BY CYNTHIA LEE
UCLA Today Staff

Over the last decade, dozens of UCLA social scientists, urban planners, demographers, epidemiologists, ethnic studies researchers and other scholars have combed through the rubble of the 1992 Los Angeles civil disturbance for clues as to what fueled the explosion that rocked a city and a nation to its core.

But 10 years later, experts diverge as to whether significant improvements have occurred.

Urban Planning Professor Edward W. Soja believes that racial and ethnic tensions remain but have lessened due to the efforts of new community-labor coalitions such as Justice for Janitors, the Living Wage campaign, the Bus Riders Union and the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy.

"Fortunately for Los Angeles, the multicultural 'civil society' and its grassroots community organizations, seeing so clearly that existing governments at all levels were unlikely to help, have been working effectively to improve living conditions among the immigrant working poor and to achieve greater justice from both the public and private sectors," he said.

"The Los Angeles 'justice riots,' as many now call what happened in 1992, were much more than an explosion or exposure of racial hatred," Soja said. "It has to be seen as a multicultural expression of deep dissatisfaction with what Los Angeles had become over the preceding two decades of globalization and economic restructuring."

For David Halle, director of the UCLA LeRoy Neiman Center for the Study of American Society and Culture, one of the most significant changes in the city since the uprising has been the drop in the city's African-American population from 14% in 1990 to 11.5% in 2000 with moves to the sprawling suburbs and South. "What that says is that the influence of African Americans is going to decline," he said.

But Jorja Prover, adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Social Welfare, maintains that changes for the better have occurred. Prover has served for the past five years on a task force on culture and language for the LAPD and the Los Angeles Police Commission.

With changes in the city charter, noted Prover, "we no longer have a police chief who is there in perpetuity. We now have a police chief that serves with oversight of the mayor and the police commission. That is nothing short of revolutionary. ... That is the singlemost dramatic change, and it has rippled down to the lowliest police officer. What that says to the LAPD is that you are no longer in control -- you must be held accountable."

A glance backward/a view forward