At Tom's liquor store, one of the first businesses looted in the Los Angeles riots, the Asian-American owner keeps a watchful eye on the angry and jobless men loitering outside. The same surly crowd frightens Goldie Bell, 65, a beautician who is black and lives nearby. The vagrants' noisy carousing causes Bell sleepless nights, and every morning she must run a gauntlet past them to get to her car. "I'm just afraid all the time," she says.
What Bell and the rest of Los Angeles fear most is how these idle and restless men will react if the verdicts in two explosive new trials are not to their liking. Only nine months after suffering the worst urban violence in the U.S. in this century, Los Angeles is bracing for trouble again. Already some youths are dusting off the NO JUSTICE! NO PEACE! placards that protesters waved last April when L.A. burst into flames after the acquittal of four white police officers in the videotaped beating of black motorist Rodney King.
The four officers will return to court this week on federal charges that they violated King's civil rights. And March brings the prosecution of three black men accused of savagely beating white trucker Reginald Denny as the riot broke out. "I hate to think of what could happen if the police officers get off and the young black men are convicted," says Odell Holly, 71, the black owner of an apartment building in South Central Los Angeles, the riot's epicenter.
The latest cases will test a city that today has a new police chief, a new district attorney and at least 52 candidates for mayor. Yet in the streets the frustration and despair that helped trigger last year's violence show little change. "People are anxious about these trials," says Karen Bass, director of a substance-abuse center with headquarters in South Central. "There is sentiment that the lid could blow off again because people don't feel that their concerns are being addressed. No one wants to see the same thing happen again, but it is a real possibility. People don't know what to expect." In a recent poll by CBS News, 2 out of 3 Los Angeles residents in the survey said that things are going badly in the city.
In South Central and other L.A. neighborhoods, residents perceive that civic leaders have failed to deliver on publicized promises to restore riot-torn parts of Los Angeles. Few of the 1,100 buildings that were severely damaged or destroyed in the violence have been reconstructed. "There is a strong feeling that L.A. is not being rebuilt," says Norma Cook, assistant director of Project Rebound, a coalition of mental-health organizations. "People's real concerns center on jobs and housing. It's an economic issue. That's at the bottom of the feeling of hopelessness." Concurs Holly: "We are frustrated. We are not really pleased with what's going on."