L.A. Riots, 10 Years Later

L O S  A N G E L E S, April 29 -- The cost was enormous. Fifty-five people dead, 2,000 injured and a damage bill of $1 billion.

Ten years later, the shattered buildings of South Central Los Angeles have been rebuilt, but the rage still simmers.

The violence came in four days of rioting after a jury acquitted four Los Angeles Police Department officers whose videotaped beating of Rodney King shocked America.

Since that violence began exactly 10 years ago today, there has been a decade of voter-approved reforms, two black police chiefs and a campaign to improve the image of the LAPD.

In the riots, hundreds of properties were burned and looted. One of the properties hit was a dental office located in a shopping center in the Crenshaw District, one of the worst-hit areas. Dentist Bill Faulkner, who's black, remembers it vividly.

"Some people were running around and by the time I got there, they had already looted out the practice," said Faulkner. He said the experience left him feeling "violated."

When then President Bush toured the devastation, Faulkner was in the group that heard him promise federal help to rebuild. Through a combination of government and private funding, that shopping center has, indeed, been rebuilt. And Faulkner's new office is there.

Faulkner said the reconstruction was all well and good but the root causes of the riot still existed. "The buildings didn't burn themselves down, the people did. And we repaired the buildings, but we didn't repair the people."

Divisions Still Remain

And when it comes to the people, little appears to have changed in 10 years. South Central still has a high unemployment rate and a high crime rate. Parts of Los Angeles remains deeply divided along racial lines, with an enormous gap between the rich and the poor.

On the plus side, community relations with police have improved somewhat.

The face of the LAPD has changed noticeably since 1992, when the department was almost 60 percent white. Now, 45 percent of the department is white. Nearly half is black or Hispanic.