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From the Washington Times

Central Americans determined to trek north to U.S.

by Guy Taylor

The Washington Times

Sunday, April 29, 2012

TULTITLAN, Mexico — About 200 impoverished and undocumented migrants recently packed into a small building in this ramshackle town 20 miles north of Mexico City.

Nearly all were from Honduras and headed for the U.S. border. Almost none spoke a word in the shelter's dark main room, where the only thing thicker than the smell of unwashed clothes was a sense of fear.

“Yeah, I'm scared,” said Victor Caseres, 26, who had traveled 750 miles by hopping freight trains to arrive at the shelter, one of more than a dozen run by the Catholic Church in Mexico to provide refuge for migrants.

“Everything's been all right so far, but going forward, I'm afraid. Sometimes criminal guys hop on the train, and they'll rob you or kill you.”

Migrants in search of jobs in the U.S. face a gantlet of life-or-death risks in their treks across Mexico from its southern border: Many fall prey to extortion, kidnapping, rape and killing by crooked police and criminal gangs.

It's a harsh reality that increasingly has undermined efforts by Mexican political leaders to reform their nation's immigration laws in response to criticism from the international community.

Relief workers say violence against migrants is particularly common along popular transit routes in eastern Mexico, vast stretches of which are controlled by the ruthless Los Zetas drug cartel.

The Zetas make a steady side business in kidnapping migrants, targeting those with relatives already based in the United States who can pay ransoms.

Migrants are killed for refusing to join the cartel or carry drugs across the U.S. border.

Such was the case in August 2010, when the bodies of 72 slain Central and South Americans turned up in a field in northeastern Mexico, about 100 miles south of McAllen, Texas.

Mexico's National Human Rights Commission followed the incident with a report citing the abductions of more than 11,300 migrants in a six-month period in 2010.

The Rev. Pedro Pantoja, a Catholic priest who runs a shelter for migrants in Saltillo, capital of the northeastern state of Coahuila, says the situation hasn't improved since then.

“The Zetas have free reign to operate with impunity in Coahuila,” Father Pantoja said. “There's always a presence of organized crime throughout the movement of migrants.

“They dominate the highways and transport vehicles. They follow the migrants on trains.”

What's worse, Father Pantoja said, is that “they've completely infiltrated the police in Coahuila.”

He told of one incident in which a migrant arrived at the Saltillo shelter claiming to have narrowly escaped a kidnapping.

Shelter organizers initially were unfazed. But nerves went on edge when the migrant pointed to a federal police car parked near the shelter and said the man who had tried to kidnap him was sitting in the front seat.

‘Double morality'

Mexico's leaders have long denounced the U.S. for harsh treatment of Mexicans living north of the border.

Arizona's immigration law, which was challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday, drew particularly fierce criticism from President Felipe Calderon upon its enactment in 2010.

Until recently, however, Mexico's own immigration laws were among the most draconian on the planet, allowing for felony charges against anyone found to be in the country illegally.

Analysts say Mexico's laws created the pretext for local authorities to prey on Central Americans. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, police made a custom of threatening felony charges if migrants refused to pay bribes.

The law's strictness also undercut Mexicans' criticism of U.S. immigration policy.

“As the Mexican government began calling attention to the protection of human rights of Mexicans in the United States, calling on the U.S. government to issue more visas to Mexicans and to establish a guest worker program for Mexicans, the Mexican government found itself being accused of failing to grant foreigners in Mexico the same civil rights and workplace protections,” says a 2011 report by the Woodrow Wilson Center's Mexico Institute.

Laura Gonzalez-Murphy, a professor at the State University of New York at Albany who co-wrote the report, says such factors served as motivation for sweeping immigration law changes embraced by the Mexican government during recent years.

In 2008, Mexican lawmakers eliminated the felony charge that could be filed against anyone passing through Mexico without documents.

The change was driven in part by a desire to gain leverage in the discourse with Washington and in part by a legitimate determination to improve the treatment of illegal immigrants passing through the country, Ms. Gonzalez-Murphy said.

Lawmakers went a step further in June by granting undocumented Central American migrants access to due process rights - effectively the same legal protections they have if they make it to the United States.

On paper, the changes are sweeping. Their implementation is a different story.

Bureaucratic bungling and political bickering have prevented enactment of regulations that “will give teeth to the new law,” Ms. Gonzalez-Murphy said.

“The result is this double morality,” she said. “On the one hand, you've got this vision of a new policy. But on the other, you've got what's really happening.”

‘Deeper and more productive'

David Angel Fonseca, a legislative adviser to the Mexican Senate who has worked to implement the new law, added that “maybe you have a new law, but right now it's not working.”

Mexico's attempted reforms, meanwhile, have gone almost entirely unnoticed in Washington, where State Department officials declined to comment on the specific changes in the law.

A State Department spokesman instead offered broad praise for Mr. Calderon, saying the U.S.- Mexico relationship “has grown deeper and more productive” during his tenure.

“We have strong cooperation on a wide range of issues, including immigration,” said William Ostick, a spokesman for the department's Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs. “We are now more committed than ever to closely collaborating as partners to achieve security and prosperity for citizens of both of our countries.”

Mr. Calderon 's six-year war on drug cartels and organized crime has involved vigorous attempts to weed corruption from the nation's law enforcement ranks.

The effort has yielded arguable success at the national level. The minting of a new federal police force has involved the careful vetting and training of thousands of fresh officers.

But progress has been more illusive at the state and local levels. The number of new officers needed is simply overwhelming in some cities and rural areas, where collusion between police and criminals remains widespread.

Preying on the shelter

Fifty exhausted migrants lingered outside the shelter in Tultitlan earlier this month.

A Tex-Mex music band belted out ballads at one end of the street, while a freight train rumbled slowly past the other.

Police cruisers and age-worn American pickups circled the block every few minutes, while three tough-looking, albeit neatly dressed, young Mexican men watched from beneath the archway of a snack bar.

Down the street, a longtime neighborhood resident nodded discreetly in the direction of the three men. “You see those guys over there?” he said. “Those three are ‘polleros.' “

Migrants are often called “pollos,” or “chickens,” and the gangsters who sweep in to “help” them are “polleros,” a term used for men who raise chickens.

A pollero might promise safe passage all the way across the U.S. border for $3,000. If the migrant can't pay, he may be more likely to fall prey to kidnappers along the route.

“The polleros are all over this neighborhood and they prey on the shelter,” said the resident, who asked that his name not be used. “The government is basically committing a crime by permitting this stuff to go on.”

Others take an even more conspiratorial view, arguing that the Mexican state is facilitating attacks on migrants intentionally to curry favor with U.S. policymakers.

“Mexico says to the U.S., ‘Hey, we'd like for you to give good treatment to Mexican immigrants in the United States, and if Central American migration is an inconvenience for you, we'll take care of it,' ” Father Pantoja said.

“This amounts to doing the dirty work for the United States,” he said. “As a result, the wall is not really on the Rio Grande River. The wall is much farther south.”

‘Always full here'

Attempts to pin an accurate figure on the number of Central Americans sneaking into Mexico during recent years have been complicated by increased lawlessness along the nation's 750-mile southern border with Guatemala and Belize.

While it may be impossible to prove, Mexican authorities estimate that 171,000 migrants cross the jungle-thick border each year.

Mexico's National Migration Institute detained more than 66,000 migrants during transit through the country in 2011, according to a report issued this month by the Washington Office on Latin America.

The report cited a significant drop in the flow of U.S.-bound Central American migrants from about 433,000 in 2005 to roughly 140,000 in 2010 because of decreased employment in the United States and rising insecurity in Mexico.

Statistics by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security show that the number of illegal immigrants captured while attempting to cross the U.S. border also declined sharply in the latter half of the past decade.

The number of Border Patrol apprehensions, a generally accepted barometer for illegal immigration into the United States, plummeted from 1,189,000 in 2005 to fewer than 465,000 in 2010.

A recent study by the Pew Hispanic Center, meanwhile, asserted that the net number of Mexicans immigrating to the United States - legally or illegally - has fallen to zero. From 2005 to 2011, about 1.4 million Mexican immigrants entered the U.S. and a similar number of Mexican nationals and their children left the country, the Pew study says.

Recent evidence, however, suggests that the number of Central Americans heading north is rebounding and may even be surging.

The Mexico City newspaper La Jornada last week cited interviews with relief workers at Catholic Church -run migrant shelters throughout southern and eastern Mexico in a report that says the number of Central Americans heading north has increased by 100 percent in recent weeks.

The same assertion was echoed by workers at the shelter in Tultitlan. “It's always full here,” said Jasimine Reza, a coordinator at the shelter. “Every night.”

The shelter has enough mats to sleep 196 people, but often serves food to as many as 300.

“Ninety percent come from Honduras, the other 10 percent are split between El Salvador and Guatemala,” Ms. Resa said.

Each is allowed to stay a single night, then must move on to make room for the next ones. “All of them are headed to the United States,” she said.

Victor Caseres said he left his hometown of Cortes, Honduras, because “there was just no way for me to make enough money there to support my family.”

Mr. Caseres squinted as he stood outside the shelter. It was hard to tell whether he was trying to block out the bright sun overhead, or hold back tears as he spoke of a 7-year-old son he left behind in Honduras.

“My hope is to be able to send back money,” he said.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/apr/29/no-road-too-dangerous/

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Chechen women in mortal fear as president backs honor killings

by Diana Markosian - Special to The Washington Times

Sunday, April 29, 2012

ACHXOY-MARTAN, Chechnya — Chechnya's government is openly approving of families that kill female relatives who violate their sense of honor, as this Russian republic embraces a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam after decades of religious suppression under Soviet rule.

In the past five years, the bodies of dozens of young Chechen women have been found dumped in woods, abandoned in alleys and left along roads in the capital, Grozny, and neighboring villages.

Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov publicly announced that the dead women had “loose morals” and were rightfully shot by male relatives. He went on to describe women as the property of their husbands, and said their main role is to bear children.

“If a woman runs around and if a man runs around with her, both of them should be killed,” said Mr. Kadyrov, who often has stated his goal of making Chechnya “more Islamic than the Islamists.”

In today's Chechnya, alcohol is all but banned, Islamic dress codes are enforced and polygamous marriages are supported by the government.

Some observers say Mr. Kadyrov's attempt to impose Islamic law violates the Russian Constitution, which guarantees equal rights for women and a separation of church and state.

“We are a traditional, conservative society, but the government has gone overboard,” said Lipkhan Bazaeva, head of the Women's Dignity Center, a nongovernmental organization promoting women's rights in Grozny. “They are declaring unacceptable limits on women - as an individual, she has no rights even if her husband beats her, despite Russian laws.”

Though observers agree that honor killings are on the rise in Chechnya, the issue remains largely taboo among locals - making official statistics hard to come by.

“You hear about these cases almost every day,” said a local human rights defender, who asked that her name not be used out of fear for her safety. “It is hard for me to investigate this topic, yet I worked on it with [human rights activist] Natasha [Estemirova] for a while. But, I can't anymore. I am too scared now. I've almost given up, really.”

Estemirova, who angered Chechen authorities with reports of torture, abductions and extrajudicial killings, was found in the woods in 2009 in the neighboring region of Ingushetia with gunshot wounds to the head and chest. Her killer or killers have not been found.

Few dare to openly challenge Mr. Kadyrov 's rule. But activists say some young Muslim women do so surreptitiously, placing themselves in a constant tug of war between two value systems.

Milana, a ninth-grader in Grozny, wears thick eyeliner, dons tight miniskirts, smokes cigarettes and dates boys: all things a proper Muslim girl is forbidden to do in Chechnya.

She said she has heard it from her father countless times: A Chechen girl who loses her virginity before marriage is a prostitute, and Allah will punish her.

“If only my parents knew some of the things I did,” she said with a giggle. “My parents are too strict with me, but it is like that here.”

Analysts say dating can be an escape for teenagers such as Milana who often live double lives.

“It is a great temptation to break from tradition when they are away from their family, said Ms. Bazaeva. “They have a good time, but it is not without consequences, not in Chechnya.”

In this small Chechen village, residents talk about the teenage girl who was killed in early February after she spent a night at her boyfriend's house.

The 16-year-old's body was wrapped in a traditional rug and returned to her mother's house. Her relatives are suspected of killing her in the name of family honor.

To escape the strict mores, some of the young opt for early marriage, which they view as the gateway to independence, sexual activity and societal respect. That goes for young Chechen men, also.

Abu-Khadzh Idrisov, 20, married in his teens to simply experiment, he said. His first marriage at age 14 lasted barely a year. He married a second time at 18. He spotted his future wife at a park in Grozny and, with the help of his friends, kidnapped her.

“When I married her, I honestly knew only two things: her name and the school she studied at. We talked together once,” he recalled. “But we have traditions and extremely strict rules in Chechnya, and you can't just ignore them. I carry my family's name, and if I tarnish it, I will have problems.”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/apr/29/chechen-women-in-mortal-fear-as-president-backs-ho/

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More families building tornado shelters

by Holbrook Mohr, Jim Salter and Phillip Rawls

Associated Press

Sunday, April 29, 2012

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — When deadly twisters chewed through the South and Midwest in 2011, thousands of people in the killers' paths had nowhere to hide. Now, many of those families are taking an unusual extra step to be ready next time: adding tornado shelters to their homes.

A year after the storms, sales of small residential shelters known as safe rooms are surging across much of the nation, especially in hard-hit communities such as Montgomery and Tuscaloosa in Alabama and in Joplin, Mo., where twisters laid waste to entire neighborhoods.

Manufacturers barely can keep up with demand, and some states are offering grants and other financial incentives to help pay for the added protection and peace of mind.

Tom Cook didn't need persuading. When a 2008 tornado barreled toward his home in rural southwest Missouri, Mr. Cook, his wife and their teenage daughter sought refuge in a bathroom. It wasn't enough. His wife was killed.

Mr. Cook moved to nearby Joplin to rebuild, never imaging he would confront another monster twister, but he had a safe room installed in the garage just in case.

On May 22, Mr. Cook and his daughter huddled inside the small steel enclosure while an EF-5 tornado roared outside. They emerged unharmed, although the new house was gone.

"It was blown away completely — again," he said. "The only thing standing was that storm room."

Generations ago, homes across America's Tornado Alley often came equipped with storm cellars, usually a small concrete bunker buried in the backyard. Although some of those remain, they are largely relics of a bygone era. And basements are less common than they used to be, leaving many people with no refuge except maybe a bathtub or a room deep inside the house.

The renewed interest in shelters was stirred by last year's staggering death toll — 358 killed in the South and 161 dead in Joplin. So far this year, more than 60 people have perished in U.S. twisters.

Safe rooms feature thick steel walls and doors that can withstand winds up to 250 mph. They are typically windowless, with no light fixtures and no electricity — just a small, reinforced place to ride out the storm. Costs generally range from $3,500 to $6,000.

Sizes vary, but most hold only a few people. They can be bolted to the floor of a garage or custom-fitted to squeeze into a small space, even a closet. Some are so small occupants have to crawl inside. A few are buried in the yard like the old storm shelters of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Before the twister devastated Joplin, the Neosho, Mo., safe room manufacturer called Twister Safe had four employees. Now it has 20.

"Business has probably quadrupled, at least," owner Enos Davis said. "We're selling 400 to 500 a year now, compared to maybe 100 before."

Twister Safe's spike in business is even more impressive in Missouri, which does not offer grant money for safe rooms, opting to use its share of federal disaster money for community shelters.

Missouri's choice spotlights a debate in states seeking better tornado protection: Is disaster aid better spent on safe rooms in individual homes or on larger public shelters designed to protect hundreds or thousands of people?

The downside of public shelters is getting there. Even with improvements in twister prediction, venturing out into a rapidly brewing storm is perilous.

"I wouldn't get my family into a car and run that risk," Joplin Assistant City Manager Sam Anselm said. "If you have the opportunity to put something in your house, that's what we would encourage folks to do."

In January, more than 50 people sought safety in a dome-shaped public shelter as a tornado ripped through Maplesville, Ala. No one was hurt.

"The shelter did what it was supposed to do," Mayor Aubrey Latham said.

Since 2005, 31 community shelters have been built in Missouri using FEMA funds, and nine others are under construction, according to Mike O'Connell of the Missouri State Emergency Management Agency.

That number is about to grow. Joplin voters earlier this month approved a $62 million bond issue that will be combined with insurance money and federal aid to build storm shelters at every school. The shelters will double as gyms, classrooms or kitchens.

After more than five dozen tornadoes struck Alabama on April 27, 2011, FEMA gave the state $17 million for safe rooms. More than 4,300 people filed applications for grants. Of those, nearly half have been approved. The others are still being reviewed.

"They absolutely save lives," said Art Faulkner, director of the Alabama Emergency Management Agency.

Alabama is also using $49 million in FEMA money for community shelters.

Following the 2011 tornadoes, nearly 6,200 applications were submitted to Mississippi's "A Safe Place to Go" program, which also uses FEMA funds. That was more requests than the program's $8 million could fund.

Among those who received money were Renee and Larry Seales of Smithville, Miss., where 16 people died in a 2011 twister, including both of Mrs. Seales' parents. They built a dome-shaped bunker buried in their yard.

"I don't know how many have been put in Smithville, but it seems like every house has one," Mrs. Seales said.

Since 2009, nearly 16,000 people in Arkansas have received rebates of up to $1,000 to add residential safe rooms.

In Joplin, the state's preference for community shelters leaves residents to pay for safe rooms out of pocket, but for many people, the cost is well worth it.

Last May, Debbie and Darrell Nichols hunched inside their safe room in the garage as soon as the tornado sirens began blaring. The roof of their neighbor's home came crashing through their kitchen, and it probably would have killed them. Inside the reinforced room, they were unhurt.

"We were holding hands and holding onto each other," Mrs. Nichols said. "Then you hear the glass breaking and the roar, and your ears begin to pop. We walked out, and it was like a scene from 'The Wizard of Oz.'"

Betty Harryman was in a Joplin hospital about to have open-heart surgery when the twister hit. Her bad heart probably saved her life: Her home was leveled.

So when Ms. Harryman rebuilt, she added a small safe room where she keeps bottled water and a battery-operated light, fan and radio.

"After what happened," she said, "we thought it would be stupid not to have a safe room."

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/apr/29/more-families-building-their-own-tornado-shelters/

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U.S. looks to South America for security partners

by Lolita C. Baldor

ABOARD A U.S. MILITARY AIRCRAFT (AP) — In these days of shrinking defense budgets, the U.S. is looking to its southern neighbors to help monitor and protect the Asia Pacific region in the years ahead.

Traveling to Colombia, Brazil and Chile this week, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta underscored the importance of those nations as military partners in a region where the U.S. influence in a number of countries is being challenged by China. And as the military relationships grow, defense officials say it can only help U.S. economic and political ties across the continent.

Panetta's talks with senior defense leaders from the three nations also focused on how the United States can support their military efforts, including those directed at the expanding threat of cyberattacks, according to several senior defense officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the meetings were private.

U.S. officials left the region thinking that at some point there may be opportunities to talk with South American nations about helping to train Afghan forces after NATO combat troops leave at the end of 2014. Officials would provide no details on which nations might eventually be willing to take on some of the training mission, which will be in need of advisers as other NATO nations pull their troops out.

With the U.S. shifting its focus away from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon's new military strategy puts more importance on the Asia Pacific region, where North Korea is a growing threat and China is rapidly building its military and its political and economic influence.

The Pentagon is poised to move more forces to the Pacific region, including plans to rotate units in and out of Australia. The U.S. has long provided training, equipment, assistance and a security umbrella for many of the Asia Pacific nations. With budget cuts looming that will reduce the size of the military, the U.S. is looking to South American countries to be more active global partners.

"The United States, just like other countries, are facing budget constrictions — which are going to affect the future," Panetta told reporters at a news conference in Brazil. "And what we believe is that the best way to approach the future is to develop partnerships, alliances, to develop relationships with other countries, share information, share assistance, share capabilities, and in that way we can provide greater security for the future."

Panetta would also like to see the South American countries use their greater military capability to train some of the Central American countries that are not as advanced.

All three defense chiefs — Juan Camillo Pinzon of Colombia, Celso Amorim of Brazil and Andres Allamand of Chile — brought up cyber threats as a major concern for their countries, including incidents of hacker attacks and data thefts, the U.S. defense officials said as they flew home from Chile, the last stop on the trip.

The three countries, said one of the officials, want help from the U.S. in hardening their computer networks against breaches and increasing their technological skills. The official said there is a recognition of how vulnerable they are, and they want to learn more about the nature of the threat and how to combat it.

That threat, however, is also likely to involve China, which is steadily gaining as a top trading partner and economic developer in South America. It's surpassing the U.S. in trade with Brazil, Chile and Peru, and is a close second in Argentina and Colombia.

For the first time, U.S. intelligence officials publicly called out China late last year as a significant cyber threat. While they did not directly tie attacks to the Beijing government, they said the Chinese are systematically stealing American high-tech data for their own economic gain. The unusually forceful public report seemed to signal a new, more vocal U.S. government campaign against the cyberattacks, which could also involve helping other nations combat similar threats.

The Pentagon's clandestine National Security Agency is an acknowledged world leader in cyber technologies. And U.S. officials have been struggling to work out ways for the government to help other nations as well as the private sector in the United States shore up critical networks.

To date, however, countries around the world have not been able to come up with any detailed agreements on how best to work together. Cyber issues are fraught with legal and political challenges, including conflicting laws and the lack of broadly accepted international guidelines for Internet oversight.

Panetta made it clear as he traveled across the continent that cybersecurity was "a whole new arena" that all the nations are concerned about. He also encouraged the South American nations to expand their security efforts to other regions, including Africa.

"The United States must remain a global power," Panetta said during a speech in Brazil. "But ... more and more nations are making and must make an important contribution to global security. We welcome and encourage this new reality because frankly it makes the world safer and all of our nations stronger."

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/apr/28/us-looks-south-america-security-partners/

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From Google News

LA RIOTS: Unrest resonated in Inland region
Effects of the riots that engulfed parts of Los Angeles 20 years ago remain visible throughout the Inland region today.

Burned-out businesses relocated to the area, and LA residents numbed by the destruction and weary of racial tension found refuge in the Inland Empire.

One of those residents was just a girl when rioters looted her mother's store. As soon as she became an adult she headed to the Inland region.

“The Inland Empire is very blessed,” said Carol Park of Riverside. “We don't have segregated areas. We mingle and it doesn't matter. I feel less tension here.”

Even Rodney King now lives in Rialto. The April 29, 1992, acquittal of four Los Angeles police officers in the beating of King sparked the riots.

The verdict also prompted changes in how the police in the Inland area and elsewhere relate to the communities they serve, and to reforms seen by anyone who has recently served on a jury.

As in Los Angeles, Inland police departments have forged closer links with their communities.

At least 53 people died, more than 2,000 were hurt and more than $1 billion in property was destroyed or damaged in the riots.

BUSINESS DESTROYED

Alicia Thompson, 39, was at home in Moreno Valley on April 29, 1992, when she began receiving phone calls that the family-owned Long Beach hair salon where she was assistant manager was in flames.

“The whole building was destroyed,” Thompson said. “Nothing was salvaged.”

Even though the riot began after outrage over a verdict that many saw as yet another injustice toward African-Americans, many of the victims of the unrest were black.

Thompson said she understood where the rage was coming from.

“But they didn't think before they did what they did,” she said. “It destroyed a lot of lives. It destroyed our business. They let their emotions get the best of them.”

The family rented space in Paramount — in Los Angeles County — for a new salon but didn't own a shop again until Thompson's mother, La Joyce Mosley, 74, opened La Joyce's Coiffures in Riverside in 2007.

Several miles away from the salon, Roy Johnson's Family Fish Market in South Central Los Angeles was heavily damaged in a blaze that began when a firebomb hit a nearby Korean-owned restaurant.

Johnson opened Louisiana Seafood in Moreno Valley as he waited for repairs at his market to finish.

When the King verdict was announced, Johnson knew trouble was ahead.

“It wasn't just Rodney King but all the injustices before that,” Johnson said. “If a kid was walking down the street, they'd (the police) sometimes tell him to get stretched out on the ground. They weren't treating people right. Everyone was a suspect.”

After frisking the young black men, police let them go if nothing was found on them, Johnson said.

“But the kid's all messed up,” he said. “There's no respect and he feels that.”

Johnson, 58, who lives in Moreno Valley, said many LAPD officers had good relations with the community, but those who didn't stoked bitterness and anger.

The black community was also still reeling from the verdict only five months earlier in another trial, in which a Korean shopkeeper was given a light sentence in the murder of a 16-year-old black girl.

“Rodney King, that was just the match that lit the torch,” said Johnson, who opposed the violence.

KOREAN-AMERICAN

Long before there was a 9/11, there was a 4/29.

The numbers — Sa-I-Gu in Korean — stand for the devastation suffered by Korean-Americans during the riots.

About $400 million of the more than $1 billion in damage was to Korean-owned businesses, mostly in South Central and Koreatown, said Edward Chang, director of UC Riverside's Young Oak Kim Center for Korean-American Studies. It was the most traumatic event in Korean-American history, Chang said.

“People's dreams were shattered overnight,” Chang said. “It had a huge economic and psychological impact.”

Some of the tension between the black and Korean-American communities stemmed from cultural misunderstandings, Chang said. African-Americans were offended by what they didn't realize were Korean cultural norms, such as avoiding eye contact and leaving change on the counter rather than handing it to customers, he said.

Park, a research assistant for Chang, couldn't wait to leave Los Angeles County after the riots.

She was 12 when her mother's Compton gas station was looted during the unrest. When Park arrived as a student at UCR at age 18, she never moved back, despite her mother's urgings.

“I wanted to get as far away as I could from my mom's gas station, from the racism, from the riots, from the fighting, from the tension, from everything I grew up watching,” said Park, a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Press-Enterprise.

“I thought, if I went to the Inland region where I felt there was no color line, where the (Korean-American) community was still young and growing, it wouldn't be so bad,” she said.

When Park was a girl working for her mother as a cashier before the riots, customers regularly called her anti-Asian racial slurs — although others got along well with Park and her mom.

Seo Wang You understood that African-Americans saw the Rodney King verdict as an injustice. But as he saw businesses in his neighborhood near Koreatown smoldering from rioting while returning home from work during the riots, he became angry.

“The Korean people were not involved, and Korean people were becoming a target of the riot,” said You, who now lives in Corona and runs a car-smog-check shop in Riverside.

CHANGES IN POLICING

During the unrest, Riverside Police Chief Sergio Diaz was a lieutenant for LAPD, covering an area in and around Watts.

Diaz said LAPD — and other police departments — did not do enough to build relationships with the community.

“There was this feeling, probably on both sides, that the LAPD was an occupying army and that we were people from the outside imposing order, and with the only mission of imposing order,” he said.

The riots and their aftermath caused changes in LAPD and departments across the country.

“It caused us to examine ourselves, and when I say us, the LAPD in particular, but the police service as a whole,” he said. “It caused us to examine ourselves in ways that we hadn't. And that examination, it dragged us, it was a transformation we underwent probably kicking and screaming. But it's important in so many ways. We had to go through that transformation.”

Diaz brought the lessons learned from the riots with him to Riverside, where community policing had already begun. Police have learned that community policing, in which police work closely with the people they serve and see them as allies rather than enemies, reduces crime, he said.

Residents are more likely to report crime, identify criminals and testify in court if they like and trust police, he said.

Dell Roberts, a longtime Riverside African-American activist and a police advisory board member, lauded the changes at the Police Department. He said the shift toward community policing in Riverside occurred not after the riots, but after the outcry over the 1998 killing of 19-year-old Tyisha Miller by Riverside police.

In San Bernardino, several community activists said more needs to be done there.

The Rev. Raymond Turner, pastor of Temple Missionary Baptist Church, one of the Inland area's largest predominantly black congregations, said San Bernardino police haven't done enough to overcome what he called a “them versus us” attitude. The San Bernardino County sheriff's office has made more strides, he said.

San Bernardino city police Capt. Gwendolyn Waters said building strong community relations is a priority for the department, and a community-affairs unit with several sworn and civilian employees was formed a few years ago.

SOME TENSIONS REMAIN

The changes, especially in police departments, make riots less likely today than in 1992, said Karthick Ramakrishnan, an associate professor of political science at UCR.

“You have all these underlying factors that still exist,” Ramakrishnan said, referring to economic and other disparities. “But the key to the LA riots was a sense of disempowerment in terms of the legal system and the criminal justice system.”

In the Inland area, racially fueled fights between blacks and Latinos have broken out at several high schools in recent years.

Emilio Amaya, executive director of the San Bernardino Community Service Center, said that tells him that larger racial unrest could occur in the Inland area.

He said young people's biases often come from their parents, and the parents' bigotry typically is based more on economic desperation and competition for jobs than true hatred toward people of other ethnicities.

“There's so much we need to do to work together,” Amaya said, “to say we're not enemies, but that we're facing the same problems, the same poverty, the same lack of resources.”

http://www.pe.com/local-news/local-news-headlines/20120428-la-riots-unrest-resonated-in-inland-region.ece

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L.A. Riots: LAPD Commander, 'That Day, It Felt Like Everybody Hated Us'

by Agnus Dei Farrant

Reaching into the backseat of his police car amid files, a baby's car seat and uniforms, Andrew Smith pulls out a stack of photographs he took during the L.A. riots. Smith tells the stories behind some of the 50 images, of looters he caught and let go, burned buildings and fellow officers posing with their weapons.

Smith was a police officer at the Los Angeles Police Department's Newton Division on April 29, 1992. The Rodney King beating verdict was the breaking point for a city already torn by tensions between the police and communities of color.

“Remembering what was going on in the city, most people in the city hated the LAPD,” he said. “Certainly that day, it felt like everybody hated us.”

For more than a week during the riots, Smith worked 12-hour shifts in South L.A.. The first morning, he packed his trunk with groceries, not sure when the next chance to eat would arise.

Police stations quickly filled to capacity. Smith photographed looters he caught for documentation but then had to let them go.

“We had no mechanism to put people in jail. We had literally hundreds of people that we detained and had no way to transport them back to the station because we're four [officers] deep in our cars. We were stuck.”

Smith saw a variety in the looters themselves and the merchandise they targeted.

“Certainly it was a small section of the community but it was a cross-section of the community as well. There was no particular ethnicity that was involved, it was everybody. People from out of town coming here because they saw that the law was completely overwhelmed and they thought, now's my chance to get some free electronic goods.”

He noticed that the most popular stolen items were alcohol and diapers.

“The biggest thing that was stolen was Pampers. It was one of the first things that would go from any grocery store that got looted, all the Pampers were gone. I always thought that was kind of odd. And liquor of course.”

To get to merchandise in closed stores, looters would drive stolen cars through the front doors and gates, take what they could and leave. Once the doors were open, Smith said it became a free-for-all.

While driving through South L.A., Smith—now commanding officer for media relations and community affairs—pointed out businesses that left after the riots, restaurants he used to go to before they were burned down and where, for the first time as a cop, he was shot at.

“There's a little market here around the corner, or there was, where they kicked the doors in, basically broke the doors off the place,” Smith said at the intersection of Central and Vernon Avenues. “The owner, an Asian guy, was giving away all the food, saying, ‘Take everything, just don't burn the place down.' That night they burned the place to the ground.”

Smith had been with the LAPD for four years when the riot happened. He had established relationships with people on his patrol, often stopping to talk to them on their front lawns or having coffee with them.

It was businesses and families he knew that he worried about in between shifts.

“There was a little family I had befriended the Christmas before. There was a garage in the back [of their house] and we had a murder in there. So I befriended the family, I'd stop and check in on the kids. I was terrified for them while I was at home during my off-time.”

He drove down Slauson Avenue, stopping at San Pedro Street. He pointed to a small, red building, alone on an island of land in the shape of triangle.

It was a restaurant having its grand opening. Twenty years ago, it was a restaurant serving breakfast and lunch, owned by two young Asian women.

“We'd go there for breakfast once in a while or we'd have a cup of coffee there. For the first two or three days we were able to keep their place from being burned down. But by the fourth or fifth day, someone had thrown a Molotov cocktail on the roof and the place burned down. They never rebuilt it, they ended up moving to the Inland Empire and I never saw them again.”

A paralyzed police department

Smith remembered starting at a Police Department made up primarily of white males. Slowly changing, the department now mirrors L.A.'s civilian population, Smith said.

“This is not the police department of 20 years ago. It's become more and more Hispanic, more and more Asian, many more females, we've just become an incredibly diverse department.”

Then-Chief Daryl Gates pushed racial tensions further in alienating the black community.

“Chief Gates did a lot to alienate communities, especially the black community from the police department. Some of the remarks that he said really led everybody to believe that he was the racist head of a racist organization, unfortunately.”

Smith called Gates an effective leader in the beginning, leading the department successfully through the 1984 Olympics.

“But as time went on, he became alienated from [then-Mayor Tom Bradley] - you know they went like, two years without talking? The mayor and the chief of police didn't talk. Shoot, Chief [Charlie] Beck talks to the mayor three times a week now.”

Gates faced criticism for attending a fundraiser in Brentwood the day the riot began. Later, Smith said, Gates was furious over a lack of action and decision-making by his officers.

“He was probably driving back from [the fundraiser] as this was happening. He could've called on the radio, I suppose, and given direction but I think he assumed that, I've got deputy chiefs and assistant chiefs and captains and commanders, they've been trained, they should do their job. And I think for whatever reason, they were afraid to do their job or they were unsure of what their job was.”

A command post for officers had been placed at 54th Street and Van Ness Avenue. Hundreds of officers reporting to work were given assigned routes but not a strategic plan. When rioters took over the intersection of Florence and Normandie Avenues, the officers who responded were pulled back to the command post. Shortly after, a white truck driver named Reginald Denny was beaten unconscious by rioters.

“We recognize that pulling out of Florence and Normandie, which is where the flashpoint of the riot really started, was a huge mistake.”

Smith continued, “It was a dysfunctional city, I think we'd all agree. The police department was too small, we were operating under the wrong policing model, the economy was bad but that's not really an excuse for what happened but that's one of the factors that came in there. The upper echelons of the police department were paralyzed when we should've acted; we didn't. And the chief of police and the mayor didn't even speak.”

Working to prevent another L.A. riot

At the time of the riot and currently, a distrust in police is an echo in people's minds. Smith attributed it to racial discrimination and segregation from four decades before the riot.

“People have long memories. I think a lot of the folks that live here grew up in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and some in the ‘40s. If I think of the way that maybe they were treated back in those days, say that the way a young black man was treated by LAPD in the ‘50s or ‘60s or maybe even ‘70s, I think, my gosh, ya know, a guy with a long memory could hold a pretty long grudge about stuff like that and I think they do.”

Twenty years later, Smith said the department is more diverse and less aggressive.

“We are a different department. We train differently, we hire differently. If we find someone that's got any kind of prejudice or racist tendencies, first of all we don't hire them. If somehow they get in here, they don't last long. Anybody that's got a problem with excessive force or brutality, we track that and we get that guy out of the field, we train him or we fire him.”

Institutionally, the commander said the department reaches out to its communities, especially communities of color. He said the department operates under a community policing model; creating relationships between officers and communities by working together to solve problems.

“We need to treat people right, too, and that means with the respect that everybody deserves and I think that in our old model of policing, sometimes that got left by the wayside.”

The policing model the department had during the riot, Smith said, was overly aggressive. Too often officers tried to stop crimes before they started, alienating communities.

“Pretty soon everybody in the community looks like a bad guy and heck, most people down here, even though they aren't wealthy, are law-abiding, hardworking citizens that just want the same thing for their families as you and I want for our family: Live in peace, be able to have a job and work, take care of your family. We didn't recognize that for a while.”

Smith hopes the relationship between the police and South L.A. community members has turned the corner from the tension of the ‘90s.

“There are so many cops out here that are doing such good work now. I'm hoping that we're able to move forward on a lot of that stuff and it's not going to be the way it used to be.”

Tactically, the department has adopted a mobile field force concept; a strategy to move large numbers of officers from one part of the city to another.

“In the case of a riot like this, what we should've done is moved a bunch of officers from the valley down to here and deployed them out into the areas. What we did was deploy a bunch of officers to 54th and Van Ness where you had hundreds of officers sitting there hour after hour after hour doing nothing while the city burned. I hate to say it, but our command staff at the time was really paralyzed at the time, and were not doing a good job of taking care of business and getting people out there, and everybody seemed to be afraid to make a decision, waiting for Chief Gates to come into town.”

After days of burning, looting, 54 deaths and $1 billion in damages to the city, the riot ended with a strong National Guard and Marines presence.

“I remember saying to people, though, there's really nothing left to loot, nothing left to burn. Every liquor store that I could see had already been smashed open, every grocery store had already been smashed open. And by then people started to calm down a little bit, and recognized that what we were doing was mainly people were doing it to their own neighborhoods and ruining their own neighborhoods.”

The crime rate is a quarter of what it was in 1992, Smith said. The Newton Division alone saw 137 homicides that year.

“In 1992, I didn't think it was ever going to get any better. We reached rock bottom during the riots. But now, since 2000, things are so much better here. The economy's still bad but this place is essentially crime-free compared to the way it was. Literally a quarter of the crime we had in 1992. So I think there's at least hope that things are going to get better here for most of the folks that are here. And certainly, crime-wise, it's night and day.”

http://www.neontommy.com/news/2012/04/la-riots-lapd-commander-day-it-felt-everybody-hated-us

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Connecticut

New project promotes police, teen bonds

by Nanci G. Hutson

NEW MILFORD -- The first time many teenagers meet a police officer up close and personal is when they see the red and blue flashing lights in their rear-view mirrors. Or if they get into some other kind of trouble.

Yet police officers say they are more than law enforcers. They are community role models whose primary mission is to protect and serve the public.

With that focus in mind, the New Milford Youth Agency teamed up with the town police department for a youth-enrichment project funded by a nearly $10,000 state grant. The program that starts Monday aims to improve relationships between high school teens and police officers, rooted in mutual interest, understanding and community service.

The program will cover the overtime costs of up to as many as a dozen officers who will spend time each week with the teens between April 30 and the end of June.

"This is not enforcement interaction, but a chance to find common ground ... and create some lasting bonds with us and our youth,'' said Administrative Sgt. James Dzamko , who started recruiting officers for the program last week.

For the first three weeks, between 15 and 20 teens will be invited to spend after-school time with two non-uniformed officers at The Maxx youth center on Railroad Street between 2:30 and 5:30 p.m.

The groups will play video games, watch movies or challenge each other in pool and ping-pong tournaments. After the first three sessions, the police will select eight or 10 young people for leadership training through hikes, high-ropes course workshops and construction of a fishing dock at Sega Meadows town park.

In these relaxed settings, Dzamko and Youth Agency Program Manager Kevin Kwas say they hope the police and teens can get to know each other a bit better and foster mutual understanding and respect.

As the head of the town's juvenile review panel, Kwas said he sees "tons of kids'' who find themselves in trouble with the law because of poor decision-making and a lack of good role models.

This opportunity will allow teens a chance to build positive relationships so they become better citizens, Kwas said.

Police Chief Shawn Boyne said he sees this as an extension of the community policing concept aimed at prevention vs. apprehension.

"It's a youth-police unity project,'' Boyne said.

http://www.newstimes.com/local/article/New-project-promotes-police-teen-bonds-3519358.php