On Tue, 16 Jan 2007 20:23:13 -0700, "Iconoclast"
wrote:

A bit of diversity training ought to fix things. No problemo.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/us...gewanted=print

January 17, 2007
A City’s Violence Feeds on Black-Hispanic Rivalry
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
LOS ANGELES, Jan. 16 — The Latino gang members were looking for a black
person, any black person, to shoot, the police said, and they found one.
Cheryl Green, perched near her scooter chatting with friends, was shot dead
in a spray of bullets that left several other young people injured.

She was 14, an eighth grader who loved junk food and watching Court TV with
her mother and had recently written a poem beginning: “I am black and
beautiful. I wonder how I will be living in the future.”

“I never thought something like this could happen here in L.A.,” said her
mother, Charlene Lovett, fighting tears.

Cheryl’s killing last month, which the police said followed a confrontation
between the gang members and a black man, stands out in a wave of
bias-related attacks and incidents in a city that promotes its diversity as
much as frets over it.

Ethnic and racial tension comes to Los Angeles as regularly as the Santa Ana
winds. Race-related fights afflict school campuses and jails, and two major
riots, in 1965 and 1992, are hardly forgotten. But civil rights advocates
say that the violence grew at an alarming rate last year, continuing a trend
of more Latino versus black confrontations and prompting street
demonstrations and long discussions on talk-radio programs and in community
meetings.

Much of the violence springs from rivalries between black and Latino gangs,
especially in neighborhoods where the black population has been declining
and the Latino population surging. A 14 percent increase in gang crime last
year, at a time when overall violent crime was down, has been attributed in
good measure to the interracial conflict.

This month, the authorities reported that crimes in the city motivated by
racial, religious or sexual orientation discrimination had increased 34
percent in 2005 over the previous year. Statistics for 2006 have not yet
been compiled.

Rabbi Allen Freehling, executive director of the Los Angeles Human Relations
Commission, a group created after the 1965 riots, said the recent growth in
hate crimes reflected a failure by government and community leaders to
prepare residents for socioeconomic changes in many neighborhoods, “and
therefore people have a tendency to lash out, out of desperation.”

In November, three Latino gang members received sentences of life in federal
prison for crimes that included the murder of two black men — one waiting
for a bus, another searching for a parking spot — and assaults on others in
a conspiracy to intimidate black residents of a northeast Los Angeles
neighborhood.

In another case, a twist on past racial dramas, 10 black youths, some of
whom prosecutors say had connections to a gang, are on trial for what
prosecutors contend was a racially motivated attack in neighboring Long
Beach on three young white women who were visiting a haunted house on
Halloween. Long Beach also experienced an increase in hate crimes in 2005.

But even with the alarm caused by the recent increase in bias crimes,
Constance L. Rice, a veteran civil rights lawyer, said that, considering Los
Angeles’s diversity, race relations remained relatively calm and were even
marked by many examples of groups getting along.

Still, in several corners of the city, particularly where poverty is high
and demographics are shifting, tensions have been flaring.

“You don’t find entire segments of the city against one another,” Ms. Rice
said, “but in the hot spots and areas of friction you find it is because the
demographics are in transition and there is an assertion of power by one
group or the other and you get friction.”

In Harbor Gateway, the neighborhood where Cheryl Green was killed, tension
had grown so severe that blacks and Latinos formed a dividing line on a
street that both sides understood never to cross and a small market was
unofficially declared off-limits to blacks. Ms. Lovett had warned her
children not to go near the line, 206th Street, but Cheryl had ridden her
scooter near it to talk to friends when she was shot.

Neighbors said the dominant 204th Street gang, which is Latino, had harassed
blacks and Latinos alike and effectively kept the groups divided, though
language and cultural differences also have contributed to segregation.

“We wave hello, but I cannot really talk to blacks because my English is
limited and I don’t want to mess with the gang,” said Armando Lopez,
speaking in Spanish, who lives near where Cheryl was shot.

A man who described himself as a former member of the 204th Street gang said
black gang members had shot or assaulted Latinos, too, and explained the
violence as a deadly tit-for-tat.

“They shot a Mexican guy right around the corner from here and nobody
protested or said anything,” said the man, who asked that his name not be
used for fear of retaliation. He referred to neighborhood speculation that
Cheryl’s killing was in retaliation for the killing of Arturo Mercado, a
Latino shot to death in the neighborhood a week before Cheryl in what the
police call an unexplained shooting.

The violence in that neighborhood and others has prompted a flurry of
announcements by Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa and police officials
promising a renewed crackdown on gangs, particularly those responsible for
hate-related crimes. Mr. Villaraigosa plans to meet Friday with Robert S.
Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, about
expanding its assistance in investigating gang and hate-related violence;
the agency has been working with the police on such investigations in the
San Fernando Valley, where gang violence has increased the most.

Chief William J. Bratton has said the Police Department would soon issue a
most-wanted list of the city’s 10 to 20 worst gangs, with those most active
in hate crimes likely to land on it.

“It’s to say, ‘We’re coming after you,’ ” Mr. Bratton said.

A city-financed report by Ms. Rice released Friday said Los Angeles needed a
“Marshall plan” to address gang violence in light of a growth in gang
membership and a lack of a comprehensive strategy to curb the problem.

Despite the spike in hate crimes in 2005, the total number of bias-related
incidents in Los Angeles, 333 in a city of 3.8 million people, was down from
peaks in violent crime in the mid-1990s and just after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Cheryl Green’s killing particularly alarmed community and civil rights
advocates because of her age and the indication that the neighborhood’s long
history of racial violence was continuing. Two Latino gang members have been
charged with murder in the case. With the district attorney having filed a
formal allegation that the men were motivated by hate, they could be
eligible for the death penalty or life in prison without parole if
convicted.

Mr. Villaraigosa, the city’s first Latino mayor in over a century, was
elected in 2005 in part on a promise of keeping peace among racial and
ethnic groups. He attended a rally in the Harbor Gateway neighborhood
Saturday, one of a few demonstrations calling for unity. He hugged Ms.
Lovett and Beatriz Villa, the sister-in-law of Mr. Mercado, the Latino
killed earlier.

“Our cultural and ethnic diversity are cornerstones of a strong L.A.,” the
mayor said Friday, “and violent crime motivated by the victim’s skin color
will not be tolerated.”

Earl Ofari Hutchinson, an African-American syndicated columnist who plays
host to the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable, a weekly gathering in the
Leimert Park neighborhood of South Los Angeles, said blacks complained that
illegal Latin American immigrants were stealing jobs. Latinos, particularly
newcomers unaccustomed to living among large numbers of African-Americans,
in turn accuse blacks of criminal activity and harassing them.

“I think L.A. is a microcosm of what could happen in big cities in the
future,” Mr. Hutchinson said. “When we have the kind of tension you see in
L.A. in the schools, the workplace and now hate-crime violence, my great
concern is this is a horrific view of what could happen in other cities.”

Ms. Lovett, Cheryl’s mother, said the family moved to Harbor Gateway six
years ago to get away from a high-crime neighborhood in another part of Los
Angeles. A relative of a black neighbor was shot by the gang a few years
ago, she said, and recently she had begun looking for a safer area.

“I feel it is unfortunate my daughter had to be the sacrificial lamb,” she
said. “But I just hope there is a change in this neighborhood.”

A mongrel political state is doomed to perpetual disorder.

Max