The distance L.A. has traveled between then and now marks a journey that has landed this city in a place very much of its own making. There have been strides and setbacks, and not everyone will agree about what constitutes progress or why some big problems remain unresolved. But, if this is a different city—we would say a better city—than the one that burned in 1992, the explanation lies in decisions Angelenos made about how they govern themselves.

First though, the L.A. story of the past quarter century has to begin with hitting bottom after 1992. In 1994, the Northridge earthquake struck, killing 57 people, injuring thousands more, and costing billions of dollars in property damage. That same year, California voters, including a majority in Los Angeles County, backed the Prop 187 ballot initiative, which prohibited unauthorized individuals from using state-run public services. The isolation, anger, and racial tensions of the 1990s continued with police scandals that eroded trust.

But those scandals also produced reform efforts that, haltingly, created a new model of community-centered law enforcement. And then, in the early 2000s Los Angeles began moving toward a shared destiny, as the region’s economics and demographics shifted.

In 1992, the non-Hispanic white population accounted for 41 percent of Los Angeles County, according to census data; that population now composes only 28 percent of Los Angeles County residents. That happened because whites left, and the non-white population grew not with immigrants but with their children. The flow of new immigrants to Los Angeles peaked in the 1990s as other destinations offered lower living expenses and better job opportunities. The big numbers already here largely stayed in place and made families. Children of immigrants now account for more than one in five residents, the highest share of any major metro.

The remains of a commercial building smolder, as another building burns out of control, in Los Angeles, early on the morning of April 30, 1992, after riots broke out in response to the verdict in the Rodney King beating trial. Photo by Douglas C. Pizac/Associated Press.

Now coming of age, this huge generation of young people has grown up navigating cultural and racial differences. According to a 2013 study by the Pew Research Center, second-generation Latinos and Asian Americans are much more likely than members of their parents’ generation to have diverse friends, feel comfortable with interracial marriage, and get along with people of other groups. By necessity, that has become the default attitude in L.A.’s school corridors and playgrounds.

Of course, a whole lot of young people, members of minority groups and growing up without many advantages, could have spelled trouble in the streets. But, as this second generation came of age, crime dropped—a lot. The violent crime rate was more than six times higher at the time of the unrest than it is today. As crime declined and this new homegrown population of cosmopolitans matured, Angelenos began making investments in their collective future.

Over the past decade and a half, voters repeatedly have endorsed tax increases to expand affordable housing, homeless services, school construction, and transit development in the region. These investments benefit everyone in the region, not just specific neighborhoods or populations. The success of these recent ballot measures, which often required support from supermajorities of voters, exemplifies Angelenos’ willingness to take responsibility for the common good.

Los Angeles also has repeatedly chosen to invest significant funds in the city’s arts and cultural resources over the past 25 years, enabling us to examine our history, heal past trauma and racial divides, and build a shared and inclusive cultural identity. Annual income for Los Angeles County arts-related nonprofits is estimated at $2.2 billion, and the arts and creative industries account for nearly 1 out of 6 jobs in Los Angeles County—a significant part of our economy.

These investments allow organizations like the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to defy national trends by increasing audiences and revenue, and to provide a wide range of diverse communities with performances and educational programs. Meanwhile, small theaters, studio spaces, and storefront galleries have become focal points of neighborhood regeneration. Simply put, the arts increase social capital and provide a rich cultural landscape in which civic vitality can thrive.

Among the most encouraging developments are moments of civil dialogue that have brought diverse populations together around shared objectives, and there is a valuable example near the burn zone of 1992.

Consider the Central Los Angeles Promise Zone, one of the first three designated zones (the others were in Philadelphia and San Antonio) under President Obama’s signature anti-poverty initiative that provides preferential status and technical assistance on federal grant applications. The Central Los Angeles Promise Zone encompasses Hollywood, East Los Angeles, Pico Union, Westlake, and, perhaps most significantly, Koreatown. These neighborhoods are collectively home to 165,000 people, 35 percent of whom live in poverty.

Like many urban neighborhoods on the edge of a central business district, this area just west of Downtown Los Angeles had seen slow deterioration of its housing stock, a loss of jobs, weak transportation infrastructure, and growing homelessness in the years leading up to the civil unrest. After much of Koreatown was destroyed in the civil unrest, representatives of many economic interests and a variety of ethnic communities found common cause in the process of drafting redevelopment plans based on public-private partnerships, such as the Wilshire Center/Koreatown Redevelopment Project Area.

Now, more than two decades later, the Central Los Angeles Promise Zone is bringing the community together again to identify shared goals and desired outcomes around good jobs, safe streets, and improved educational opportunities for young people in the community. This process alone has not directly solved problems, but proposed solutions have a much better chance of becoming real when they are based on a deliberative process of community engagement and collective goal setting.

Lastly, Los Angeles has chosen policies that treat the undocumented population as part of the civic family. And they are, literally, a big part. One of every 10 adults in Los Angeles County, and the parents of one of every six kids in the public schools, are undocumented immigrants: one million people, the largest concentration in the country. The region’s commitment to including the undocumented in plans for the future goes way beyond “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies in law enforcement. Angelenos, often in concert with the state government, have helped ensure that unauthorized immigrants have access to health care, public education, drivers’ licenses, and community policing that unambiguously aims at protecting them and their neighbors.

They are part of us. That realization developed slowly, and it applies not just to the undocumented. Los Angeles was a city of contested spaces and tribal rivalries 25 years ago. It’s not that now.

The post From the Wreckage of the ’92 Riots, a Better Los Angeles Rises appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This violent tradition lives on in the country, boiling up at times in our cities. In places like Los Angeles in 1992, and Ferguson and Baltimore in the past year, urban tensions—often the result of racial and economic inequalities—have exploded into a mess of arson, looting, and police brutality.

What sort of progress is made in these periods of unrest? Do they actually make conditions better? In advance of the Zócalo/UCLA event “Can Urban Riots Cause Change?” we asked people who study, write about, and are deeply engaged with sometimes-violent protests: Have urban riots ever improved the lives of a city’s residents? If so, when and how? If not, why not and what happened?

The post When Is Rioting the Answer? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It all started with Payasa. A gang-involved girl growing up in the city of Lynwood, just east of Watts, she was a figment so tenacious that I couldn’t get her out of my mind. In my experience, it’s not often that a fictional character insists on existing. When it happens, I know I need to follow wherever he or she leads.

Perhaps I should explain how this girl, this voice in my head, came to be.

In 2011, I’d been living in L.A. for three years and was working with the artists and muralists of UGLAR (Unified Group of L.A. Residents), doing an internship of sorts. It came at just the right time for me; I’d spent seven years writing a book that never got published, and I needed something else on which to focus. When I’d met the guys some months previously, we clicked immediately, and before long, they’d asked me, a non-visual artist, to be a part of their crew. I said yes in a heartbeat.

We all agreed it was an experiment, but before we saw how we might mesh together as artists with different disciplines, I had to learn what they did. So I carried paint for murals, photographed the progress of our walls, and cleaned up. The work took me to areas of the city I—a guy who’d grown up in Colorado—had never seen before, much less knew existed: Lincoln Heights, Highland Park, Lynwood, and others.

In these parts of L.A., I saw the city’s temperament and texture. I began to understand its disparate cultures and its people. I spoke to the homeless and the jobless, but the people I was most drawn to were former gang members, most of them Latino. They had a different take on their city than I’d heard before, and the way they talked lit up my brain.

I have an aural memory. When people speak, I visualize how what they say would be written. I map sentence structures in my head while listening. I visualize rhythms of speech, so I can make them live on the page. Brick by brick, our discussions about everything from tattoos to tacos built the foundation for Payasa. When I knew how they spoke, I knew how she would speak, and in this way, she gained form and style.

When I first told a number of former Latino gang members I’d been speaking to that I was contemplating writing a female character who lived that same life and would have grown up in their neighborhood, I met with strong resistance. I was told women were not involved in the gang life as I thought they were.

I tried to give up on Payasa then, for the sake of authenticity, but she wouldn’t let me. I’d be waiting for the 720 bus, and she’d spout lines about the sky or the person standing next to me, or what she wanted from life. This went on for days. When she wouldn’t go away, I knew I had to do something. I had to engineer a plot device that would give her the freedom not only to exist in the gang world of Los Angeles, but to craft her own destiny.

The 1992 riots were that event.

When this realization hit, I knew I had to write her story. It came chunks at a time: two, three, even four chapters a day. Her voice flew at me, and I did all I could to type as fast as I heard it. Within a week, her section was done, and it remains largely unchanged in the finished novel.

I ran Payasa by the folks I had been talking to, certain they’d think she couldn’t exist in their world of 23 years ago, and as I finished telling them about her and her story, I braced myself to be shut down. Instead, I heard, “I was into it!” and best of all, “Wow, man, I like her.”

This, I found with relief, not only made her real but also alleviated my deepest worry. I felt it necessary to prove to the people who spoke to me that I would write about their neighborhoods with respect and honor—that, no matter what, I would take the time to get it right, detail by detail. When I got their blessings, it meant that my Payasa fit within the world they’d once known.

It was a victory, but it opened the door to a much graver project: what was once just a single character’s story was now the story of an entire city during its most incendiary days. I remember standing in my kitchen at 13, watching what happened to Reginald Denny on the news, and I felt an immense responsibility to get that era right.

There was only one way to do it: research. I watched every documentary I could. I immersed myself in L.A. Times microfiche. I read books like Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 by Anna Deveare Smith and Fires & Furies by Maj. Gen. James Delk. As I worked my way through these, I learned something interesting: An awful lot has been written about the riots in many different mediums, but not in fiction. In fact, the last few chapters of The Tattooed Soldier by Héctor Tobar are the only fictional account I can name, though I’m sure there are more.

All the same, this emboldened me to tell a wider story. I watched and re-watched news reports and raw footage on YouTube from that time. Most importantly, I kept speaking to people who knew the city better than I did and who were there in ’92. They could tell me how it felt, what most scared them, and what they most hoped for back then. Through their generosity, I grew to understand not just the psychology of the time, but the psychology of survival.

And through it all, facts emerged. Facts so heavy they not only weighed on my heart, but inspired me to explore them through the eyes of new characters. I learned of the Lynwood Vikings—a then-secret group within the L.A. Sheriff’s Department that a federal judge proclaimed a “neo-Nazi white supremacist gang.” I learned of Navy SEAL medics doing combat internships with the L.A. Fire Department due to the sheer volume of trauma injuries at that time; I learned that murders that took place in non-riot-related areas were not considered riot-related even though a lack of police or emergency assistance may have made them possible; I learned of portable morgues—refrigerated semi-truck trailers used to temporarily house the dead; I learned of the over 3,000 guns stolen during the riots, most of which have not been recovered, even to this day.

Throughout this journey, my eyes have opened to the recent history of Los Angeles—its depth and its difficulties—and I think, in some small way, I uncovered a buried city hidden just beneath the one I knew. What I saw when I emerged from my research was a city that both explained the present and shaded it, adding tones of grayness where previously things had been more starkly black and white. Yet it never would have happened without Payasa’s insistence to exist on the page. Without her, there would be no novel.

She started it all.

The post How the 1992 L.A. Riots Sparked My Imagination and Opened My Eyes appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

People across Southern California and the nation have spent the past weeks engaged in appropriately somber reflection on the 20th anniversary of the Los Angeles riots, a catastrophe I experienced as a dislocated expatriate anxiously watching CNN International and hearing loved ones back in Long Beach describe the Bosch-style view from their rooftops. As always happens when the riots have come up since then, the subtext this season has been “Could it happen again?” But in the struggle to answer that question and make sense of those murderous, soul-draining events of two decades ago, too many commentators have lost the plot.

Was “the root of the unrest … economic,” and therefore eternally susceptible to relapse? That’s what the interesting writer Erin Aubry Kaplan posited in the L.A. Times. And yet violent crime, both locally and nationwide, has continued to go down even during the last four years of recession. The New York Times produced some ambivalent handwringing about South L.A.’s changing demographics, as if the ideal of any big city (let alone one as dynamic as Los Angeles), is to preserve ethnic and nationality percentages in amber. And L.A. Times columnist Sandy Banks even made the startling claim that destroying 200 liquor stores might well have been a good thing on balance.

There are scores of worthwhile policy and social discussions embedded in those assertions, but they are secondary to the fundamental cause of the riots that has changed fundamentally: African-American communities in Southern California are no longer policed by what they rationally suspected to be a racist and casually brutal occupying army of mostly white men from faraway suburbs. The L.A. County of my childhood is no more, and unlike political nostalgics from Kevin Starr to Tom McClintock, I say good riddance to most of that.

I grew up in the seemingly idyllic, middle class Levittown of north Long Beach, near Lakewood. Our block was alive with the constant clatter of kids playing Wiffle ball and navigating wooden skateboards. Everyone’s dad could get a good job down the street at McDonnell Douglas. You didn’t have to squint very hard to see similarities with the good suburban vibrations of The Brady Bunch or The Partridge Family. And, like those shows, our neighborhood’s cast was almost exclusively white. Therein lay some of the inevitable noir behind the sunshine.

I will never forget the rude shock to my naive, Roots-loving ears when one of the oldest kids on the block bragged to us about his new job as a cop. One of the awesome things about police work, he told us, was that when you hauled a nigger into the station, you and the boys could just take him out back and beat holy hell out of him. Because who were people gonna believe–the cops, or the nigger!

There is no relationship in citizenship more elemental than that between the resident and the cop. With the rare (though sadly not rare enough) license to kill in the name of peace, government, and the greater good, local police forces make thousands of unreviewable judgment calls every day, almost all of which are freighted with an awesome asymmetry of power (occasionally in the opposite direction). It’s a difficult, dangerous, and often thankless job, which is why every good officer deserves our strong respect.

But power does corrupt, especially where the asymmetries are strongest. With a police force that in the early 1990s was 61 percent white and reportedly 83 percent comprised of people who lived outside city limits, and a longtime chief (Daryl Gates) who pioneered odious paramilitary tactics while mouthing arguably racist statements (such as “blacks might be more likely to die from chokeholds because their arteries do not open as fast as they do on normal people”), the Los Angeles Police Department came to treat the disproportionately violent black neighborhoods south of USC not unlike U.S. soldiers now approach Kandahar.

It’s hard to describe to white people not from Southern California why it’s perfectly plausible that O.J. Simpson was found not guilty of murdering Nicole Simpson. All you need to consider is a backstory that included LAPD Det. Mark Fuhrman’s past statements like, “Yeah we work with niggers and gangs. You can take one of these niggers, drag ’em into the alley and beat the shit out of them and kick them. You can see them twitch. It really relieves your tension.” My dad, no soft-on-crime liberal, always understood the verdict as the fruits of decades’ worth of reasonable doubt sewn by California’s all-too-frequently racist police force.

I was 12 years old when a local football star named Ron Settles, a 21-year-old senior tailback at Long Beach State, died of hanging in his Signal Hill jail cell less than five miles from our house. He was black, had been pulled over for speeding, and savagely beaten. The cops claimed it was suicide, but a coroner’s inquest ruled that Settles’ death came “at the hands of another“; an independent autopsy a year later found that the injuries were much more consistent with police chokeholds, and the Signal Hill Police Department ended up paying the Settles family more than $1 million. No cops were ever charged. The case was locally famous, but seemingly every Southern California community with a significant black population could tell similar stories in the 1970s and ’80s.

The past indeed is a different planet, thank God. I haven’t heard any white person, let alone a police officer, seriously use the word nigger since the early 1990s. The LAPD is now 36 percent white (as of last August), and former antagonists like the Urban League’s John Mack say things like “It’s been an amazing transformation … The L.A.P.D. of today is very, very different than 10, 12 years ago, when I was one of the people who was constantly battling them.” An L.A. Times poll in 2009 found that 77 percent of residents “approved” of the LAPD’s job, including an amazing (given the history) 68 percent of blacks.

Violent crime, which seemed to be on an irreversible trend upward for the three decades before the riots, creating deep and seemingly permanent political divides, suddenly started nose-diving almost immediately afterward. The way we talk about crime–the recent Trayvon Martin case notwithstanding–is almost unrecognizably different, too. It is impossible to imagine in 2012 a political atmosphere in which any commentator, let alone a professed libertarian (as am I), would respond to something as horrific as the videotaped gang-stomping of Rodney King by advocating that police issue extra-judicial beatings of “street criminals” and joking that maybe video cameras should be banned. In fact, some of the same voices who were fanning the racial flames 20 years ago are now among the first to register proper outrage at police militarization and what has come to be known as “the war on cameras.”

Much of these changes for the better have come from the messy, deeply flawed, but heartfelt work of L.A.’s law enforcement and political cultures. Recently departed police chief William Bratton may end up with most of the accolades, but his imperfect predecessors Bernard Parks and Willie Williams also helped turn around an organization whose faults had been the stuff of legend since long before Daryl Gates started mugging for cameras. Though few if any sane people believe we are living in a post-racial nirvana, especially in the poorer neighborhoods of our bigger cities, a raw and violent open-air conflict has been talked back down to DefCon 5.

What might deserve even more credit is the source that almost never gets it: Society, or the rest of us. Consider that during the Watts riots of 1965, interracial marriage was still illegal in some states, and during the 1992 riots, still fewer than half of Americans approved of it. Today that number is 86 percent. Twenty years ago, Washington intellectuals were expending much oxygen linking racial differences to IQ; today, those people are more likely to be talking about class instead of race. It is much more difficult in pluralistic, cross-pollinating America than it was even two decades ago to consign a whole category of people into a dehumanized “other.”

None of this leaves us in a particularly great place. One should hope, at a bare minimum, that conditions are good enough to forestall a three-day nightmare of violence, vandalism, looting, and self-destruction. We may be better as a society in not tolerating racism, but we remain far too tolerant of an unconscionable drug war that overwhelmingly hits minority and black populations harder even though they are no more likely to, say, smoke marijuana than anybody else. There is a permanent underclass of millions of Americans, and the families they can’t support, who are in some way under the supervision of the judicial system. Crime is way down, but militarized policing is way up, jeopardizing the lives of uncounted innocents who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And too many politicians and activists who are addressing the inaccurate “root cause” of economic distress have chosen new prohibitions–of fast food restaurants, Wal-Marts, liquor stores–as a doomed attempt to zone South L.A.’s way out of its perennial recession.

But in a year when so much political discourse is likely to be poisoned, it’s heartening to know that the biggest toxin near the corner of Florence and Normandie 20 years ago has largely been drained. Now comes the hard part.

Matt Welch is editor-in-chief of Reason magazine and co-author (with Nick Gillespie) of The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong With America (Public Affairs).

*Photo courtesy of waltarrrrr.

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