LOS ANGELES — It's not the kind of event a metropolis likes to commemorate, but this week the City of Angels is consumed by symposiums and vigils, economic conferences and bus tours, rap jams and cocktail receptions — all to mark the 10-year anniversary of the worst riot in modern American history.
And everyone in the audience is asking the same question: What has changed in the past decade?
The short answer is that things are better: That's the consensus of a broad range of voices. But they quickly add that the challenges of mass immigration and joblessness and racial tension continue like white noise from the freeways: always there but often ignored.
Many characters from that drama have changed or are gone. Tom Bradley, Los Angeles' first black mayor, who watched his city burn, died of a heart attack in 1998. Reginald Denny, the truck driver dragged from his cab and nearly beaten to death on live TV, lives in Arizona. Daryl Gates, then the police chief, had a radio talk show. And Rodney King, who won a $3.8 million settlement from the city after being beaten by police, pleaded guilty last year to being under the influence of PCP. He is broke and living in a treatment center.
In the decade since the riots, sparked by the acquittal of police who beat King, whole sections of the city have been transformed by immigrants from Asia and Latin America. In some neighborhoods, especially those hard hit by the riots, newly arrived Mexicans and Central Americans are replacing African Americans as the majority.
The rage on the streets that came to a rolling boil on the evening of April 29, 1992, persists among some, but more often the anger continues as a low-grade fever.
"I think, frankly, the riots caused everybody to have more understanding," said Democratic state Sen. Kevin Murray, who is black.
But a poll released this week by the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University found that half of the 1,500 Angelenos surveyed believe another riot is "very or somewhat" likely in the next five years. Paradoxically, nearly three-fourths of the same respondents said racial and ethnic groups are getting along well.
Gun sales are down. So is the crime rate. The Los Angeles Police Department is more diverse: White officers are no longer the majority; a fifth of the force is female; a third is Latino. LAPD's two chiefs since Gates have been black men.
"I think we've done a pretty good job over the years to shed that image of racist white cops," LAPD spokesman Sgt. John Pasquariello said.
Not everyone agrees. "They are now just cowboy cops that come in all different colors," Murray said.
And the economy?
In the neighborhoods of South Los Angeles, where the riots began and reached their greatest fury, there's a new Home Depot and a Starbucks at one corner. At another, there's a vacant lot strewn with garbage.
"It is better. Is it substantially better? That would be hard to say. There are certain pockets that are probably the same," said Linda Griegos, former head of RLA, a public-private group that directed recovery investments. "You're dealing with neighborhoods of the working poor, the uninsured, and that's taken its toll."
In a sense, it would have been hard for things to have gotten much worse over the past decade.
Beginning April 29, 1992, South Los Angeles erupted in rage and opportunism after four police officers were acquitted in the videotaped beating of motorist King, who is black. Over the next six days, the riots spread from the intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues to Long Beach, Hollywood, Koreatown and West Los Angeles.
From the hillside mansions, the city looked as if it had been bombed.
There were more than 2,300 injuries, 55 people died, and more than 1,100 buildings were damaged or destroyed. A Rand Corp. analysis found that most of the 10,000 people arrested were young men; more than half were Latino, and about a third were black.
Damage was estimated at $1 billion. Among the hardest hit by looting and burning were the Korean merchants who ran small groceries, coin laundries and liquor stores, and who were seen by some black residents as strangers who treated them rudely and did not hire them.
Many of the Korean merchants, who had bought offshore insurance, never recovered.
"After the riot, business was really going down, and I didn't feel secure to do business over there," said Ellis Cha, president of the Korean American Grocers Association. Cha closed his furniture store in South Los Angeles and opened a liquor store in Orange County.
Cha said he believes race relations are slightly better but adds: "The rich and poor gap is getting bigger. That is the reason for riots. The job is not done with getting a McDonald's there. It is the unemployment."
Ten years later, university scholars and next-door neighbors still disagree over what to call the events: a riot or a rebellion or civil unrest? Whatever it was, it took more than 13,000 National Guard and federal officers to quell it.
Immediately after, the White House of George H.W. Bush placed some blame on the social welfare programs of the 1960s and '70s. Most others have concluded that the riots were a spontaneous combustion, fueled by poverty and the dearth of investment, jobs and hope, combined with the impression that both the police and the judicial system were brutal and unjust.
But there was also quite a bit of opportunistic looting, with much of the violence and property damage driven and directed by gang members.
Also, the LAPD's failure to stop the riot in its earliest stages was considered a blunder of epic proportions.
"Whenever you have the kind of social problems in a pressurized environment such as South L.A., it's combustible," said the Rev. Norman Johnson, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Los Angeles. "The Rodney King verdict was a catalyst. It wasn't just the fact that Rodney King was beaten and that it was caught on tape. It was the verdict people responded to."
It's hard to see the scars of the violence today, even at Normandie and Florence, but it's easy to see what's still missing. There are plenty of chicken joints and taco stands, offering cheap meals and paying minimum wage, but no living-wage jobs.
In the riots' wake, entrepreneur Peter Ueberroth launched the private group Rebuild L.A., which later became RLA. Its goal was to spur recovery by luring big-name businesses to open chains in the riot zone.
RLA and its partners brought about $400 million in corporate investment into the city from 1992 to 1999. That effort, coupled with government programs, made a start, but few participants consider it a smashing success. Also, much of the money went into safe investments, not the city's hardest-hit sections needing the most help.
Other investment groups and partnerships, such as those organized around the churches, did as much or more, with less money. They continue to operate today.
Economists and business leaders say the surest recovery will come as retailers, such as the big chain stores, realize there's money to be made in places like South Los Angeles.
That is happening. But to many here, 10 years already has felt like a long time to wait.