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Attacks in Calif. Jails Highlight Racial Tensions
Conflict Simmers Between Black, Latino Communities in Los Angeles

By John Pomfret
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 21, 2006; A01

LOS ANGELES -- A series of deadly racial attacks in the jails of this sprawling metropolis has cast a spotlight on long-simmering but little-discussed tensions between a shrinking black community and an ascendant Latino one in California.

In almost every arena of public life -- schools, politics, hospitals, housing and the workplace -- African Americans and Hispanics are engaged in an edgy competition, according to interviews with teachers, students, politicians, researchers, government officials, civil rights lawyers, street cops and business people.

Los Angeles's first Latino mayor since the 19th century, Antonio Villaraigosa, was elected last year with strong support from African Americans amid hopes of the creation of a true rainbow coalition in one of the world's most ethnically diverse metropolitan areas. But the reality, said Earl Ofari Hutchinson, an African American radio talk show host who directs the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable, is that "the jail violence is only symptomatic of something larger. There is conflict and competition in all areas. This city and this state is a caldron of racial issues. This thing is pulsating."

Fighting broke out at the Pitchess Detention Center on the northern fringes of Los Angeles County two weeks ago when a group of Latino inmates in a two-tiered dormitory began throwing furniture down on a group of black inmates, leaving one of them dead. In the ensuing days, scores more were injured in a string of clashes between Latinos and blacks at Pitchess and other jails. Last Sunday, a second African American was killed in a jail brawl.

Fighting continued at Pitchess on Friday night, leaving six more injured. The sheriff's department responded to the riots by firing tear gas at some participants and stripping 100 others, giving them only blankets for cover. The jail system, which houses about 21,000 people and is the nation's largest, is in lockdown, and Latino and black inmates are being segregated.

Sheriff Lee Baca said the fights were part of an "ongoing gun battle" between black and Latino gangs. "People on the outside are shot-calling to the inside to Latinos to start racial disturbances," he said. Sheriff's department officials said a gang known as the Mexican Mafia is believed to have given the green light to prisoners of Mexican ancestry to go after African Americans.

The conflict has come amid a large increase of Latinos in California, said Nicolas C. Vaca, author of "The Presumed Alliance: The Unspoken Conflict Between Latinos and Blacks and What It Means for America." In 1980, Latinos made up 19 percent of California's population while African Americans made up 7.7 percent. Today, almost one third of California's 36 million people are Hispanic while blacks have fallen to 6.7 percent of the state's population.

Vaca, Hutchinson and others predict the competition and tension in Los Angeles highlight a nationwide issue between the two groups. Last year, after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin complained of Mexicans overrunning his city and displacing blacks -- a sentiment recently repeated by Jesse L. Jackson in an interview on CNN.

Large swaths of Los Angeles, such as Watts, a place that Earl Paysinger, the deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department described as an "ecosystem for African American culture," are now increasingly Hispanic. The nearby city of Compton, the birthplace of gangsta rap, is now 60 percent Latino. "The movement of Latinos into these communities has been nothing less than a demographic earthquake," Paysinger said.

Schools that for more than a decade had been predominantly black are now predominantly Latino and that shift has led to racial strife. In 2005, widespread fighting between Latinos and African Americans, sometimes necessitating lockdowns and the deployment of police officers, rocked 12 schools in Los Angeles County, said Marshall Wong, of the county's Commission on Human Relations.

Channa Cook, a teacher at the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, said that even in her school, routinely regarded as one of the best in Los Angeles County, African American students each year skip school on May 5, the day when Mexicans celebrate Cinco de Mayo, a 19th-century military victory over France. Mexican gangs have warned in graffiti that they will shoot blacks attending school that day.

"My first year here, I didn't believe it, but the students told me, 'No, Miss Cook, if you come to school you're going to get shot,' " said Cook who is African American. "When I arrived at class, all the black kids had stayed home."

Hate crimes experts also point to a worrying trend among the two communities in Los Angeles County. Unlike in the past when whites were involved in the lion's share of hate crimes, now, in anti-black hate crimes, 73 percent of the identified suspects are Latino and in anti-Latino crimes, 80 percent of the suspects are African American, according to a report by the county Commission on Human Relations.

"The old paradigm of black-white race relations is falling by the wayside," Vaca said.

His view holds true for battles over employment as well.

A decade ago, in Southern California, minorities taking cases to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission rarely if ever complained that they had lost the job to another minority, said Anna Park, a lawyer for the EEOC's Los Angeles district office. Now, however, an increasing number of African Americans are taking and winning cases against employers who have hired Latinos instead of them, she said.

"Discrimination is not just black-white anymore," she said.

To be sure, there are optimists. Martin Ludlow, head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, the county's most powerful labor organization, is one of them. Ludlow, an African American, took the reigns of what was traditionally seen as a bastion of Hispanic power last year. He said his union would soon launch a campaign to push the hotel industry, which is dominated by Latinos, to begin rehiring African Americans in what he called "a largely Latino union effort to reach out to African Americans."

Still, Los Angeles's gang problem has only added to the racial problems. The county is home to an estimated 1,000 gangs, some of the bloodiest in the United States. A decade ago, said civil rights lawyer Connie Rice, black and Latino gangs operated in separate parts of the city. "Then the populations merged and the borders mixed," she said, "and now the underclass is at war."

Tony Rafael, a gang expert who is writing a book on the Mexican Mafia, said so far the Latinos are winning.

"Obviously it goes both ways, but the hammer is much bigger on the Latino side," Rafael said. "Blacks are outnumbered. And they can't seem to create a united front to resist."

In the jails, the problems are further magnified by poor living conditions that often spark violence, said Jody Kent, the jails project coordinator for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, which has monitored conditions in the jails since winning a lawsuit against Los Angeles County in the 1970s.

Prisoners in the jail are housed mostly in dormitory settings with men suspected of committing violent offenses bunking with people not involved with violent crimes. Although the jails were designed to house prisoners sentenced to one year or less of jail time, at this point, 80 percent of the inmates are awaiting trial or are convicted felons awaiting transfer to a state prison. Plumbing is poor, and the deputies are short-staffed.

After the racial attacks, county sheriff's deputies said they anticipated a rebound on the streets.

On a recent evening, Deputy Tim Brennan, a patrol officer who has worked the streets of Compton for more than two decades, stopped two members of warring black gangs, the Bloods and the Crips, riding in one car. "What are you doing?" Brennan asked, clearly surprised to see the two men -- one wearing red, the other blue -- in the same vehicle. "Going to get the Mexicans?"

Everyone laughed uneasily.