--but they also note the active participation of Neighborhood Watch groups. The 9-square-mile city boasts more than 200 of them.

The other pressing quality-of-life issue is airport noise. Los Angeles International Airport is just to the west of Inglewood and draws nearly half its employees from the city. While LAX expansion has been good for the local job market, the deafening roar of low-flying jets is incessant.

In the mid-1990s, Los Angeles World Airports began offering millions worth of sound insulation for houses under the flight path. But to receive the money, homeowners had to sign a document promising they would not sue over noise issues in the future. Many residents refused to sign, and focused their anger on City Hall.

“There was a feeling they wouldn’t be doing this to white folks,” said Mark Weinberg, deputy city administrator.

The issue has died down since February 2001, when the airport authority agreed to do away with the document. Today, 800 homes have received insulation, with 7,500 more are eligible to receive it in the future.

Then there is Market Street, which was Inglewood’s main downtown shopping strip until the 1970s, which saw the rise of shopping malls in nearby cities. By the 1990s, the street was in tatters, but the $4-million face lift has brought new trees, sidewalks and flower boxes.

The street is still dominated by beauty shops and flea markets, and there are still a number of empty storefronts. Retail sales downtown were up only 1% for the first quarter of this year compared with the same period the year before, Weinberg said.

But the cleanup, as well as generous loans for small and minority businesses, have attracted new projects, such as the Little Belize Caribbean Restaurant.

“It’s been a pleasure here in Inglewood,” said its owner, Adrian Zetina, who received a business loan from the city. “Other cities wouldn’t help me out.”

Within the city are areas of wealth alongside poor communities. In some cases, well-to-do residents try to separate themselves from the city that they see as identified with the poor.

“We probably wouldn’t even say we’re from Inglewood,” said John Bass, who was shooting hoops in the driveway of his two-story home. “We’d say we’re from Ladera Heights.”

The Not-So-Sunny Side

Across town, the neighborhood known as Darby-Dixon has been fighting a gang problem for decades.

“Some people got shot over there, and over there, by the Mobil [station],” said one 13-year-old from behind the fence of an apartment complex. “My uncle got shot one time, and people are robbing houses and everything. They even got grown people jumping little kids around here.”

The city has been able to purchase and tear down some of the most drug-plagued houses in Darby-Dixon using airport-noise mitigation money, because the neighborhood is right under the LAX flight path. Reyna Gonzalez, who was visiting her mother in Darby-Dixon, credits the program with reducing the violence a bit.

But Weinberg said he knows most people will judge Inglewood on the way it handles the investigation into the Jackson incident.

“It’s terrible and regrettable,” he said. “But the city also sees it as an opportunity to show that we handle things a little differently.”