With racial tension in LA, mayor struggles to hold black vote

By MICHAEL R. BLOODAssociated Press Writer LOS ANGELES (AP) – Outrage over alleged police brutality is shaking up a wide-open contest for City Hall in which an influential, if relatively small, black vote could determine whether Mayor James Hahn keeps his job. The death of 13-year-old Devin Brown, who was shot by police after driving a stolen car into an LAPD cruiser, galled black residents who see the killing as the latest example of Police Department abuse. The Feb. 6 shooting came three days after prosecutors declined to file charges against an officer who was videotaped hammering black car-theft suspect Stanley Miller with a metal flashlight, images that evoked the beating of Rodney King. As the March 8 primary election approaches, community unrest carries both risks and opportunities for Hahn, a Democrat who was elected four years ago with overwhelming black support. His situation is further complicated by his decision in 2002 to push the ouster of police Chief Bernard Parks, now the only black candidate among Hahn’s four chief rivals. Hahn is running on the city’s falling crime rate. But some community leaders say the Brown shooting is evidence that, despite the statistics, not enough has changed. In the black community, there is a “feeling that it’s really not better,” said the Rev. Norman Johnson, a Baptist pastor and former executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Los Angeles. “Ultimately, this is a problem for the mayor,” Johnson said. There are, of course, factors beyond race that will factor into who wins, including accusations that the Hahn administration traded contracts for political donations and issues from traffic to troubled schools. But the Brown shooting has brought renewed focus on police-minority tensions, an issue that troubled the city since the 1965 Watts riot. With his re-election far from certain, Hahn’s typically cautious demeanor has vanished. He demanded that the city’s police oversight board rewrite the policy for shooting at moving vehicles, publicly browbeat City Council members who blocked a proposal to hire more officers and denounced the decision not to charge the officer who clubbed Miller. Hahn’s hand-picked replacement for Parks, Chief William Bratton, has been an emissary into minority neighborhoods. The pro-active approach had shown progress, with some South Los Angeles ministers appealing to the public a year ago to help stop attacks on officers. But if the mayor sees a safer city as his crowning achievement, he also hasn’t hesitated to question the actions of officers in the Brown and Miller cases. “He’s playing to his base and trying to turn a negative into a positive by … demanding quick accountability and action,” said Jaime A. Regalado, executive director of the Edmund G. “Pat” Brown Institute of Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles. Hahn succeeded four years ago by knitting together a coalition of largely white, moderate-to-conservative voters in the suburbanish San Fernando Valley and blacks in South Los Angeles _ a bloc he inherited from his late father, a longtime county supervisor beloved in the black community. This time, Hahn’s support among blacks had nose-dived, with many of those voters defecting to Parks, the former police chief, a Los Angeles Times poll found this month. Voters had no clear favorite, although Hahn was clustered at the front of the pack with City Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa, whom he beat in a 2001 runoff. The major mayoral candidates this year, all Democrats, represent a rainbow of backgrounds not unlike the city itself, Hahn has Irish roots, Parks is black, former Assembly Speaker Hertzberg is Jewish and there are two Hispanic candidates, Villaraigosa and state Sen. Richard Alarcon, D-Sun Valley. The black vote remains crucial for Hahn, and an important voting group overall, even though Los Angeles’ black population has been shrinking. In the 2000 Census, the black population was pegged at 11 percent in a city of 3.7 million, although blacks accounted for 17 percent of the turnout in the 2001 mayoral race, exit polls found. Hispanics make up nearly half the population but accounted for only 22 percent of the turnout four years ago. Why the disparity? One key reason: Of the 1.1 million Hispanics over 18 years old, about 650,000 are not citizens, the census found. As Hahn looks to keep a foothold in the black community, Parks’ challenge is to extend beyond the black community. Villaraigosa, the son of a Mexican immigrant, is courting voters outside the Hispanics and liberal Democrats who propelled his campaign four years ago. And Hertzberg and Alarcon are trying to push out of their strongholds in the San Fernando Valley. If no candidate wins 50 percent of the vote, a likely scenario given five major candidates, the top two finishers advance to a May 17 runoff. Villaraigosa, in particular, has been trying to avoid being pigeonholed as just a Hispanic candidate. Four years ago, he was regarded as the first Hispanic in years with a legitimate chance of winning the mayoralty. When asked in an interview last week whether it was important for Los Angeles to have a Hispanic mayor, Villaraigosa said: “I think most people are looking for a mayor who can get things done, who can unite us around a common vision.” Some analysts say Villaraigosa’s ethnic image was turned against him when Hahn ran a campaign ad in 2001 that used grainy images of a crack pipe to fault Villaraigosa for writing a letter on behalf of a convicted cocaine trafficker. Regalado called it a veiled attempt to paint the Hispanic candidate as weak on crime, a “devastating kind of association” that shifted more conservative Valley voters to Hahn.